The Easel

5th February 2019

Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the most controversial artists of the ’80s. Now he looks entirely innocent.

A fine essay on Mapplethorpe’s art. “Was he an art-world dandy who used sexual imagery to boost his brand? Or was he using his exceptional technical skills to give pornography the sheen of high art? Neither was the case. [He saw] desire as inherently dignified and, as such, nothing to be confined to dark spaces or behind closed doors.”

The Exhibit That Painted Itself

John Cage sometimes put “indeterminate” sections in his music, inspiring his friend Steir to do the same in her art. Her works (“emphatically not abstract”) are not so much painted as poured and flicked, a result of “chance within limitations”. The writer thinks they are “gorgeous”: Steir says “In some way, the paintings paint themselves.” A video of Steir working (8 min) is here.

The Prado Museum, Spain’s cultural jewel, turns 200

The Prado has turned 200. It boasts a fabulous collection, especially of Old Masters, reflecting a national journey through monarchy, civil war and a still uneasy relationship with the Franco dictatorship. Many see an institution invigorated by the greater autonomy it now has to pursue its art history mandate. Says one proud local “the Prado represents the best image of Spain.”

Elisabeth Frink’s Human Bestiary

Anxieties about war didn’t show in Frink’s daily life but sure did in her art. Her 1960’s “goggle head” forms are noble but also sinister. The later Riace figures suggest “a warrior as the aggressor and a brutalized victim”. Immune to the emergence of abstract art around her, these natural forms were the perfect vehicle to express the “coexistence of empathy and dread in [her] moral imagination.”

Obituary: Susan Hiller, the artist of neglected memories

Half way through an anthropology doctorate, Hiller fled its “factuality” for “irrational, mysterious, numinous” art. Some suggest she believed in aliens. Not quite; she was fascinated by “the fact that people believed they were abducted by aliens.” In one work Hiller played back hundreds of such accounts, together, through tiny ceiling speakers – not facts but “a different kind of truth”.

Doing the Work: Carolina A. Miranda and Siddhartha Mitter in Conversation

A writer’s perspective on the art market and art criticism. Art fairs – “I just don’t think an art fair is a story.” The art market – “[combines] a speculative finance market as well as the traits of books and music”. The loss of small newspapers “What the alt weeklies did was community-building accountability journalism”. The internet – “has allowed this flood of new voices … I love the internet”.

The art of restoration: Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Van Eyck and a new gallery trend

The puzzling non-appearance of Leonardo’s restored Salvator Mundi in its new Abu Dhabi home puts a spotlight on art restoration. Some old paintings have had a hard life and cleaning reveals that some of what is seen is not by the artist. Watching a painstaking restoration, sometimes now public, is “a new kind of art pleasure … [and] always tasty meat for the pigmented naysayer.”

29th January 2019

Midlife Crisis on an Unlimited Budget: Marc Newson’s Furniture for the 1%

Since designing the Lockheed lounge and Embryo chair Newsom has been at “the very apex” of design. Most reviews of his current show are gushing – “a form of alchemy … furniture pieces of immense beauty.” Not so the linked piece. It worries about “objects as hyper-commodities” and wishes Newsom would show “he can still be ingenious on the cheap”.  More images are here.

Elmgreen & Dragset: This Is How We Bite Our Tongue. Whitechapel Gallery, London

These Scandinavian artists have a knack for the astonishing – they once installed a replica Prada store out in the Texas desert. Now it’s a derelict community swimming pool inside a London gallery. This work has the “patina of fiction” and tells a story, with “a wink and a nod”, about the decline in civic facilities. “Gentrification makes everything so smooth and nice but it also excludes people.”

Nothing to Do with Art

As print media ebbs, so too does the art criticism it once supported. Gary Indiana is a New York writer whose 1980’s essays – “a bracing, electric portrait of eighties art” – have just been re-published. Of Robert Mapplethorpe – “combines a preternatural refinement with an insatiable appetite”. Cindy Sherman’s characters “give the impression of having awakened in a different place than where they went to sleep”.

There’s a Reason Why Lucio Fontana’s 60-Year-Old Art Feels Vital Right Now

Fontana has “muffled visibility” a hangover, perhaps, from having once worked for Mussolini.  A retrospective shows this neglect is unwarranted. Fontana pioneered “spatialism”, using light and colour to create an immersive viewer experience. And he took to making refined cuts in his canvasses, breaking the picture plane to reveal a dark void. For some, this alone secures his place in art history.

Bill Viola/ Michelangelo, Royal Academy: where the mythic meets the meaningless

Apparently, Viola was keen to do this show after seeing some Michelangelo drawings. Putting one’s work up against the guy that painted the Sistene Chapel … WOAH!!  You can guess the result. The linked piece is admirably restrained – “some fundamental challenges in this pairing”; others cannot resist nasty: “like the difference between a brilliant mathematician and a spaniel with a calculator.”

Native American Art Receiving Broad Reassessment In Museums Across U.S.

After a century, the American wing of New York’s Met finally holds a show of native American art. One critic fumes that the show is coloured by “the pride and resentments of identity politics”. That seems a bit tough. Clearly, an effort is being made to change old attitudes: “designating arts as ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnographic’ has limited our capacity to see a broader … humanity.”