The Easel

5th March 2019

Hans Hofmann’s wide-ranging art at UC Berkeley Art Museum

Hofmann taught a who’s who of 20th century American artists. That distinction overshadows his reputation as an artist, despite his leading role in New York abstract expressionism. Perhaps teaching provided the gestation period for his late career achievement, ‘colour plane abstractions’. They are “the pinnacle of American academic abstraction … a world of floating forms”.

Phyllida Barlow interview: ‘A cul-de-sac has the claustrophobia of suburbia’

Barlow’s sculptures are without aspiration to beauty. Tilting timber objects, ungainly slabs of building materials, draped fabrics, they all manipulate the space around them in a humorous, gentle way. “My work has always been an enjoyment of the absurdity of the made object that isn’t going to have any useful function in the world other than for itself.” A good bio piece is here.

Angel of Uncertainty: A Conversation with Photographer Sally Mann

An early career controversy over Mann’s photos of her young (and sometimes nude) children has faded. With hindsight the controversy seems way overblown, pushed aside by the poetic character of a career’s work. Subsequent images of her now adult children “[speak] to the evanescence of our mortal selves, arguing strongly, again, for the old carpe diem approach to life”.

Marina Abramović – The Life, Serpentine Gallery: ‘a slow, minimal, intimate encounter with a virtual Abramović

You can see the attraction of 3D imaging for Abramović. Such technology may allow her to “perform” in virtual reality without being present. A first-ever such “mixed-reality art experience” has just finished in London, to mixed results. One critic complains “The tech overshadows the art”. Responds Abramović, the technology makes her feel like “the first woman on the moon”.

Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab

A neuroscience perspective on responding to art. Our biggest response is to faces, “the most important visual image we ever encounter”. We process images, not like a camera but as “an act of assembly with numerous brain areas contributing”. This assemblage is highly individual: “something special in the art [sets] off the physiological triggers of attraction and love. And so we say, ‘What a great painting.””

From Charcoal to Lipstick, Drawing’s Potential for Experimentation and Rebellion

New York and London both have institutions dedicated to drawing, as if the art form needs special support. Some see it as just a working tool, more bridesmaid than bride. London’s Drawing Biennial 2019 suggests it reigns supreme as a means of experimentation and caricature. Says one artist, it’s “a space of reflection and speculation … the fulcrum of [my] practice”.

26th February 2019

Don McCullin talks war and peace

Few exhibitions get called ‘magnificent’. McCullin modestly doesn’t think himself an artist, even though Henri Cartier-Bresson likened his work to Goya.  The curator has no doubt. “[McCullin] was always doing things that you wouldn’t consider photojournalism. If you take the most historic notion of genres in art, [portraiture, landscapes] he was always engaged in that”. A good video (4 min) is here.

Sarah Lucas discusses the work of revolutionary sculptor Franz West

West’s art might look simple but explanations don’t come easily. He grew up in fraught, post-war Austria and saw the nihilistic work of the Viennese Actionists. So serious! In contrast his work is “ludicrously playful”, joyous, the antithesis of pompous. Still, it does convey a serious endeavor – perhaps to capture “where clumsiness becomes elegance”. A short intro video (3 min) here.

What Ghosts Haunt Jasper Johns’s New Skeleton Paintings? We May Never Know (and That’s the Point)

Reviewers of Johns’ new show approach it as a puzzle to be solved, undeterred by his long-standing reluctance to help with interpretation. Mortality seems a preoccupation of the octogenarian artist (no surprise) but is that it? “What is the meaning of all this meaning? You mainly end up finding symbols that are symbols of other symbols.”  A good bio piece is here.

Bauhaus designers changed the way the world looks. But did they make it better?

An interesting companion piece to the item on British design. Some think Bauhaus the most important design aesthetic ever. Perhaps so, given how it oriented design around functional need. It is now accused of giving us “buildings of unparalleled ugliness, blighting urban environments worldwide. Behind the Bauhaus’s admirable idealism, you sense a kind of disgust with difference”.

Is Modernity Destined To Destroy Beauty?

Britain’s Building Commission wants developments that foster a sense of community. Modernist design, says the Commission’s head, gives us “structures [that] remake somewhere as anywhere, and therefore as nowhere.” Although this might be viewed as “nostalgia” we seem to have “completely forgotten the merits of aesthetics. [T]he vast majority of us are living in the midst of the non-beautiful.”

How Laurie Simmons’ Photographs Opened Our Eyes

How much of what we see is real, how much cultural myth? Throughout her career Simmons has used props, dolls and makeup to create images of domestic tableaux. “I knew that I wanted to stay in my studio and tell a certain kind of lie, to create a kind of ambiguity”. The linked piece covers her career highlights while a piece that delves into Simmons’ outlook is here.

Painstakingly perfect and utterly peculiar – the drawings of Jean-Jacques Lequeu

If your building designs verge on the madcap, are you an architect? That is the conundrum that is Lequeu. Contemporary tags (“proto-Surrealist”) seem ill-fitting yet so too is the descriptor French classicism. Are his drawings any more than a “psychotic mélange”. Are they “knowing pastiches of architectural culture, or the expression of obscure private obsessions?”