On paper, Holzer’s early text-based art is so neat and aesthetic. Projected onto buildings or in illuminated signs, it has even more impact. Holzer tried hard to be clichéd in order to “catch people who were in a hurry”. Recently she has made works using redacted security documents: “the person redacting should have been a Russian Suprematist … the blocks were just so”.
A wonderful phrase describes Toulouse-Lautrec – “argonaut of the boulevards”. Celebrities, cabaret lowlife, the street – that was his milieu. Toulouse-Lautrec’s eye for the characteristic gesture and instinct for attention-grabbing colour brought instant success. His work resonates still with today’s celebrity obsession. “One of the creators of modernism itself”.
Scully’s childhood encompassed poverty and homelessness. Becoming a father has impacted him greatly, happily, and in unexpected ways. In Scully’s art, figurative paintings featuring his son are suddenly emerging alongside his renowned abstractions. “Staying with what is safe is not attractive. [I]f you take enormous risks it can go wrong. But if you don’t it will go wrong anyway”.
There are calls for the removal from a San Francisco school of a 1930’s mural depicting slaves and a slain Native American. Some see it as “traumatic” and/or glorifying oppression. Others argue that it portrays, without approval, those violent parts of American history – it is “a historic mural by a renowned artist”. The school head says “I do understand the sensitivity about it being art. It’s difficult”.
Lately, KAWS has been selling for millions at auction. His paintings and sculptures of cartoonish figures are attention-grabbing and Instagram-friendly – perhaps he is the next Basquiat or Haring. Naysayers think this is absurd. His early street art had vitality, but endless repetition since shows up the real issue – the “sheer conceptual bankruptcy of KAWS work.”
Popular in his native Madrid, Sorolla is elsewhere obscure. One critic praises his “Impressionist effervescence” and immense skill in depicting light. However, key works, from the 1890’s, when Impressionism was no longer new, were essentially traditional. [He represented] “everything modern painting set out to overthrow.” Sorolla aspired to be Goya’s heir. He was not.
Sultan was adept at all forms of photography but is celebrated for Pictures From Home, a decade-long study of his retired parents. Using both staged and spontaneous images, he created a narrative about family and suburban life. “Photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, … but also a kind of mythology.” More images are here.
Kossoff’s subject is London – roads, buildings, tube stations, individuals. His early cityscapes are “bare and joyless but [they] have authority”. That was true of postwar London. His more recent work is lighter; a school building is “a mighty structure that seems to stand for something more lasting”. Says one critic “an oeuvre that is among the most original in postwar painting”.
The Sackler families are prolific donors to arts organisations. They are now accused of misrepresenting the addictiveness of their pain control drug. US artist Nan Goldin opposes institutions accepting their “blood money” donations. London’s National Portrait Gallery has just announced that it will decline a donation. Tate and Guggenheim are set to follow.
Here is a vehemently different view of the arts patronage issue. How do we know that the Sacklers are morally “worse” than other donors? Institutions have been accepting their money for years. To reject it now is simply “over-politicisation”. The arts “are fast becoming just one more vehicle through which to strike moral poses, regardless of whether they have much real effect.”
A fun piece. When expensive art is moved, especially for museum shows, the logistics are “delicate, expensive and complex. In 2010, a courier lost a portrait by Corot worth some £850,000 while drunk in a New York hotel bar.” And then there’s the paperwork – “they’d lost the forms at the airport and were going to bump my shipment. I nearly lost out to some fresh fish.”
What thinking lies behind an abstract painting? Jack Whitten, who died late last year, recorded his thoughts in a diary. It reveals a roller coaster of ambition about his own art. He wanted a “synthesis of abstraction and subject matter”, but also to “get rid of the spiritual”. Sometimes he wanted “revenge”. Later, “please do not show me anything that doesn’t go beyond the self!”
This “magnificent” show has a painful resonance with the Brexit identity crisis. Nelson has salvaged a mass of obsolete machinery from post-war industrial Britain. A show “not of nostalgia but deep sadness” says one critic “It’s about the end of an era: industries moving on and out of the country … everything must go, entire eras of the past.” More images are here.
Philip Johnson was called the “Godfather of American architecture”. He helped bring architecture into the public discourse and, as a practicing architect, produced some acclaimed designs. This success papers over less lofty realities – a Nazi sympathizer; a great deal of second-rate work. “Many of his buildings, even churches and museums, look like malls.”