Given the numerous Richter exhibitions, what can yet another one say? This show assembles the best of his meticulous photorealistic seascapes. It reveals his strategy quite clearly – avoid copying a photograph while striving for an “autonomous image” devoid of a personal style. However, something distinctive does emerge, “a strangeness and unease and that is stylistic in itself.”
Paula Rego doesn’t do mild. Intense is closer to the mark, especially works dealing with issues – like abortion – that affect women. In these works, and others, her female figures seem empowered. The renowned “dog-woman” series shows female figures in dog-like poses, yet all possessed of an indomitable spirit. As one critic says “exhilarating, at times alarming”.
Technology is a trendy subject. However, not for the first time, a prominent show on the topic fails to excite. While individual works are “interesting”, the show is “incoherent”. Too many works “divorce us from the reality of how intertwined our physical and virtual worlds have become. [Why warn about a] dark and dangerous other world?… the thing is, we are already in that other world”.
Possibly well-informed art market gossip. Where is Salvator Mundi? (On a luxury yacht – where did you expect?) Does recent scholarship support attribution to da Vinci? And, has anyone noticed the scale of investments in art in the Middle East? Abu Dhabi’s Louvre, Qatar’s National Museum and Saudi Arabia’s planned cultural precinct are a “headlong shopping spree for international cultural capital”.
Hammershøi is often compared to Vermeer because both painted interiors. From that point they diverge. Vermeer showed a moment’s stillness amidst daily activity. Hammershøi’s interiors are all quiet greys and pallid light, clutter conspicuously absent. Figures have their backs turned. Is everything OK here? “He observes rooms with the attentiveness of one watching for changes in the weather.”
Haring had the first of many gallery shows while still a teenager. Some think his work facile, perhaps because it was developed on the street or because of its joyful graphic style. But Haring’s deft humour helped address serious issues like AIDS and his prescient concern with the impact of technology. His style remains immensely influential.
Museums have only recently shown real interest in black artists. Likewise, “rigid” art history has blatantly ignored black figures that appear in European paintings (see The Easel, January 22). “Even basic facts about the relationship between blackness, black culture, and certain Modernists, like Manet and Matisse, have been omitted from the timeline of art history.”
The Bauhaus was probably the single most influential modernist art school of the 20th century. To mark the centenary of its founding, Morgan Meis is writing an essay – in three parts – on its history and impact.
“Bauhaus’ founding manifesto [by Walter Gropius] is a document wild with utopian ideals. It is not a utopianism wishing to abolish the past in the name of a glorious future filled with glass and concrete. There is nothing in it that comes anywhere close to the idea that form should follow function, that ornament is an enemy, or that formal simplicity is a goal in and of itself. The biggest question … is whether the movement lost – or found – its way through the course of the 20th century.”
The art world, it seems, is getting woke. There has always been a market for the work of African American artists. It’s just that the leading museums are now involved, with changed curatorial appointments and museum acquisitions. Conspicuously, auction room results have also upshifted. Says one curator “there has been a whole parallel universe … that people had not tapped into”
Superb, museum-quality shows like this are rarely seen in private galleries. On top of this, the reviewer thinks Bacon’s already lofty reputation warrants further elevation. Works portraying sexual battle showcase his style of being both “precise and ungraspable”. “This exhibition makes a great case for Bacon as [Picasso’s] true heir: the only artist who could add to Picasso’s metamorphic lexicon of the human figure.”
Can an artist be too diverse? Goncharova’s vast output was surely, in part, a reflection of her life. Raised in not-quite-modern Russia she made folkloric-styled modernist paintings and books. Her later life in avant garde Paris brought acclaim for her costumes and sets for Ballets Russes. “Everything she did was fully realised and extremely powerful, yet … she remains enigmatic.”
Ringgold’s work is political, intense. It thus surprises how often it is called colourful – even “pretty”. She started with painting and posters but moved to “populist” quilts, a form women have long used for story telling. The art world can be sniffy about textiles but they suited Ringgold, their textures and colours expressing her “exuberance and optimism” in the face of angry subject matter.
Alan Schaefer had a secret – April Dawn Alison, an after-hours female persona. Following his death, decades of Polaroid images were found, “an extraordinary long-term exploration of a private self”. In our social media age, a project “intended only for private consumption and personal pleasure feels so anachronistic and so genuine as to become almost sacred.” More images are here.
A lookback at the Rijksmuseum’s “epic” show of its nearly 400 Rembrandts, now in its final days. His self-portrait paintings are fabulous but smaller prints and drawings impress even more, especially those done after the death of his beloved wife. Overall, the show reiterates the “inexhaustibility of his invention. Nothing human was alien to him. He was us before we were us.”