The Easel

Archives: London Review of Books

7th June 2015

At the RA

Diebenkorn’s work is not held widely in the UK and there was a tone of surprise in the early (gushing) reviews of his London retrospective. In contrast, this essay focuses on what to make of his shifts in style. Diebenkorn’s career “was not a single, mechanical oscillation from abstract through figurative and back, but a long argument with himself, and others, about different ways to make a good painting.”

6th June 2015

After the White Cube

Contemporary public galleries are tending to be ever more grand, with designs that sometimes shout louder than the art they house. Is their core purpose still clear?.Should such galleries consider themselves places of popular entertainment rather than art scholarship? The risk of excessive size is that “… more than the viewer, it is the museum itself that the museum seeks to activate.”
Image: Wikipedia