The Easel

Archives: The New York Review of Books

6th December 2017

More Light!

Hockney’s very first show was a sellout and helped establish his reputation for bright colours and “debonair playfulness”.  As art world tastes shifted to the conceptual he has remained stylistically constant. His youthful work carried a quotient of “homosexual propaganda”, making a point to conservative Britain Now in his 80’s, he is “an apostle of niceness and kindness”. A promo video (2 min) is here.

28th November 2017

Anni Albers: Picking Up the Thread

Albers has slipped from prominence. Is it because she was a weaver, or was it gender bias? She was the first textile artist to receive a retrospective from MoMA. But that was 1949 when Bauhaus credentials were contemporary. A Bilbao exhibition is a “rediscovery”, revealing that her work “has the precision and grace of a Bach fugue: themes sounded and reconfigured, echoes, repetitions, and variations, all assembled with élan and poise.”