The Easel

24th October 2017

Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites

Johnathon Kantrowitz | Art History News | 10th October 2017

When London’s National Gallery acquired van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Portrait in 1842, it inspired the Pre Raphaelite movement in British art. This much discussed art is hailed by some as radical. For others, however, it’s “Victorian tripe”, or even “a fraud … mediocre.” Ouch! What is not in dispute is van Eyck’s 1434 work. “Mesmerising” is undoubtedly a consensus view, “the first really lifelike domestic interior ever painted.”

‘I wanted to do something I have never done before’

Fatema Ahmed | Apollo | 10th October 2017

Going from the Memphis Design Group to fine art painting is something of a leap. Du Pasquier’s work still reflects her design DNA – using scale models to assist still life compositions and the ever-present bright colours that so characterized Memphis designs. Several shows reveal a new shift underway, toward abstraction. It’s “a different kind of position. I became a builder, an inventor.’ More images are here.

17th October 2017

EASEL ESSAY: “How to See the World Properly”: An Interview About Jasper Johns

Morgan Meis | 17th October 2017

A companion piece to Morgan Meis’ recent Gallery Essay.

The Royal Academy of Arts landmark survey of Jasper Johns work, “Something Resembling Truth”, was co-curated by Roberta Bernstein, a personal friend of Johns.  Johns has said about his work “I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don’t think that’s a painter’s business.” Morgan recently interviewed Roberta about this famously elusive artist.

“He is a complex man and his art is challenging. The understanding of a painting as a real object occupying space was so vividly conveyed [by Painting with Two Balls (1960)] and made me think about art in a new way. [Johns] is, I think, struggling with (and also fascinated by) the impossibility of fixing meaning or meanings. He’s more interested in how the mind … constructs meaning.”

Martin Puryear

Veronica Simpson | Studio International | 5th October 2017

Puryear, a “giant” of American art, is well overdue a London retrospective. This “tremendous” survey makes amends. Puryear clearly loves working in wood, an echo of the wood cultures he encountered in Africa and Japan. His sculptures convey allusions and ambiguities. As one critic noted about one of his pieces “the logic of the thing’s making is obvious but… something else is hidden … lurking”.

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