Oceania, according to a London show, is a single civilization connected by water. Clear aesthetic similarities between artworks of different island groups proves the point. But there are attendant issues – the impact of Europeans, the unacknowledged debt that our culture owes this art. As Faulkner observed, the past is never dead, it’s not even past.
Albers succeeded despite, not because of, Bauhaus’s famous teachers. Heartwarming though her personal story is, the bigger story is about what constitutes fine art. She showed that textiles belong among the fine arts and linked weaving with architecture and design. Ample justification for the claim that she was “a weaver who changed art”. More images are here.
In a new location this show gets a review focused more on Nolde the great colourist rather than Nolde the anti-Semite. He briefly aligned with several avante garde art movements but was not really the type to belong to a club. His was a singular vision – “in love with the “expressiveness” of paint itself”. He used it to convey beauty as well as danger, making his works “raw and unforgettable”.
The Liverpool Biennale has been favourably reviewed with particular acclaim going to Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook. Her realist drawings, a radical departure from Inuit naturalist traditions, portray the realities of remote community life with a “pitch black humour as murky as those Arctic winter nights”. An overview of the Biennale is here.
The Nazi’s degenerate art show in 1937 was a “venomous” attack on modern art. As a rebuttal, the same artists were featured more positively in a London in the following year. The details of the events are surprisingly dramatic. Art, while not directly a matter of life and death, was a primary tool for manipulating public opinion to accept the dark deeds that were shortly to occur.