The Easel

30th July 2019

Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing

Louise Clarke | Studio International | 29th July 2019

Da Vinci’s impatience is revealed by his output – fewer than 20 completed paintings but many thousands of pages of drawings. Few projects came to fruition, so the drawings are a record of his thinking. They show what we all know – his art reflected a scientific mind. One of the last drawings he did, of an old man, also reveals his humanity: “He redraws this old man’s nose again and again no longer sure of himself.”

Curator Clare Lilley on David Smith

Clare Lilley | Hauser and Wirth | 20th July 2019

Seeing photographs of some Picasso metal sculptures was, for Smith, an epiphany. He went on to explore metal sculpture in a body of work that “had no precedent”. Like a collagist, “material determined imagery”, and Smith used “tools, off-cuts, boiler lids, waste and bought steel” to create works with a strong human narrative. At his funeral he was described as “delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck”.

23rd July 2019

In a Morris Minor key – Michael Collins presents the lost world of family slides

Fatema Ahmed | Apollo | 18th July 2019

An interesting perspective. Amateur cameras in the 1950’s and 60’s were clunky, making for slow photography. Careful, matter-of-fact family snaps, at their best, are aesthetically akin to the celebrated photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher. “They have an eloquence that goes to the core of what photography really is … each of these family slides is a biography written in the vernacular”. More images are here.

Can we decolonise the British Museum?

Ellen Pierson-Haggar | New Statesman | 20th July 2019

In late 2017 the French President promised to repatriate art objects stolen from French colonies. The announcement resonated in Britain because of its extensive holdings of colonial-era artifacts. It seems the British Museum remains untroubled. “We believe the strength of the collection is its breadth and depth … the integrity of the collection should be maintained.”

Finland’s Munch’: the unnerving art of Helene Schjerfbeck

Kate Kellaway | Our Daily Read | 6th July 2019

Schjerfbeck does not provide a tidy narrative. She was fashion conscious but many of her portraits show a preference for “an averted gaze”. She adored Paris but ultimately chose provincial Finland – where her art became modernist. One critic’s view that her work is “a cold shower of second-rate art” is an outlier compared to this writer’s summation – “wan, authoritative and unnerving”.

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