“Rapturous” acclaim for Tate’s show of Anni Albers’ weavings is but part of a bigger story. Despite Bauhaus credentials and groundbreaking modernism, her reputation faded. Weaving also fell from favour. Now this is reversing, the art/craft distinction discredited. The warp and weft of textiles creates a grid, modernism’s favourite “armature for the expressive aesthetic gesture”.
A very different view of Tate Modern’s show. Bonnard’s multiple portraits of his wife show that he constantly fiddled and changed his mind. Picasso diagnosed indecision. “Wrong … Bonnard, like many artists, was working to find himself and sort through his past … a form of therapy. [His wife] was Bonnard’s shifting projection of himself [and] color was Bonnard’s arbitrator of emotion.”
How timely – a show about Britishness, just as the Brexit debate peaks. The linked piece airs criticisms of Parr; a lover of kitch, satire lacking in compassion. Fellow artist Grayson Perry disagrees: this work “hovers uncomfortably between comedy and tragedy … humour bleeds through all these photographs, but also compassion … one of the foremost chroniclers of our times.”