The Easel

11th June 2019

Natalia Goncharova, Tate Modern review – a prodigious talent

Can an artist be too diverse? Goncharova’s vast output was surely, in part, a reflection of her life. Raised in not-quite-modern Russia she made folkloric-styled modernist paintings and books. Her later life in avant garde Paris brought acclaim for her costumes and sets for Ballets Russes. “Everything she did was fully realised and extremely powerful, yet … she remains enigmatic.”

4th June 2019

Brancusi and America

Brancusi felt a debt to America, its openness to the new. In return he has been “the fountainhead” of American sculpture. Listing his undoubtedly numerous innovations tends to obscure where his true greatness lay. An earlier critic is more specific – “his rapturous feeling for surfaces … [and endowing] his forms with something of the clarity and finality of law”.