The Easel

27th June 2017

A new window into Wright

“World’s greatest architect” Frank Lloyd Wright once declared of himself. Wright’s many projects often drew on a central idea – “organic” architecture that harmonised people and the landscape. “Despite Wright’s mothlike attraction to the flame of celebrity, he was deeply engaged with the essential question of how buildings can uplift the lives of individuals and communities.” Images and a video (4 min) are here.

The ‘August Sander’ Show At Hauser & Wirth Reaffirms Photography As Art Form

Physiognomy – the inference of personality from someone’s appearance – doesn’t work. But a century ago it motivated Sander to photograph thousands of his fellow Germans. “All of his subjects seem to wear labor like a badge. [Sander said] allow me to be honest and tell the truth about our age and its people”. Sadly, he didn’t prove the theory but did lay the foundations of fine art photography. Some images are here.

Image: Hauser and Wirth

Calder: Hypermobility 2017

We are so used to Calder’s works that it’s easy to forget how radical he was. His leap of inspiration – from observing Mondrian’s work to thinking kinetic sculpture – was huge. “[His work], freed from coffee tables and institutional lawns, regains its purity of intent, abstracted once again into the primary tools of form, shape, line and movement … you realise that a Calder is in its essence its own language, a vocabulary of fresh ideas.”

John D. Graham and “Another Way of Making Modern Art”

European emigres arrived in 1920’s America in such numbers that they created a new avant garde. None of the newcomers was to prove more influential than John Graham. Steeped in the theories of Jung, he advocated painting from the unconscious. His own portraits show this with their psychosexual undercurrents. But the idea caught on even more among those around him – de Kooning and particularly a young Jackson Pollock.