The Easel

29th August 2017

Tom Wolfe on Marie Cosindas, an Artist Who Created Something Completely New

Tom Wolfe | Vulture | 19th June 2017

Wonderful. “[S]he arrived at my apartment in New York to photograph me for a series called “The Dandies.” So I put on a new suit, beautifully tailored. I was particularly proud of that suit. Before I answered [the door] I fixed a confident, slightly smiling, amusingly knowing look on my face. I opened the door, and here was a diminutive woman with wavy brown hair … in the softest of voices she directed me to go change my clothes …”

Cartier-Bresson’s Distant India

Ratik Asokan | The New York Review of Books | 25th August 2017

Having helped found the Magnum agency, Cartier-Bresson set out for photojournalism. Sent to India, his images of Gandhi just before his assassination, and the subsequent funeral, brought fame. “Cartier-Bresson’s Indian photos are quiet, self-effacing … If in Europe he chased the “decisive moment,” there’s something conspicuously timeless about his panoramas of Indian peasants and cowherds.”

22nd August 2017

Mary Heilmann’s New Dia Show Places Her among the (Male) Icons of Minimalism

Hillarie Sheets | Artsy | 30th June 2017

Being a female ceramicist was not a promising start for an aspiring artist in 1960’s New York. Heilmann shifted to equally unfashionable painting and while she wasn’t ignored, she wasn’t celebrated either. That is now changing. “The unassuming quality of her work lulls you in and then you realize all the quirks and careful counterbalancing that take place within the geometric and color combinations.” A short video (4 min) is here.

Explore the Weird World of the Symbolists at the Guggenheim

Jennifer Krasinski | The Village Voice | 16th August 2017

In Belle Epoque Paris, some artists were articulating the emerging modern world. Others sought refuge in spiritual themes, loosely grouped around Symbolism. This latter movement held a series of Salon exhibitions but their work was kitsch – it was an art dead end. The Sublime, though, is a concept with enduring appeal. It has regularly been revisited in the last century, most spectacularly by Mark Rothko.

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