The Easel

5th September 2017

Robert Hughes Is Not My Dad

Rennie McDougall | Hyperallergic | 2nd September 2017

An appreciation – with misgivings – of the great art critic. A self-confessed cultural elitist, Hughes criticized Australia for its shortcomings, only to then rail against New York’s imperial tendencies. But then there was his fine prose: “Hughes’ prose is often like architecture itself, a solid, tangible construction, which, after a first pass, one can wander through again musingly, appreciating the shapely details within the foundation.”

Richard Gerstl, Neue Galerie, New York — mesmerising

Ariella Budick | ft.com | 16th August 2017

Fin de siècle Vienna was a nervy place and it produced some nervy artists. Richard Gerstl was certainly one of those. Talented but unhappy he had an affair with a friend’s wife which was promptly discovered. Uproar ensued and, shortly thereafter, Gerstl committed suicide at just 25. “[D]id mental illness shape his style, or does his work look especially desperate because we read backwards from his suicide?”

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.”

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