Since designing the Lockheed lounge and Embryo chair Newsom has been at “the very apex” of design. Most reviews of his current show are gushing – “a form of alchemy … furniture pieces of immense beauty.” Not so the linked piece. It worries about “objects as hyper-commodities” and wishes Newsom would show “he can still be ingenious on the cheap”. More images are here.
In 2017, Schutz caused an art world firestorm with her painting of the murdered teenager Emmett Till. Those issues – particularly about cultural appropriation – remain unsettled. Schutz, for her part, seems chastened but unbowed. Her new work is “rife with a painterly dark energy… a progenitor of a kind of abstract-imaginative figuration”.
As print media ebbs, so too does the art criticism it once supported. Gary Indiana is a New York writer whose 1980’s essays – “a bracing, electric portrait of eighties art” – have just been re-published. Of Robert Mapplethorpe – “combines a preternatural refinement with an insatiable appetite”. Cindy Sherman’s characters “give the impression of having awakened in a different place than where they went to sleep”.
Fontana has “muffled visibility” a hangover, perhaps, from having once worked for Mussolini. A retrospective shows this neglect is unwarranted. Fontana pioneered “spatialism”, using light and colour to create an immersive viewer experience. And he took to making refined cuts in his canvasses, breaking the picture plane to reveal a dark void. For some, this alone secures his place in art history.
After a century, the American wing of New York’s Met finally holds a show of native American art. One critic fumes that the show is coloured by “the pride and resentments of identity politics”. That seems a bit tough. Clearly, an effort is being made to change old attitudes: “designating arts as ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnographic’ has limited our capacity to see a broader … humanity.”
Black women appear frequently in Impressionist art, reflecting a Paris that was becoming multi-racial. What has escaped everyone’s notice is that these women were depicted matter-of-factly, without racial tropes. This shift, radical for the time, is highlighted in a landmark show that is “singular in illuminating fully [this change] while pulling its theme … thrillingly into the present.”
Yiadom-Boakye is an artist in the ascendant. Many expect greater things to come. Her paintings feature imagined, handsome black figures – “because I am not white”. Her work, says this writer, has an emotional clarity and her figures, shown in relaxed, still poses, are vaguely reminiscent of the Old Masters. Or, as one critic expressed it “They say little, explicitly, but you hear much.”
Psychology experiments show that our distaste for forgeries comes from a perception that originals gain “identity from their history”. We are also good at identifying genuine abstract works – “people see more than they think they see in abstract art – they see the mind behind the work “. Sadly, no evidence is found that looking at art is good for the soul.