The Easel

5th March 2019

Hans Hofmann’s wide-ranging art at UC Berkeley Art Museum

Hofmann taught a who’s who of 20th century American artists. That distinction overshadows his reputation as an artist, despite his leading role in New York abstract expressionism. Perhaps teaching provided the gestation period for his late career achievement, ‘colour plane abstractions’. They are “the pinnacle of American academic abstraction … a world of floating forms”.

Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab

A neuroscience perspective on responding to art. Our biggest response is to faces, “the most important visual image we ever encounter”. We process images, not like a camera but as “an act of assembly with numerous brain areas contributing”. This assemblage is highly individual: “something special in the art [sets] off the physiological triggers of attraction and love. And so we say, ‘What a great painting.””

26th February 2019

What Ghosts Haunt Jasper Johns’s New Skeleton Paintings? We May Never Know (and That’s the Point)

Reviewers of Johns’ new show approach it as a puzzle to be solved, undeterred by his long-standing reluctance to help with interpretation. Mortality seems a preoccupation of the octogenarian artist (no surprise) but is that it? “What is the meaning of all this meaning? You mainly end up finding symbols that are symbols of other symbols.”  A good bio piece is here.