The Easel

4th July 2017

Sophie Calle at Fort Mason: Reports from love’s front lines

Charles Desmarais | San Francisco Chronicle | 1st July 2017

It’s difficult to be precise about the art of celebrated French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. A gallery blurb says her projects deal with issues of absence and loss. She based one such project on a break-up email received from a lover. Calle circulated the note to a wide circle of women requesting their analysis “without pathos”. An excellent background piece sums up her work thus: “autobiography wrung dry of all emotion”.

Myth-Maker of the Brothel

Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books | 29th June 2017

Utamaro painted refined scenes of beautiful women in Tokyo’s brothels. In truth this “floating world” was not so glamorous nor he its habitué. His celebrated paintings possibly had rather prosaic origins: “Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusement. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening … than political activity.”

27th June 2017

A new window into Wright

Blair Kamin | Chicago Tribune | 11th June 2017

“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

Adam Lehrer | Forbes | 1st May 2017

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

Jill Spalding | Studio International | 18th June 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”

Thomas Micchelli | Hyperallergic | 3rd June 2017

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.

Tracing Seismic Culture from its Highs to its Lows

Brandon Sward | Newcity | 6th June 2017

Reviewers seem flummoxed by Murakami. He doesn’t see a difference between high and low art. Fine – but given the multiple assistants, his manga characters and the slick marketing, is he serious? “[The show is] more like watching someone capitalize on whatever happens to resonate… are we all moving toward a world wherein there is no difference between avant-garde and kitsch?” An excellent video (7.5 min) is here and more images here.

Older links
Newer links