The Easel

6th February 2018

Kiefer Rodin at The Barnes

Julia Cliff | Title | 18th December 2017

Kiefer’s visit to Musée Rodin has led to an exhibition about the “compelling dialogue” between the two artists. Their interests overlap – Rodin’s passion for Gothic cathedrals and Kiefer’s interest in sculpture/architecture. Sadly, and not for the first time, hackles are raised by the more erotic works. Rodin’s drawings carry “a whiff of misogyny” while Kiefer’s are “woefully unskilled and fail utterly to transcend their perviness.”

“Art” A Brief Retrospective on the Legal Term

Michelle Pham | Helsell Fetterman | 26th January 2018

You know there is going to be trouble when the law has to decide what is, and is not, art. “U.S. Customs officials did not see a bird in Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space and refused to exempt it as a work of art when it arrived at New York Harbor in October 1926. Instead, they classified it as a “kitchen utensil” and imposed a standard 40 percent tariff on the sale price.”

This piece originally appeared in The SciTech Lawyer and has been made available with the kind permission of the author

Imagining President Donald Trump Sitting on Maurizio Cattelan’s Solid-Gold Toilet

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 29th January 2018

Amidst an anti-Trump rant, some interesting points about art. Duchamp argued that context gives meaning to art. Does the fracas over the Guggenheim’s action add meaning to Cattelan’s toilet, making it a better sculpture? Would installation in the White House have made it a different artwork – or perhaps not an artwork at all? At least one critic disapproves: “an erudite potty joke but a potty joke all the same”.

Fabergé And The Russian Crafts Tradition: An Empire’s Legacy

Karla Klein Albertson | Antiques and the Arts Weekly | 30th January 2018

Peter Carl Fabergé was part of a crafts tradition going back centuries. Tsarist patronage of the arts was partly intended as a demonstration of national prowess – and Fabergé eggs do nothing if not that. Bolshevik ambitions were, of course, far more muscular and, after 1917, some of these exquisite objects came to Europe in the arms of emigres. No longer symbolic they are now merely objects of “otherworldly beauty”.

The Eternal Peter Hujar

Sarah Nicole Prickett | Document | 29th January 2018

A tinge of romance attaches to New York’s Lower East Side of the 1970’s. Amidst the urban decay important artists were emerging – Warhol, Basquiat, Mapplethorpe. Hujar was confident that fame would eventually find him, too. His friends thought likewise “In his portraits, he doesn’t exert the gaze, which is the norm of most photography. He met people where they lived. He is the greatest portraitist of the twentieth century.”

30th January 2018

Jack Whitten: once neglected artist lately the toast of the art world

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 22nd January 2018

Despite getting an early career solo show at New York’s Whitney, Whitten struggled all his life for recognition. It is now starting to arrive, belately, after a long career of sustained innovation. His “visually arresting [work] can feel like a missing link between the abstract expressionists of the postwar years and the minimalists and conceptualists”. He died last week. An excellent interview with the artist (2.50 min) is here.

Chuck Close is Accused of Harassment. Should His Artwork Carry an Asterisk?

Robin Pogrebin and Jennifer Scheussler | The New York Times | 28th January 2018

Accusations of sexual misconduct against American portraitist Chuck Close have led Washington’s National Gallery of Art to cancel an exhibition of his work. Is this the right response? Cancellation of the show is a gesture of support toward his accusers. On the other hand, many esteemed artists are on display, despite deeds that are far worse. Is “the prism of reprehensible behaviour” the only way to view an artist’s work?

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