The Easel

3rd December 2024

Picasso: printmaker at the British Museum review – an eye-opener of a show in more ways than one

Melanie McDonough | The Standard | 6th November 2024

Picasso loved the print medium – in bursts. His print activity was dominated by two vaunted collections – the mid-career Vollard Suite and the huge 347 Suite done toward the end of his life. At well over 2000 works, printmaking was a major part of his oeuvre. It was a place to develop ideas (often inspired by classical sculpture) and express his erotic obsessions. And print offered many different techniques. He mastered all of them, with “insolent ease”.

Annibale Carracci, the greatest Old Master no one has heard of

William Poundstone | LACMA On Fire | 26th November 2024

Here’s a big claim – Carracci is “the most underappreciated” of the key painters in European art history. Why so? He developed a naturalism in his painting that preceded Caravaggio. He also was a forerunner in painting landscapes, ahead of the now more famous Poussin. Lastly, he developed illusionist techniques that became a characteristic of the Baroque. Lacking the radical cinematic quality of Caravaggio, he languished in the art market for decades. Not any more.

Trace Ed Hardy’s global influence on tattoo design, roots in San Francisco with this timeline

Ethan Gregory Dodge | San Francisco Chronicle | 29th November 2024

Sceptical about tattoos being art? Well, consider the career of prominent American tattooist Ed Hardy. After graduating from art school he switched to tattooing, drawn by its ”spectacularly transgressive” spirit. His appointment-only tattoo shop offered custom designs influenced by his long study of finely detailed, semi-abstract Japanese tattooing. Says one writer, Hardy’s lasting contribution was to take “tradition-bound Americana and transmute it into something more artistic”.

Stitched: Scotland’s Embroidered Art

Beth Williamson | Studio International | 18th November 2024

The economics of a community reflects in its art and especially so for textile embroidery. This was women’s work, requiring long hours to produce objects that sold for very little. Yet a wide network of women, including from “the peasantry”, had the skills to make intricate armchair coverings, bed hangings, tablecloths and cushions. Many pieces show exceptional individual creativity, using not just traditional textiles but also newer products from India. “An extraordinary exhibition”.

Tate’s finances are on the skids and I think I know why

JJ Charlesworth | The Spectator | 30th November 2024

Visitor numbers at many museums remain below pre-pandemic levels but British museums are lagging noticeably. Tate Britain, which holds the national collection of British art, is singled out for recrimination, due to its “social justice-tinted view of history”. “Mediocre paintings” are displayed because they make a point about colonialism or women, while “artistically significant” works stay in the storeroom. In its attempt to diversify its audience, there is a “ blindspot where the ‘national’ should be”.

The magic of Tirzah Garwood

Matthew Lyons | Engelsberg Ideas | 26th November 2024

Garwood married a renowned artist who died early in WW2. Her own death, soon after the war, propelled her “into an unearned oblivion”. A current London exhibition is her first in 70 years. After an initial foray into woodblock printing, she switched to painting, capturing a distinctive “English vernacular … dog shows, vegetable gardens, quiet domesticity”. Some works might seem “childlike”, but they are “without sentimentality. [This is] life itself hiding in plain sight. The more you look, the more astonishing it all is.”

26th November 2024

San Francisco MoMA — Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Jessica Skwire Routhier | Antiques and the Arts | 18th November 2024

Because of her acclaimed portrait of Michelle Obama, one might assume Sherald is a portraitist. Mostly, it seems, she is not. Her “luminous figurative compositions” are usually done using models and they tell stories Sherald has imagined. Taking a lesson from social media, her pictures use detail and nuance to project a narrative – about black people and about American-ness. “Sherald’s subjects keep themselves to themselves … less concerned with how they are perceived than with their own imagination”.

Islamic art and the sumptuous Victorian designs of William Morris

Weronika Strzyżyńska | Hyphen | 11th November 2024

William Morris was a quintessentially English designer, and his wallpapers and fabrics celebrated the flora and fauna of the English countryside. Yet behind his designs was a profound influence from Islamic arts. He was an active collector of Middle Eastern carpets and decorative tiling, and their flower motifs and geometric patterns were reflected in his wallpaper designs. Said he, “Persia has become holy land, for there in the process of time our art was perfected”. An essay by a curator is here.

The Painted Protest

Dean Kissick | Harper's Magazine | 1st December 2024

An attempt to decipher the cacophony of contemporary art. A decade ago, the art world decided it was too frivolous. Identity, social issues, and inequality should instead be its focus, along with amplifying the voices of the marginalised. Now, the appearance of an artwork is “subordinate to the theory that purports to explain it.” However, “I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject”.

Giorgio Morandi: Time Suspended, part II

Lyle Rexer | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st November 2024

One critic suggests that no-one “has less to tell us about the 20th century than Morandi.” Working in his small Bologna apartment bedroom, he painted his bottles and vases with “a medieval attentiveness”. He showed them as mere geometric forms in an architecture. And yet they are irresistible as objects for contemplation. More than one writer has likened Morandi’s work to the great Zen painting Six Persimmons, described as “passion… congealed into a stupendous calm”.

Never-before-exhibited portrait by Caravaggio to go on public display

Staff | The History Blog | 23rd November 2024

A Caravaggio portrait, locked away in a secretive collection and unseen for decades, has gone on show in Florence. Completed early in Caravaggio’s career, it features an equally youngish Barberini when he was a rising star in the Vatican. Dramatic lighting and the subject’s expressive hand gestures give the work a “dynamic naturalism” unusual for that time. By the way, Barberini later became pope, patronised the arts, practised nepotism on a “vast” scale and beat up on Galileo. Background and images are here.

Should we open our hearts to Vanessa Bell?

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 18th November 2024

Some critics think Bell’s art deserves more acclaim. She picked up on early modernism, not just in painting but also in ceramics, furniture and illustration. From one perspective, “openness to experimentation” is a good thing. Yet it feeds the criticism that her work is derivative. “[She was influenced] by the post-impressionists. “Which ones?” you may be wondering. All of them! Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, [all have] an impact. In 1912 alone she attempted a dozen approaches …” 

The end of art critics

Pierre d’Alancaisez | The Critic | 14th November 2024

Art criticism is in crisis. Cultural pluralism has “turned discernment into a dirty word”. Artworks have become “props in predetermined political or theoretical arguments” which turns off readers. Social media is such that galleries want to be namechecked by influencers and don’t mind if a review is good or bad. But then, some hope. Because of the “flight from judgement”, the field “is full of opportunities. Audiences are yearning to understand what they’ve been looking at all this time.”Pierre d’Alancaisez

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