The Easel

5th November 2024

Egypt is building a $1-billion mega-museum. Will it bring Egyptology home?

After decades of construction, the Grand Egyptian Museum is (mostly) open. It is immense. Its conservation centre, similarly huge, will prioritise study of Tutankhamun’s treasures, 70% of which have never been properly analysed. Some hope the museum will help “reclaim a national narrative of Egyptology”, long dominated by academics from abroad. And the objects? “Ancient Egyptian art is so exquisite … so in line with our ideas of beauty that [properly displayed] the effect is dazzling.”

“It’s Not Real But It Happened”: A Sophie Calle Survey Confronts the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Calle’s self-description, a “narrative artist”, hides a lot. Notable projects include following a man across Europe, secretly photographing guests’ belongings in hotel rooms, and a narrated video of a road trip with her lover. Cumulatively, they are about “the boundaries between public and private; truth and fiction”, issues of great contemporary relevance. One writer observes “the unconsidered self, in possession of a supposedly natural story, is lost in Calle’s carefully staged endeavours, but [Calle gains an art book].”

Drawing the Italian Renaissance review: This will delight Da Vinci and Michelangelo fans

Drawing flourished in the Renaissance and not just because paper had become affordable. Drawing was also an ideal medium in which to explore new ideas, notably a naturalistic approach to portraiture. While it might have started as a subsidiary activity, the “immediacy and virtuosity” of drawing established it as a unique artform. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and others all developed and shared their ideas on paper. Collectively, drawing helped define the aesthetic of the Renaissance. A “sensational” show.

Gustave Caillebotte — a once-in-a-generation show at the Musée d’Orsay

“Lone men haunt Caillebotte’s paintings.” The writer feels this “vast” retrospective is rather fixated on the matter, although it seems a reasonable inquiry. Male figures are more common in his work compared to the other Impressionists. Anyway, this writer isn’t pleased, especially as Caillebotte’s “truly original” flower paintings are omitted.  What seems agreed, though, is that Caillebotte had a unique vision of Paris’s urban life, “recognisable but imaginatively transformed.” [If the FT link doesn’t work, try this.]

Rosario de Velasco

Why did de Velasco become invisible? Let’s count the ways. She was a reputable female artist in macho 1930’s Spain, but by WW2 had fallen from view. Her elegant figurations that blended an Old Masters style with modern realism, were out of step with an art establishment that favoured abstraction. Lastly, her support for the anti-democratic forces in the civil war “sidelined” her among those writing art history. Images are here.

The rebel painter who ushered in a new era of Indian art

Gaitonde had a liking for silence, perhaps reflecting the multiple artistic influences he was juggling. Although Gaitonde trained in realist Indian miniature painting, both Paul Klee and, later, Mark Rothko made him, as he stated it, a “non-objective” painter. He didn’t mean he was an abstractionist, though it’s difficult to explain the difference. He was, says a writer, a “radical individualist” intent on discovering “not visions of the outer world, but visions of his inner self.” A backgrounder is here.

Museum shows can be death for street art. Osgemeos look alive and well.

Apart from rare examples like Keith Haring, graffiti artists just don’t get art world attention. Brazilian duo Osgemeos seem another exception to this rule. Their art comes out of 1980’s hip hop and comprises intricate drawings, paintings and sculptures. So, what allows them to straddle the street art / fine art divide? Their art is original but also “twee and repetitive”, prone to nostalgia for 1980’s-style graffiti. This writer found Osgemeos’ appeal came from elsewhere: “discernment is not the point: exuberance is.”

29th October 2024

The ghostly worlds of Goya and Paula Rego

Paula Rego admired Goya’s sometimes baffling, sometimes terrifying images. With both artists having a dark side, an exhibition showing them side by side should be interesting. Well, maybe. Some Rego works are “marvellously grotesque” in portraying the cruelty found in children’s rhymes. However, Goya’s prints conjure a world of “monstrous dreams” and are altogether more disturbing. Says one writer, Rego “ends up being no more than Goya’s foil, pointing up the satanic majesty of his imagination”.

How Emmet Gowin Defines Intimacy in Photography

Photography takes inspiration literally from anywhere in life. Gowin is renowned for his images of intimacy. Early in his career, this meant observing his wife’s extended family. Casual family snaps they are not. They are formally elegant compositions that speak to “the close bond shared between relatives”. So, how does he pick a key moment? “[It] is just wherever the family occurs, the awareness of how we fit into the places around us. Anything worthwhile is, in a way, something you’ll never see again.”

The Surprising Power of Piet Mondrian’s Lesser-Known Early Paintings

Mondrian’s elegant grids emerged from a long evolution. At 20, he was painting still lifes in the great Dutch tradition. But he was drifting away from his father’s religious outlook and, in his art, showing a preference for primary colours. Around this time, he painted a puppy with the sun shining on its black and white fur. Although an odd subject, given his later work, it reveals Mondrian as already fascinated with “the interplay of neatly confined precincts of black and white. [It reminds that] looking begets enchantment.”

For a Master of Brutalist Provocations, a Modest Museum Appraisal

Architects face the dual challenge of aesthetics and utility. Starting with innovative house designs in 1950’s Florida, Paul Rudolph went on to challenge the glass towers of International Modernism. However, the public never warmed to his brutalist megastructures that expressed his idea of a “return to the primal texture of caves”. Their users, it seems, didn’t like them much either. By the early 1970’s his celebrity had faded. Rudolph’s great ideas, says the writer, are now “framed by whispers of failure”.

The Cross-Pollination Between Prints and Textiles Yields Abundance

Printing and textiles have swapped technologies back to at least 1455 when Gutenberg used textile stamping techniques in his new printing press. By the 1600’s “dressed prints” emerged, prints that had patterned fabrics sewn onto them. The boundary between paper and fabric is now even less distinct. Fabric-like patterns are printed on paper and then embroidered with stitching, making an object that “could be seen as a quilt itself, a print of a quilt, or a collage”.  Images are here.

Toward Joy

To mark its 200th birthday, Brooklyn Museum has re-hung its American collection. That’s brave because, in choosing how to show its art, it must decide what stories it wants to tell. Navigating between our current discontents is tricky – gender and racial equity, environmentalism, colonialism all vie for attention, so the re-hang ends up being an “institutional critique”. Portraits of rich white males still appear, perhaps to mollify the traditionalists. “Some things are better left in storage”.