The Easel

1st October 2024

Monet and London review: This will never happen again – don’t miss it

Florence Hallett | iNews | 26th September 2024

These days London’s air is clean but Monet’s affection for the city formed when it was dirty. In three separate visits, he painted the “delicious” winter fogs that, when combined with the “billowing filth” of industry, produced irresistibly beautiful light, His studies of central London and the Thames were finished back in Giverny and “clearly relate” to his famous waterlilies. These paintings are “a revelation beyond exaggeration” and a testament to the “elastic nature of [Monet’s] mind”.

Is Robert Frank’s late work worth viewing?

Arthur Lubow | ArtDaily | 14th September 2024

Frank’s first photobook The Americans was published in 1958, and it made him famous. He “hated” that and moved away from street photography. Despite doing things like touring with rock stars, Frank’s landscapes and studio images from this time don’t impress this writer. He also went into filmmaking, a form where his “genius” as a photographer seemed not to reach. Weary of facing huge expectations, Frank said “you see photography everywhere, it’s like bricks, you know.””

10 things about bronze

Staff | Rijksmuseum | 28th September 2024

The Rijksmuseum blockbuster show of Asian bronzes exemplifies the challenges of cross-cultural art. These are great sculptures, objects of beauty that include figurines, bells, mirrors and ceremonial objects. Besides flaunting the skill of their makers, they loudly proclaim their spiritual stories. For contemporary Westerners, though, it’s difficult to go beyond a superficial appreciation. What is clear is the depth and relatedness of Asian cultures and the eternal quality of bronze. An in-depth piece is here.

Uncanny Returns: Trevor Paglen and the Hallucinatory Domain of Generative AI

Anthony Downey | MIT Press Reader | 23rd September 2024

In the world before ChatGPT, Paglen thought image generating models would be unimaginative. Now he is concerned about the opposite – that is, AI models can “hallucinate”. He warns that models can be biased when classifying images and that users put too much faith in “machine realism”. Of course, awareness of these issues has skyrocketed with the emergence of ChatGPT. Builders of these models are trying to ensure “non-toxic” outputs, a category they may define differently to Paglen.

Michael Craig-Martin review – sorry, but these lamps and filing cabinets just aren’t that interesting

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 17th September 2024

The tradition of “object-art“ goes back at least to Magritte and his pipe that was “not a pipe”. Craig-Martin started there in 1973 with a glass of water that, he said, represented an oak tree. For decades, though, he has produced cheerfully coloured line drawings of everyday objects. “Perfectly pretty, and perfectly vacant” says one critic. The writer agrees. “If things are just things, how interesting can they be? It’s more like the dry irony of someone who’s forgotten what he’s being ironic about”.

Seeking the Silk Roads: An extraordinary story of the power of connections

Sue Brunning and Luk Yu-ping | The Past | 19th September 2024

Today’s world is global – and it’s been heading that way for longer than we think. The silk road was a network of routes on land and sea. Many high value goods were carried but religion, knowledge, diseases and slaves travelled too. The strongest evidence of these interconnections is the art, including pieces dug up in far-flung places that originated in nations we scarcely remember. One writer thinks the show is “almost too ambitious” but not so a noted historian: “Its epic”. Images are here.

24th September 2024

Van Gogh in Provence: ‘There was both a growing mastery in his work and a growing deliberation over what went into it’

Cornelia Homburg | Christie’s | 11th September 2024

Yet more van Gogh! London’s National Gallery is marking its 200th birthday with a show of 61 works, covering the artist’s two years in the south of France. Wanting to create “the art of the future”, he decided that colour would be his hallmark. Sadly, pigment deterioration now dulls many of his choices. Still, what remains is a “comet trail of splendour”. Says one writer, “How much light can you pack into a painting? How much love, despair, hope, anxiety? In the case of Vincent Van Gogh, the answer is: infinite.”

How Japanese Female Photographers Channeled Exclusion Into Experimentation

Pauline Vermare and Lesley Martin and Takeuchi Mariko | Literary Hub | 20th September 2024

Japan has a strong lineage in photography and some of its stars have global reputations. Those stars are all men. A new publication and “canon-revising” exhibition highlights that country’s female photographers who have long battled for attention. While covering some of the same tough subjects as the men (sex workers, big city street life), they also offer perspectives on domesticity and women’s roles that are “both delicate and blunt”. A revelation. A long essay on the topic is here.

All The Rage? We Need To Make Room Again For Anger In Art

Hanno Rauterberg | WorldCrunch | 21st September 2024

This writer seems riled up because he thinks the art world, increasingly, is not. Have artists become too well-behaved, like “dental technicians”? If so, is it because of the money sloshing around in contemporary art? Or is it that today’s big issues, beginning with AI, are so complicated that bafflement is a more likely response than anger? “The urge to always be unpredictable seems to be gone for good; today the art scene is focusing on remixing, remaking and recycling.” 

Arlene Shechet, Storm King review — colourful sculptures both monumental and intimate

Ariella Budick | ft.com | 14th September 2024

In the world of sculpture, Storm King is a sought-after commission. Shechet, who came to prominence via her abstract ceramics, has used the opportunity to lash out, producing six large metal sculptures dressed in conspicuous pastels. They are “biomorphic and baroque, a writhing mass of shapes”, qualities in line with Shechet’s reputation as one of America’s most imaginative sculptors. Mostly, though, they are “a rebuke to certainty”. If the FT paywall doesn’t like you, another review is here.

‘You must walk close to the edge’—the pioneering German artist Rebecca Horn dies, aged 80

Gareth Harris | The Art Newspaper

The many reviews of Horn’s work testify to her influence, even though her art is hard to characterise. She started with drawing but soon explored body-modifying costumes, performance, sculpture and film. One notable piece had a performer walking around in a wheatfield wearing nothing but a unicorn’s horn on her head. Such works didn’t represent a specific idea, says one writer, but rather “evoked … the experience of being half awake, poised between intention and instinct.” A review of her work is here.

Am I supposed to read all this? On spending time with Jenny Holzer’s word art.

Brittany Allen | Literary Hub | 17th September 2024

A fresh, disarming take on Holzer’s text-based installations. She is not the first text artist so why do we pay so much attention to her mix of “pseudo-philosophy, wise-guy polemic, and aimless chatter”? Some text clearly comes from the artist but at other times, who is speaking? If we don’t try to read the words as they scroll past, the whole show seems a bit absurd. And what if we do try to read them?  “If one clear, activating, right-headed message is the point—why take so many words to say it?

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