The Easel

23rd July 2024

Star Man: Vincent van Gogh’s Illuminated Nights

Michael Lobel | MoMA Magazine | 17th July 2024

An interesting pairing – van Gogh and industrialisation. From early in his painting career, van Gogh was fascinated by new forms of building and street lighting and the way it transformed “modern experience”. For him, illumination became “a full-blown artistic motif”. In his famous Starry Night, for example, celestial light is combined with lit windows throughout the village. Perhaps van Gogh was marvelling at the beauty of the night sky while the villagers marvelled at abundant gaslight and how it held the night at bay.

As Surrealism Turns 100, a Look at Its Enduring Legacy

Howard Halle | ARTnews | 24th April 2024

Surrealism is turning 100, a good excuse for lots of shows. The surrealists claimed a heritage back to Hieronymus Bosch and, via celebrated artists like Dali and Magritte, they are still influential. But what is surrealism’s current status? One critic notes, surrealism “has always been a multiplicity”, always a state of mind. The linked piece is a good primer but it seems we will have to wait for a more definitive contemporary assessment.

Toshiko Takaezu

Jennifer Krasinski | 4Columns | 31st May 2024

Takaezu is revered among ceramicists but almost unknown outside that circle. Inspired by a student job at a ceramics factory she went on to develop her acclaimed “closed form” works, vase-like forms with tiny necks. These were followed by more eccentric sculptural objects. Takaezu had no interest in “ideal form”, experimenting endlessly with ceramic imperfection and making her work almost a combination of sculpture and painting. “A stunning retrospective”.  Images are here.

Immaterial: Blankets and Quilts

Camille Dungay | Perspectives | 17th July 2024

The quilts made in Gee’s Bend in southern USA challenge conventional thinking about art. Quilters were not trying to make art works, just functional objects using worn out scraps of fabric, As they saw it, they made “pretty” (patterned) quilts or “ugly” (asymmetric) quilts. Further, unlike most artworks, these quilts were often made by a group of quilters, not a single artist. Eventually, though, they were hung in art museums, bringing the realisation that quilts, like art, can carry stories. “A quilt has many, many lives”.

The mysterious New York nanny who helped shape 20th-century street photography

Helen Stoilas | CNN | 24th June 2024

Meier’s story – the nanny with a secret passion for photography – is now well known. Does a first retrospective in the US reveal anything new about her images? Her skill at composition, her instinct for a telling detail, are evident throughout her work. Does that make her a ‘great’ street photographer like, say, Arbus? Some think so, but one writer notes that her “lifetime of anonymity persists in the work … she didn’t contribute anything uniquely her own. [Her best work] are her self-portraits”.

Old Master Encore

James Gardner | The Magazine Antiques | 7th June 2024

Lethière dodged the worst of the French Revolution, reached the pinnacle of the French art establishment, but is now mostly forgotten. A neoclassical painter, he created huge paintings that addressed conventional classical themes of love and death. One critic thinks he shows “occasional stodginess”. So why attempt a resurrection? Is it because, as someone born into slavery, Lethière suits our identity-obsessed times? Muses the writer, perhaps his real achievement was just proximity to the ruling elite.

16th July 2024

Bill Viola, artist and navigator, left a world drenched in beauty

Phillip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 13th July 2024

Viola saw earlier than most the artistic potential of video. Starting as an audiovisual assistant, he pioneered the development of video art, doing more than anyone to bring it into the cultural mainstream. He was especially interested in Old Masters works and their themes of life, death, love and spiritualism. Among his favoured techniques was slowing footage down to emphasise the passing of time. “Time and the unfolding of awareness is the real subject of a lot of old master paintings”, he said,

‘Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures’: Humanity and Otherworldliness in the Artist’s Late Work

Daniel Felsenthal | The Village Voice | 17th June 2024

If minimalism was all about the impersonal, pristine object, post-minimalism was an attempt to re-introduce emotional expressiveness. Using materials like latex and fibreglass, Hesse was a star of the movement. In one work, rubberised canvas was used to create “ghostly wrinkled bedsheets”. Other works “bear the curves, asymmetries, and blemishes of flesh, even if they aren’t figurative”. Sadly, her materials have become brittle and are now falling apart. As Hesse said, “life does not last, art does not last.”

The Eternal Youth of Yoshitomo Nara

Louisa Elderton | artnet news | 11th July 2024

One critic says Nara’s “simple cartoony/illustrative paintings … have a depth that is a match for any contemporary painter”. That’s bold. Several writers note that his child-like characters “teeter between innocence and defiance”, but what are the “profound emotional and social themes” that they illuminate? Perhaps this show will fare better in London but this writer seems sceptical: “Nara’s bold dynamism peters out … with later paintings marred with sentimentalism.” 

Arts and Sciences

Roberta J Olsen | The Magazine Antiques | 8th July 2024

Famous in ornithology, Audubon should also be regarded as America’s first great watercolourist. Self-taught, he reputedly was immune from the influence of other artists. A comparison of his work against Rembrandt and (particularly) the French artist Oudry, suggests otherwise. Yet he went further, showing the drama of movement amidst “the fierce beauty of the natural world.” Says the author, Audubon was “a nineteenth-century American Leonardo da Vinci, who married art and science.”

Jean Hélion goes against the grain

Itzhak Goldberg | Le Journal des Arts.fr | 15th April 2024

Language barriers deprive artists outside the Anglo-sphere – like Hélion – of due recognition. An early advocate of geometric abstraction in Paris, he helped introduce it to the US but then shifted to figuration. The critics thought his surrealism-influenced arrangements of figures “incongruous” and called his nudes “insipid”. Yet his final works of Paris street scenes are “climactic achievements”. Says a curator “The more we look at Hélion, the more his work seems immense,” Images are here. (Google translate)

How Images Make the Objects We Desire Seem Irresistible

Jesse Dorris | Aperture | 18th June 2024

Product photography first appeared in catalogues in the mid-1800’s. Those early images, compositionally influenced by the still life genre, exploited the “truth claim” of photographs. In 1920’s Paris, product photos expanded the “visual language” of modernism. And, by the 1940’s, the distinction between product photography and fine art photography had blurred completely. After more than a century of change, though, the challenge is still “what makes you pay attention?” Images are here.

Can the Museum Survive?

Richard J Evans | The New Republic | 1st July 2024

Is the debate about restitution turning into a museum “crisis”? Museums were a response to public curiosity about the “trophy art” arriving from newly colonised territories. Their social licence is now under attack, and not just because of restitution. Are these institutions obsessed with “identity politics”? Are they even necessary? Why not re-imagine them as cosmopolitan places where cross-nation cultural linkages can be explored. The British Museum, a bête noir in this debate, claims to be just that.

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