The Easel

18th February 2025

Linder’s trailblazing work at the Hayward Gallery

Dada, the art movement that responded to WW1 horrors with absurdism, found a peerless exponent in Linder. Emerging in punk era Liverpool, her photomontages deliver a lethal view on consumer culture and identity. Yes, feminist issues have moved on since the battles of the 1970’s. Yet her images are so potent, using such an economy of elements that they still resonate. Says she “I find that my old montages feel like prophecy. My idea of voluptuous, overblown lips suddenly [has] been normalised”

Noah Davis at the Barbican: long overdue, emotional and timely

This “beautiful” retrospective speaks to unfulfilled potential. Davis died young, just as he found his painterly voice. Drawing on family photos and scenes from TV, he painted “impeccably composed” scenes of Black life. What sets them apart is their uncanny, “dream-like” quality. A man rides a unicorn. Figures, with blurry faces, are set in dreamy scenes. Yet his early death is omnipresent. Says one criticDavis is forever a young artist on his way … when everything seemed possible.”

Screaming in the Streets

A sympathetic review of Golden’s retrospective in Berlin, which features six of her renowned slideshows. They all touch on social issues such as drugs and AIDS and, despite constant re-editing, reflect the times in which they were initially made. They share a common core – autobiographically based statements about the human experience. Watching them, says the writer, is “hypnotic, thrilling, [Her friends don’t have jobs] of the 9 to 5 kind. Here, living is a spectacular form of work in itself”

Figures of the fool: from the Middle Ages to the Romantics

Art in the Middle Ages often included images of the fool. What did they mean? Around 1300, when art was essentially religious, the fool represented an absence of love for God. Later, fools were seen as buffoons and associated with the excesses of courtly life. By the mid 1500’s and Hieronymus Bosch, they had become an allegory for human imbecility. Only after that did they gain a darker association with mental illness. The linked piece sets this out in admirable detail, but a snappy review of the show is here.

Inside the Louvre Museum’s Breathtaking Debut Fashion Exhibition

Haute couture at the Louvre – and no, it’s not a fund raiser. Asserting that the museum’s vocation is “to present contemporary creation”, a curator asks why shouldn’t fashion be included? Couture masterworks have been paired with tapestries, furniture, silverware and armour, all displaying glorious craftsmanship. Some of the pairings have “uncanny” visual connections, especially where items in the Louvre inspired the particular design. For many fashion designers “the museum is the ultimate mood board”.

Revisiting Weegee in an epoch where image and illusion is king

Weegee made his name with dramatic, even lurid, images of New York crime scenes. Years later, he moved on to take celebrity portraits. He understood that images make events (and celebrities) newsworthy, and he thus was part of the spectacle creation process. Yet only his early work is acclaimed. This writer defends the later portraits as another way to demonstrate the power of images. Another critic demurs: while Weegee’s early work “pulses with life” his portraits were “puerile … a dead end”.

Donald Trump’s official portrait: The 17th Century painting that unlocks this mysterious image

Whether you like or dislike Donald Trump, his official portrait is a startling visual image. Portraits of leaders (including Trump’s own portrait in 2016) usually communicate “openness and affability” and usually are forgettable. In contrast, this new image has a “piercing intensity of expression and … aggressiveness of gaze”. The “crepuscular light” and the subject’s “severe, asymmetrical squint” are chosen for maximum effect. “We really need a new word. “Trumpant” will do.”

11th February 2025

Weaving a language beyond abstraction: Olga de Amaral in Paris

Despite having been a pioneer in fiber art for decades, de Amaral has received limited recognition. A “revelatory”, first-ever show in Paris might change that. Combining a modernist feel with pre-Columbian motifs, her work is hugely diverse– in materials, different weaving and knotting techniques, and in forms that span the architectural, three-dimensional, monumental and abstract.  One critic calls the show “the monographic exhibition of [2024], regardless of medium”. A video (6 min) is here

From kitchen wall to the Louvre: Cimabue show sheds new light on ‘father of Western painting’

In his 1550 book on art history, Vasari credited the Florentine artist Giotto with initiating the shift toward naturalistic painting. However, new evidence suggests that Giotto’s peer Cimabue deserves credit for this monumental shift. The change in thinking owes much to the recent discovery of a Cimabue work in a French kitchen. The Louvre claims that the painting and another recently restored Cimabue work, are together the “founding acts of Western painting” where it broke away from Byzantine iconography.

Nature’s Emissary

Surprisingly, this is Friedrich’s first US retrospective. His acclaimed Germanic landscapes, often painted at dawn or dusk, depict figures facing away from the viewer, contemplating “the empowering essence of nature”. Romanticism was all about the feelings of an individual and Friedrich’s landscapes spoke eloquently to that. As one critic expresses it, his was an “art of experience, in which what you feel has primacy over what you see”.

Etel Adnan Captured the Light of Many Suns

Before her painting career, Adnan was a successful writer. Little surprise, then, that her paintings are sometimes referred to as ‘tone poems’. Her multicultural early life in Lebanon and Paris gave her art an “ambiguous sense of place”. Exuberant colours and abstract shapes impart a modernist feel to her paintings while her tapestries summon associations with Middle Eastern kilim rugs. Out of that cultural multiplicity, says one critic, Adnan offers “the possibility of another world”.

There: a Feeling | Gregg Bordowitz

Maybe some art just doesn’t suit the written review. Bordowitz is cerebral – artist, writer, filmmaker, activist – with a wide-ranging oeuvre that, starting with the 1980’s AIDS crisis, addresses survival. Yet, reviewers need to spend paragraphs explaining specific works. This art isn’t easy. One critic calls Bordowitz “influential”. Impressive, but this writer struggles with works that are “fleeting … always contingent on something unseen”. Perhaps you just have to be there …

What Is AI Art?

Is this essay substantive or frivolous? Taking the former view, it’s a survey of active AI artists and describes different ways artists are using AI capabilities. The temptation is great, though, to take the frivolous view. Auction house revenues are way down, and AI art is one way to boost sales. Absent from the article is any art criticism, implying that AI art is primarily a novelty. Christie’s claims (hopes) otherwise. Trills one executive, “AI technology is undoubtedly the future”.

I love bird-watching and art. Here’s my gallery guide to doing both at once

In the many years of this newsletter, no-one has ever written about bird-watching and art – until now. Subscribers who are bird-watchers will presumably thrill at this recognition of their hobby. For the rest of us, it’s a chance to learn about the symbolism that birds add to a painting. Goldfinches, with their red colouring, prefigure Jesus’ bloody death. Magpies were thought to be “the bird of death”. And Hieronymus Bosch used owls as a symbol of the Devil. There, birds have added something to your day!