The Easel

6th August 2019

On Excavation: The Paintings of Mark Bradford

John Vincler | The Paris Review | 31st July 2019

Bradford says some of his abstract works start as a kind of map and “on top of it I lay art history and my imagination”. His works combine painting and collage, the thick surfaces then sanded back to reveal their multiple layers. It’s a kind of excavation, just as looking at art involves “a subtle excavation: we sift through associations and memories [attempting] to move from our own experience more fully into the space of the artwork”.

The variegated symbolism of gardens in art

JWSW | The Economist | 1st August 2019

Everyone enjoys a garden. A Berlin show intrudes on such happy thoughts, suggesting gardens have a “rich metaphoric ambiguity”. Tranquility is achieved by the exclusion of others. The ubiquitous lawn is “imperious in its consumption of space and resources”, troubling at a time of climate change. Gardens show how humans see their place in nature, for better or for worse.

Ilya Repin’s Art and Construction of Russian-ness

Yulia Savikovskaya | Russian Art and Culture | 25th July 2019

Often absent from Western art history books, Repin is a central figure in Russian art. A nineteenth century social realist, his astute portraits of Russian luminaries are acclaimed and his genre paintings of late-Tsarist life even more so. These works have influenced “contemporary Russians’ perception of themselves … [helping to answer] the question of what Russianness means”.

An Indian Master of Fiber, Clay, and Bronze

Sharmistha Ray | Hyperallergic | 20th July 2019

Sheer originality puts Mukherjee in “a class of her own”. Inspired by Indian temple carvings, she made sculptures from hemp that she knotted to create three-dimensionality. Despite the humble material, these works have a “modernist formalism” that places them outside Indian art traditions. One critic gushes “one of the most arresting museum experiences of the season … an astonishment.” A video (4 min) is here.

Where Women Outpace Men in the Market

Michael Klein | Art Agency Partners | 1st August 2019

A recent Easel essay highlighted the low prices for works by female artists. Is that beginning to change? Recent auction prices of works by women have risen faster than for men, a marked change from “the last 50 years”. Still, over 90% of auction revenues come from works by male artists so they “need not fear a drastic loss of market share to female artists anytime soon”.

It Ought to Be Gothick

Witold Rybczynski | The American Interest | 26th July 2019

Debate rages over Notre Dame cathedral. Some, viewing it like an artwork, demand faithful replication. However, conventions about treating damaged art vary. Sculptures usually don’t get repaired whereas paintings do. Anyway, Notre Dame has mixed design elements resulting from multiple constructions. Overall, tepid support for the view that “whatever its exact design, it ought to be Gothic.”

Adversarial Art Worlds: A Report from Christie’s Art + Tech Summit

Mike Pepi | Art in America | 25th July 2019

Maybe the revolution of algorithm art is less than imminent. Google likes the idea of AI art because it helps “humanize” AI. However, their engineers are not interested in claiming authorship of AI paintings. For them, art is just more data. That’s a problem. Christie’s – indeed, all the art world – sees “the hand of the artist” as paramount. “Christie’s thrives on scarcity. Google does not.”

30th July 2019

Pining for the Moon

Josephine Livingstone | The New Republic | 11th July 2019

Galileo drew the first detailed map of the moon in 1609. Four centuries of study later and the moon has lost most of its mystery. It is completely familiar. What it has not lost is its ability to evoke a sense of romance. On the anniversary of the moon landing, this exhibition of moon-related art and photography is surely the most resonant – and inevitable – of the year.

In memoriam: Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923-2019)

TF Chan | Wallpaper | 29th July 2019

Colour, Cruz-Diez realized, is unstable. His influential career was spent making works in which colour changes with the viewer’s position and the surrounding light. Collectively they deal with a central preoccupation of modern art – how we perceive. “[Colours] are permanently in the process of becoming. This work is not happening in the past. It is forever in the present.” Images are here.

Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing

Louise Clarke | Studio International | 29th July 2019

Da Vinci’s impatience is revealed by his output – fewer than 20 completed paintings but many thousands of pages of drawings. Few projects came to fruition, so the drawings are a record of his thinking. They show what we all know – his art reflected a scientific mind. One of the last drawings he did, of an old man, also reveals his humanity: “He redraws this old man’s nose again and again no longer sure of himself.”

‘It’s Just the Beginning’: Art World Responds to Warren B. Kanders’s Resignation from Whitney Board

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 26th July 2019

A Whitney Museum board member has resigned amid protests about his company’s production of tear gas. There is an ongoing campaign to refuse philanthropy from the Sackler family. Are these two controversies comparable? Have events at the Whitney strengthened institutional “morality”? One critic notes “the idea of moral purity in the arts is a fantasy”; another thinks more such conflicts are to come.

Curator Clare Lilley on David Smith

Clare Lilley | Hauser and Wirth | 20th July 2019

Seeing photographs of some Picasso metal sculptures was, for Smith, an epiphany. He went on to explore metal sculpture in a body of work that “had no precedent”. Like a collagist, “material determined imagery”, and Smith used “tools, off-cuts, boiler lids, waste and bought steel” to create works with a strong human narrative. At his funeral he was described as “delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck”.

Unvarnished Truths

George Bisacca | The Brooklyn Rail | 30th July 2019

All artworks deteriorate. Conservation is thus a “necessary evil”. Colours can fade or shrink as they age: varnishes can lose transparency. Modern artists, trying for visual impact, sometimes use materials with “unresolvable” problems. Which approach best respects a work and its artist – “a hygienic interest in the object [or] an aesthetic interest in the image.”?

Always the Model, Never the Artist

Madison Mainwaring | The Paris Review | 24th July 2019

A review angry at Morisot’s “erasure” from the Impressionist story. Besides being technically bold, Morisot uniquely celebrated feminine life and domesticity. “She killed the aesthetic in which women had for so long been “immortalized” as art.” Whether Paris’s Musée d’Orsay (which focuses on Impressionism) has worked hard enough to correct this erasure remains unclear. More images are here.

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