The Easel

29th October 2019

El Greco: The last great Renaissance master

Lara Marlowe | The Irish Times | 15th October 2019

Patrons are hard to come by. El Greco tried in Venice, Rome and Madrid before finally winning favour in religious Toledo. Contemporaries thought his style “incomprehensible” with its expressive distortions of form and colour. Having started Spain’s Golden Age of art, El Greco was quickly forgotten. One contributor to his belated rehabilitation – the young Picasso, via his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Images are here.

More than Mona Lisa: Louvre’s Leonardo da Vinci is a blockbuster with brains

Jonathon Jones | The Guardian | 22nd October 2019

This is “the great Leonardo show of our time”. Leonardo didn’t dabble – he was “striving for the most perfect form of painting”. Says one critic, he “erased the distinctions between art and ideas … the original conceptual artist”. More than a painter, Leonardo was a polymath, who could imagine distant futures. His workbooks have this writer “inwardly whooping with delight. You go, Leonardo!” An illuminating discussion of eight works is here.

Inside LA icon Betye Saar’s Laurel Canyon studio

Matt Stromberg | C Magazine | 24th October 2019

Joseph Cornell made his acclaimed assemblages from junk shop stuff. On seeing this work, Saar determined to do the same. In 1969 she made Black Girl’s Window, various images arranged inside an old window frame. A window frame? “That’s the protection for what’s inside.” Besides bringing her national attention, this work now seems a career signpost, “rescuing the black female figure from her destiny of abasement.”

August Sander’s Life Studies

Alex Halberstadt | MoMA Magazine | 23rd October 2019

Sander embarked on a 40 year photography project inspired by the daft theory that facial features predict character. His portraits of thousands of everyday Germans didn’t prove the theory. They do reveal Sander was an immensely insightful portraitist whose images “provoke feeling” and “humanize history”. They have profoundly influenced 20th century photography. Images are here and background video here.

Dissident Modernism Meets Peak Philanthropy at the New MoMA

William Smith | Art in America | 25th October 2019

Course correction. MoMA has conceded that it cannot present the tumult of modern art as a tidy process. Some think this long overdue change deserves no more than “a really slow clap and a really long eye roll.” A more generous take is that MoMA’s rehang of its collection achieves “an elegant but limited cosmopolitanism”. Perhaps more fresh thinking awaits. New MoMA ads state: “Make space for the new mistakes.”

‘If you can outlive most men, all of a sudden you can be venerated’ – an interview with Kiki Smith

Claire Barlaint | Apollo | 26th October 2019

Kiki Smith eludes the definitive statement. A self-described “thing maker”, she makes sculptures, prints, tapestries, photography and more. Her sources of inspiration are similarly various – “the overlooked detail of the everyday”. Perhaps Smith doesn’t want to be defined. She hesitated before putting colour in some recent tapestries – “Colour seems too personal, self-expressive to me – too scary.”

Nubia: The Kingdom and the Power

Sarah Fensom | Art and Antiques | 19th September 2019

History is owned by the storytellers. Without a written language to record their achievements the ancient Nubians have been presumed inferior to their Egyptian rivals. In fact, these cultures were equally accomplished. A major Boston collection, obtained a century ago, shows Nubia’s “glorious” achievement across gold, ceramics, sculpture and architecture. A discussion of Nubian art (5 min) is here.

22nd October 2019

Nam June Paik review

Eddie Frankel | Time Out | 15th October 2019

Anticipating the internet, as Paik did, clearly makes him a visionary. Further, with his often lighthearted works that combined electronics, engineering and what we now call IT, he pioneered the genre of video art. Some of his work was obvious but the best scintillating, foreshadowing that what he called the “electronic superhighway” would unleash a torrent of images and remake our culture.

MoMA’s Art Treasure, No Longer Buried

Roberta Smith | The New York Times | 17th October 2019

Reviews of the “new” MoMA are numerous and positive. Its much enlarged building is slick, a bit like an Apple store. Art by old white males is less dominant. Critically, MoMA has discarded its view of art history as an inevitable, cumulating sequence of art movements in London, Paris and New York. Great art, it now thinks, happens everywhere. “The museum could be on its way to its second round of greatness.”

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

Nancy Kay Turner | Riot Material | 9th October 2019

In 1970 Guston was an esteemed abstractionist – but he wanted out. He returned to figuration. His first show of that work caused such uproar that he fled to Rome. There he was prolific. Unflattering drawings of President Nixon; deliberately clumsy paintings of lumpy figures and lumpy objects. The paintings, now famous, have a human feel but are obscure. Guston agreed: “I look at my paintings, speculate about them. They baffle me, too.”

What lies beneath

Michael Prodger | New Statesman | 6th October 2019

There can be costs to being good at just one thing. Stubbs’ paintings of horses were of unparalleled anatomical accuracy and notable empathy. When he brought them to London he was a hit with wealthy horse owners. He liked their horses more than he liked them. They noticed. Britain’s greatest painter of the equine form was pidgeon-holed a “sporting painter”. Full membership of the Royal Academy was denied.

Who is Michael Jang?

Allie Haeusslein | British Journal of Photography | 18th October 2019

Three cheers for municipal arts programs. As a student, Jang’s hobby was street photography. This interest was crowded out as his career in commercial photography developed. Decades later, an astonished local art curator came across Jang’s early work, leading to exhibitions and, now, a monograph. Ever-modest, Jang thinks his work is dated, but then wonders “Maybe they’ll be like Twinkies and will last forever”. More images are here.

Where Is the Audience for Art Criticism Now?

Raphael Rubinstein | Art in America | 1st October 2019

Some puzzling about a subject dear to this editor’s heart – why is there so little good writing on art? Have (online) editors “given up on criticism”? Is the critic a doomed species in “a multi-voice universe”? Surely there is a healthy demand for good writing, particularly in the face of boundless online dross? And, the critic’s job spec is not unreasonable; “some insight … written in a distinctive and pleasurable style.”

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