The Easel

24th March 2020

Schlock Sculpture

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 24th March 2020

Early 20th century modernist painting loosened its moorings to the literal, the figurative. Sculpture did likewise. While painting has periodically returned to its figurative roots, sculpture, in its materials and visual language, has sailed off into the pale blue yonder. Morgan Meis says we now face ‘schlock sculpture’ and – wait for it – ‘schlockiness’ has its virtues.

“The problem of sculpture became, for many of the great mid-20th-century sculptors, exactly that: the problem of sculpture. They are sculptures about being sculptures. They are trying to figure out ways to fit together and hold together … without falling back on the discarded language of figuration or architecture, or, really, anything at all. Smith’s sculpture … just is what it is. A sculpture trying to be a sculpture … This is what can make the experience of looking at a David Smith, or any other Modernist sculpture, mysterious to the point of bafflement.”

How Artist Brian Clarke Is Pushing the Medium of Stained Glass

Caroline Roux | Galerie | 10th March 2020

From his earliest days, Clarke set out to revolutionise stained glass. He has done so, taking it “out of the cathedral into the secular world”. Combining traditional glassblowing with modern architectural glass has eliminated the need for lead supports and created a contemporary art form “at the highest level of poetic achievement”. And he is not finished “I want to surpass the Middle Ages, not equal them.” A background piece is here.

Gloves: Through the Magnum Archive

Rosalind Jana | Magnum Photos | 26th January 2020

Fashion piece, social anthropology or photo essay? Perhaps all three. Gloves go way, way back – they were in Tutankhamen’s tomb. They are a source of some fascination in photography because of their potent symbolism – warmth, protection, glamour, the erotic. Plus, let’s be honest, status. “[A] white glove is only desirable when it’s pristine … [they] nod to the fact that one won’t be getting their hands too dirty”.

The Met’s Just-Opened Galleries Cast a New Light on British Decorative Arts

Ted Loos | 1stdibs | 8th March 2020

The renovated galleries for British decorative arts at New York’s Met are “a triumph”. What stories do they tell? One is that these objects reflect an entrepreneurial global power drawing inspiration from everywhere. But there are other narratives, notably colonization and slavery. Take, for example, the teapot: “tea has a far more illicit history than any drug or hard liquor … conditions on the plantations were shocking”.

James Turrell, Pace Gallery

Waldemar Januszczuk | Waldemar.tv | 9th March 2020

How best to characterise Turrell’s “immensely influential” work? “Turrell manipulates light” is a favourite phrase, though some writers get woefully obscure. The linked piece opts for just describing the sensory experience. “[A] visual geometry that pleasures the eyes. Is it merely a trick of the light that there’s something churchy about the experience? That the roundels have something of the rose window about them, that the alcoves feel whispery, like a chapel?”

Garden of Painterly Delights

Jenny Uglow | The New York Review of Books | 16th March 2020

A tiny exhibition in London perfectly suited to our collective pandemic moment. Artists seeking  refuge from the ghastly memories of WW1 turned to the ordinary household garden. For them it was a mythical Eden, “a source of … enduring healing power.” Such ideas may sound quaintly English, but they tap into a bigger thought: “to confront the world, we can still retreat to nature as a refuge and resource.”

How Léon Spilliaert’s dark paintings are strangely uplifting

Cath Pound | bbc.com | 19th March 2020

Léon Spilliaert is overshadowed by his Belgian compatriot James Ensor. Should he be? His early career yielded lonely self-portraits and nuanced seascapes. Then came a happy marriage and, it seems, fewer artistic fireworks. “Enigmatic works [that] inhabit a twilight netherworld between reality and dream” says this writer. Another is unconvinced: “an uneven, repetitious and limited artist”

10th March 2020

David Jenkins discovers the new Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain

David Jenkins | tatler | 6th March 2020

Expecting a short life, Beardsley worked feverishly. He took up art at 18, his sensual black and white drawings instantly brilliant. Book illustrations cemented his reputation, their erotic content showing “an attitude to lust and sex that even Egon Schiele is hard pressed to match.” Then death, at 25. There is no lasting Beardsley movement, just his images of “the overheated, decadent days … that were London’s febrile 1890s”

Against understanding

Sebastian Moll | Süddeutsche Zeitung | 4th March 2020

Richter is a skeptic. Perhaps this reflects his background – growing up with East Germany’s Socialist Realist aesthetic; and as a German, processing the memory of WWII. Some paintings begin with a photographic image which is then worked until virtually gone. Richter is, says one critic, the “greatest of living painters”. This writer offers a different perspective: “a master of indissoluble ambivalence”. (via Google Translate)

Alona Pardo on destabilising the myths surrounding masculinity

Diane Smyth | British Journal of Photography | 17th February 2020

This photography exhibition has produced an absolute torrent of commentary. Masculinity is cultural and learned from stereotypes – musclemen, athletes, soldiers, fathers. “Generalisations”, protest some reviewers. True, but that doesn’t deny that stereotypes exist or that they are influential. This writer concludes that we need an “emancipation of masculinity” The take of another critic is that men share an overlooked quality – vulnerability.

How ‘The Gates’ Triumphed Over New York’s NIMBYs

Kriston Capps | Citylab | 2nd March 2020

An appreciation of the 2005 The Gates project of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Bureaucrats initially declared it “the wrong project, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Fourteen years later it was realised. “The gates were … a live civic spectacle, proof that a vision could serve as a beacon to the public commons. Witnessing the gates as a visitor felt peaceful — even underwhelming. It was supposed to be.”

Piranesi Drawings: Visions of Antiquity

Sarah Vowles | theidlewoman | 19th February 2020

Unable to succeed as an architect, Piranesi chose instead to make prints of ancient Roman buildings. Tourists on the Grand Tour loved them, making him the 18th century’s “greatest printmaker”. Architecturally sensible images gradually became towering edifices that Piranesi imagined for ancient Rome. Perhaps their fantasy element explains their lingering influence, like inspiring sets on the Hollywood film Blade Runner.

What You Need to Know from the Art Market 2020 Report

Benjamin Sutton | Artsy | 5th March 2020

A key market report says that global art sales declined 6% in 2019, following a flat 2018. Auction sales fell a lot (fewer sales of the most expensive artworks) while online sales fell slightly. Sales by galleries and dealers nudged up, the biggest of them growing by a lot. Art fairs remain important. Women artists are (slowly) getting more exposure. A description of these data as “a strong plateau” sounds just a touch optimistic.

Peter the Great: Collector, Scholar, Artist. Moscow Kremlin Museums

Kamila Kociałkowska | Burlington Magazine | 5th March 2020

A story off the beaten track.  Apparently, the modern concept of a museum owes something to the reformist Czar, Peter the Great. Russia had accumulated treasure from war, diplomacy and trade deals. Appreciating that “power was a performance”, Peter put these treasures on public display. Pleased with the results he engaged in what would now be called curatorship. Then, as now, art has the potential to “brand national identity”. Images are here.

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