The Easel

14th April 2020

What Alexander Calder Understood About Joy

Rachel Corbett | The Atlantic | 1st May 2020

Having moved to Paris, Calder started his art-making with some unusual pieces – miniature model circuses. Playful, yes, but not trivial. Calder’s biographer reasons that they were an “experiment in spatial relations”. Soon after came wire sculptures and then the mobile, the fullest expression of Calder’s artistic vision, “an art not of isolated or singular objects but of a dialogue between objects”.

(Morgan Meis will be interviewing Jed Perl about his Calder biography next month. – Ed)

Art is a collective experience. It’s also a deeply private one

Phillip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 9th April 2020

Gallery openings and art fairs offer collective enjoyment of art. Now this is off limits there is an opportunity to focus on “pleasures we cultivate in isolation”. One part of this is awareness of our “isolation and smallness in a grandly scaled universe”. This “fundamentally private” insight can be learned in a crowd “but you can also learn it alone, and there’s no time like the present”.

The Dizzying Experience of Visiting Virtual Museums

Sophie Haigney | Art in America | 1st April 2020

Humorous stumblings around Google Arts & Culture during lockdown. “If you press a single arrow key long enough, you can set a gallery to spinning like a top. [In] the Uffizi in Florence, I kept having a problem centering myself, so I would slam into windows like a confused bird. Still, if you accept that a Google Arts & Culture tour is nothing like walking through a museum, it has its own strange pleasures.”

The architectural tragedy of the 2019 Notre-Dame fire

Kevin Murphy | OUPblog | 25th February 2020

An interesting update. A year ago this week, fire ravaged Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral. Work since has revealed how little of the structure is truly original. Does this change the dilemma facing the project – faithful restoration versus modern adaptation? Perhaps, suggests the writer, there is no choice: “[R]estoring a work of architecture [may mean] giving it an imagined completeness which may never have existed.”

Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field 1948-1958

Joe Lloyd | Studio International | 30th March 2020

Starting out in Rio de Janeiro, Clark was a figurative painter. Tuition from Ferdinand Leger during a sojourn in Paris changed all that. What Clark responded to most was not his Cubism but his instinct for geometric shapes. Geometric abstraction quickly became her signature style, a style increasingly devoid of colour. Observing her stark shapes, she famously said “What I seek is to compose a space”.

Bamboo crafts: Woven into Japan’s art history

Matthew Larking | The Japan Times | 26th February 2020

Eye candy. Bamboo weaving is a centuries-old tradition in Japan, rooted in the crafts of basket weaving and utensil making. The early 1920’s saw local craftsmen begin to explore more refined, aesthetic forms. Excitement has grown among Western collectors in just the last few decades but greater recognition in Japan is happening only slowly. Images (2 min) are here.

Weegee: Photos of a seedy underworld

Oliver Lunn | bbc.com | 4th March 2020

The New York tabloids had a saying: “if it bleeds it leads”. Weegee’s sensational images for these clients brought him renown. What sets his photography apart is an evident empathy for those who lived in New York’s teeming tenements. It allowed his images to tell a bigger, human story which is his legacy. One follower was Diane Arbus: “[they] occupy some of the same mental space – the underworld, the real fringe people”. A video (8 min) is here.

7th April 2020

Discovering magic in the mundane with Daidō Moriyama, Japan’s street photography godfather

Miss Rosen | Document | 28th January 2020

A major exhibition of Moriyama’s work has been cancelled. Images from that show are here and the linked piece is a recent assessment of his work. Moriyama declares that photography is “simply copying” but then admits “as a photographer, I make discoveries”. Often, those discoveries are the beauty to be found in gritty urban life. Cumulatively, his prolific output amounts to a “eulogy to the intense state of modern life.”

Bubonic plague in Europe changed art history. Why coronavirus could do the same

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 29th March 2020

While Jerry Saltz (below) anguishes about galleries and artists, Knight wonders how the pandemic will impact art. Giotto blazed a path away from stilted Byzantine iconography. With the Black Death in 1347, his revolution stopped. Art retreated to the familiar. Survivors of the pestilence carried feelings of guilt and saw religion differently. Covid 19 may be a similar catalyst: “Fear, guilt and spiritual upheaval await.”

Andy Warhol, Tate Modern

Waldemar Januszczuk | Waldemar.tv | 6th April 2020

Yet another Warhol show! A few critics are enthused but this writer’s verdict, a “jerky driftospective”, is hardly surprising. The diversity of Warhol’s output – photography, printmaking, painting, film – poses a curatorial challenge. Still, its hard not to agree that we need a “a deep and proper assessment of Warhol’s achievements, mounted with wisdom. A just released virtual tour of the exhibition (6 min) is here.

Above It All

John Dorfman | Art and Antiques | 15th February 2020

Italian Futurists worshiped speed, and the machines that produced it. They dreamed of an Italy driven by technology, and it showed in their art. These ideas were influential in Europe and at home won a key admirer – Mussolini. With their imagery of “masculine military power”, were they complicit in the “aestheticization of war”? Only some, but enough to hinder recognition of Italy’s most influential art movement.

Artemisia Gentileschi: the artist who grabbed life by the throat

Claudia Pritchard | iNews | 25th March 2020

Gentileschi’s profile has risen abruptly as major institutions redress their neglect of female artists and many find that her life story resonates with #metoo. Stylistically influenced by both her father and Caravaggio, the celebrated psychological intensity of Gentileschi’s works is uniquely hers. They “pulsate with honesty, meticulous observation and a sense of what it is to be a woman” – the Baroque’s first proto feminist.

Hospital paintings and the art of healing

Michael Prodger | New Statesman | 1st April 2020

Doctors focus on the body while art prioritises the soul. Pre-Renaissance art tried to provide “edification of the sick”, featuring religious themes like mortality, forgiveness, redemption. By the eighteenth century, art was empathetic because illness was seen as part of the human condition. Art in today’s hospitals is determinedly cheerful – optimism is good for our health.

The Last Days of the Art World … and Perhaps the First Days of a New One

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 2nd April 2020

This “true believer” has bleak expectations about the coming art world. “Most galleries don’t have cash reserves to go through a lockdown of six months.” Some art schools will close and, with them, teaching jobs for artists. Museums without large endowments will struggle, art fairs will disappear, and writing about art will shrink further. “How to survive? Passion. Obsession. Desire.”

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