The Easel

6th October 2020

David Hockney’s Paintings Are World Renowned, But He Never Lost His Desire to Draw

David D’Arcy | Observer | 4th October 2020

While there may be some unevenness in Hockney’s overall output, when it comes to drawing he is a “master”. What jumps out from this current New York show is his variety – pencil, charcoal, Polaroid, iPad – the emotion he is able to convey about those he sketches, and an allegiance to the truth.  Enthuses one writer “the intensity of Hockney’s self-inspection, fag in mouth, bears comparison with Rembrandt.” Images are here.

The Later Work of Dorothea Tanning

Craig Morgan Teicher | The Paris Review | 1st October 2020

Art history’s coverage of Tanning is rather one dimensional. Recognition came more from her marriage to Max Ernst than her own “almost photo-realistic” surrealism. Beyond that, not much is said. In fact, she left surrealism behind. Her later works were “unprecedented creations as much about the paint itself as about what she painted. [She] accomplishes everything the abstract expressionists set out to do.” A recent biography is covered here.

Some of Edward Hopper’s Earliest Paintings Are Copies of Other Artists’ Work

Nora McGreevy | Smithsonianmag.com | 1st October 2020

New research has found that, in his formative years, Hopper copied the works of others. One curator concludes that this means he was not an “American original”. This sounds excessively critical – after all, Hopper’s enigmatic work helped define America’s sense of itself. More likely as a casualty is Hopper’s claim that his only formative influence was “myself”. “Young Hopper copied freely and regularly, which is to say, he learned to see.”

The Demolition of LACMA: Art Sacrificed to Architecture

Joseph Giovannini | The New York Review of Books | 2nd October 2020

Fierce controversy over the re-build of Los Angeles’ major museum stems from disagreements about how art should be displayed. The approved plan aims to avoid displays that are “Eurocentric” or that impose a “hierarchical narrative”. Opponents think the museum’s collection should provide context for items on display. An aggravation – the new plan diminishes gallery display space. The writer’s view: the plan is “a very expensive betrayal of the public trust”.

Four Museums Decided This Work Shouldn’t Be Shown. They’re Both Right and Wrong

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 1st November 2019

A Philip Guston show has been postponed because of fears that his anti-racist imagery may be misunderstood. Major art institutions are terrified of being caught in the swirling debate about racial equality. Have they “caved in” to groups wanting to dictate how art is interpreted? Protests the writer “Is art to be defined exclusively by ideology? We can’t reduce art to woke or not woke.”

Bubbles, sheiks and the freeport frenzy: Georgina Adam reflects on 30 years of art market reporting

Georgina Adam | The Art Newspaper | 30th September 2020

A cataloguing of the things that have changed. Extreme levels of wealth (and low interest rates) explain much, especially the prices paid for ‘trophy’ art. Tastes have shifted dramatically, as evidenced by declining enthusiasm for antiques. Contemporary art, a “minor specialist area” in 1990, has now “carried all before it”. Auction houses are now “totally corporate” and art is a commodity, judged on its asset characteristics.

Gregory Crewdson’s photos reveal melancholy and mystery in small-town America

Jacqui Palumbo | CNN | 30th September 2020

Crewdson specializes in constructed images – photographs where he creates many aspects of the image. This practice may sound like contemporary movie-making but actually has a history in photography going back to Victorian times. His current work, set in a “dreary post-industrial town”, exudes a sense of malaise.  Says one writer, his are “half-stories, with no prelude and no denouement”.

29th September 2020

The ‘Real’ Cindy Sherman

Laura Allsop | ArtReview | 20th September 2020

An avalanche of reviews of Sherman’s Paris retrospective mostly just state the obvious. This one does better. Of course her work explores identity, but is that all? For some of her characters -aging female socialites, for example – the use of disguise works to expose rather than conceal. “The whole range of injustices that age has imprinted on their faces and bodies suggest an underlying melancholy … you see [them] vulnerable and exposed.”

Goya and the art of survival

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 21st September 2020

Review of a new Goya biography. In his lengthy career as painter to the Bourbon court Goya produced admirable, naturalistic portraits. His modern appeal does not rest with these works but others “of blistering negativity”. The Disasters of War series depicts “universal depravity”. In his later Black Paintings Goya is the “tour guide to Hell”. Collectively, these are “a homing beacon for worried people in worlds that are subject to unpredictable changes”.

The fine line between art and pornography

Lizzie Enfield | bbc.com | 18th September 2020

What a quagmire! Female nudes were surely often intended as “soft porn for the [male] elite”. If not, why so few male nudes? Does that matter if the work has artistic merit? Where does that leave female viewers? Is the offence nudity or rather the stereotyping of women? Should dubious works be removed from museum walls, or is that censorship? “Compare Goya’s Naked Maja to a Playboy centrefold and tell me the line [with pornography] is not blurred.”

Lucie Rie from the Estate of Claire Frankel

Alison Britton | Phillips | 29th June 2020

The linked piece has great images of Rie’s work and this piece fills in some background. Fleeing Nazism, Rie arrived in London to find British ceramics in thrall to a sturdy, Japanese inflected style.  With her refined modernist sensibility, Rie was having none of that. Her elegant designs, vivid glazes and textured surfaces gradually overthrew the prevailing aesthetic and established a lexicon now synonymous with contemporary ceramics.

Matters Of Fact

Richard Kalina | Art in America | 25th September 2020

Bechtle was one of several important realist painters to come out of 1960’s San Francisco. A meticulous photo realist, he always worked from photos. While careful to borrow photography’s “veracity”, he still played painterly tricks with perceptions of scale and depth. “Bechtle grapples with serious issues of representation, but he does so in such a laboriously off-hand way that it takes a while for a viewer to realize what the artist is up to, and just how good he is.”

In Berlin, a retrospective of one of Germany’s most influential photographers

Daniel Berndt | Aperture | 28th September 2020

Schmidt started by photographing his Berlin neighbourhood. That style – factual, black and white images – stuck. He spent 25 years making images of the commonplace – “empty lots, murky puddles, distressed brickwork”. They reveal a Berlin trying to shrug off the burden of history. Schmidt was a “lodestar of postwar photography in Germany … unideological, [and his work] offers a rich vocabulary without being anecdotal.”

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