The Easel

10th November 2020

Reality check: Sarah Sze brings AR to Fondation Cartier

Nick Compton | Wallpaper | 21st October 2020

Sze’s work is interesting and important, it’s just difficult to put into words. A Paris show comprises two big installations, each a whirl of found objects, bits of paper, projected images. What is the implied scale – are we looking at an explosion, an implosion or “drilling into the sub-atomic?” That uncertainty, it seems, is what Sze wants, a borderland between “interior and exterior worlds.” As she observes “When we dream, there is no real sense of scale”.

Haegue Yang: Strange Attractors, Tate St Ives, review: magical and thrillingly bold

Hettie Judah | iNews | 3rd November 2020

Yang makes genre-defying installations – sculptures on wheels, soundscapes, arrays of hanging venetian blinds. Some combine technology and craft elements. What’s the big unifying idea? Yang seems unlikely to provide one, thinking art is ““something to experience, not necessarily to understand”. Pondering Yang’s admiration for “loyal, supportive” domestic appliances, one writer speculates her art “represents a point of passage between human and non-human.”

Huguette Caland: A Movement of Her Own

Stephanie Bailey | Ocula | 21st August 2020

In 1970 Caland “bolted”, leaving her young family and Beirut to pursue art in Paris. The art she produced was as uninhibited as her life choices. She ranged across painting, sculpture and textiles, developing a voluptuous, “decidedly feminist” style. Discovered almost by accident in a Paris group show, she had her first solo museum exhibition in 2019, the year of her death.

“Jordan Casteel: Within Reach” at The New Museum, New York

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 1st November 2020

Young artists sometimes get “cradle snatched” by critics and the market. Casteel, 31, is a case in point. In the six years since her graduation, she can boast multiple solo shows, “enviable” sales and attention from critics. Is this too much acclaim for a young artist? Some think her work, mostly portraits, is conservative. The reviewer wonders whether Casteel is prescient or just trendy but doesn’t show his hand. “Let’s see where [she] takes us”.

This $22,000 Book Gives You An Extraordinary Look Inside The Sistine Chapel

Nicole Trilivas | Forbes | 30th October 2020

Advanced digital photography has been used to reproduce the Sistine Chapel’s glorious art in a book at 1:1 scale. Project details are impressive – five years’ work, 270,000 images, almost perfect colour fidelity, three large format volumes, each weighing 25lbs. Says the publisher “The idea is that the Sistine Chapel is one of the masterworks of western art [but] we can’t see it—because it’s 68 feet up”. It makes sense … if you ignore the price tag. A video is here.

Looking Back At The Legacy Of Modernist Mohamed Melehi, As A Way Forward

Beverley Pereira | Design Pataki | 1st November 2020

In the midst of a major touring retrospective of his work, Melehi has fallen victim to Covid19. After an initial education in Morocco, he trained in Europe and then New York. While in New York, he developed a highly coloured, hard-edged abstract style that won international recognition. Returning to Morocco Melehi’s pioneering wave motifs showed how modern abstraction could be infused with Berber culture and Arabic calligraphy.

3rd November 2020

JMW Turner: Narrating A Modern World

Edward Lucie-Smith | Artlyst | 29th October 2020

Turner, the Romantic, “enjoyed going to extremes”. Why paint a placid river when the tempestuous sea was available? Even better, the sea – which he painted hundreds of times – was diverse and changeable, a challenge to Turner’s “supreme energy”. Some of his watercolours seem prophetic – “like scribbles made by Jackson Pollock”. Not that he was trying to be prophetic; he was “making art for one primary audience – for himself,”

Having His Cake and Eating It, Too

Jessica Zack | Alta | 12th October 2020

Thiebaud is turning 100 and getting various celebratory shows. He still thinks his work is joyous, which it is. But it’s more. Very much the realist painter, he is attracted by colour and shape. Cakes, for example, offer a “nobility of abstract form: prisms and wedges, disks and cylinders”. Aspiring to emulate “heroes” like Morandi, his is a demanding style – “it’s actually almost ludicrous that anybody would do it”.

Tim Clark – interview: ‘This set of Hokusai’s drawings is a really important piece of the jigsaw’

Juliet Rix | Studio International | 30th October 2020

A newly uncovered set of Hokusai drawings shows that, well before Japan had opened itself to the world, he was a “world artist”. The drawings incorporate European ideas about perspective and use images from ancient China and India. Hokusai received commissions from the Dutch East India Company. Van Gogh was a huge fan. His human poses have a “fundamental humanism. People compare it to Rembrandt and I think that is a very good comparison.”

Death barge life

Colin Fleming | The Smart Set | 19th October 2020

When Géricault painted his epic The Raft of the Medusa in 1818, he wanted to raise his profile with a painting that shocked. He succeeded. What makes us, still, recoil from this huge work? The “gore shock value” of dead and dying on the drifting raft is only one part. “These people are all in various stages of fight and defeat. [They face] the challenge of endurance when hope is removed, and the human necessity to locate hope again”.

Art After the Plague

Ingrid Rowland | The American Scholar | 20th October 2020

Visions of death, inspired by history’s famous plagues. That most efficient of killers, the Black Death, is represented as “a gaunt, hollow-eyed woman”, wielding a scythe. A frescoe shows a cavalier on a “pale horse”, shooting diseased arrows. Poussin portrayed human chaos delivered by rats amidst Rome’s “serene architecture’. And Munch painted a hunched figure battling Spanish flu where “even the midnight sun cannot dispel the chill terror of death.”

Celia Paul Redefines the Artist’s Model

Rumaan Alam | The New Republic | 29th October 2020

A review of Celia Paul’s memoir, for once not smothered in Lucien Freud anecdotes. Portraiture is a central part of her work. “When Freud looked at Paul, she felt reduced; when Paul looks at her subjects, they are exalted. Her painting is not an act of close observation—she’s seen these people before—but some deeper communion with the person she’s aiming to fix on canvas.”

In defence of progressive deaccessioning

Glenn Adamson | Apollo | 26th October 2020

Amidst what seems an endless debate on deaccessioning, a pragmatic voice. Deaccessioning will happen if only because some museums need it to survive. More institutions, though, want to finance acquisitions that correct woefully lopsided collections. Critics point out that a few such acquisitions won’t correct past mistakes. True, but “no one believes undoing this legacy will be either quick or easy. The only way to begin is to begin.”

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