The Easel

1st December 2020

The Re-Education of the Museum of Fine Arts

Kyle Paoletta | Boston | 2nd November 2020

The august MFA Boston, with its “Eurocentric artistic sensibility”, is facing claims of racial bias and insensitivity. Criticisms range widely – the display of looted artifacts, where artworks are displayed, staff unaware of community context. Collectively, these claims challenge the institution’s concept of itself. Acknowledges one museum executive, “for a long time we thought that museums in general were in this academic safe space”. Not at all.

One of the greatest of all outsider artists: Alfred Wallis at Kettle’s Yard reviewed

Martin Gayford | The Spectator | 31st October 2020

Wallis was oblivious to any modest artistic reputation he had. He painted just for companionship, using a limited palette – “shiny blacks, fierce greys, strange whites” and paying little regard to perspective. Two London artists discovered him by chance. Dissatisfied by art’s “decadence”, they saw in Wallis not an eccentric but an authentic modernist. What is it that gives his paintings their directness and subtlety? “More was going on in his mind than we’ll ever know.”

Celebrated photographer Dawoud Bey, retrospective opens at the High Museum

Rosalind Bentley | Atlanta Journal-Constitution | 11th November 2020

Bey’s first-ever visit to a museum left him thinking that such institutions excluded black Americans. His career has helped change that through his “magnificent” portrait photography. He has a trademark style – the relaxed demeanor of his subjects, his empathetic view, the “richness of black lives”. Says a curator “He is emphasizing the power of representation and … really, the act of being seen is a political act.”

Stanford White’s surfaces

Michael Lewis | The New Criterion | 1st December 2020

Lovely appreciation of Stanford White, the American architect. High Victorian buildings of the 1860s – 70s emphasised their structural components. White, in contrast, bestowed on his buildings an “elegant repose”. Visible structural elements were merely “playful garnishes”. White’s buildings were “nothing more than an assembly of surfaces, waiting to be gorgeously painted … the most beautiful architectural surfaces that America has created.”

Transformed by crisis, arts criticism may never be the same. And that’s a good thing

Philip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 29th November 2020

With most galleries closed, the arts economy is being devastated. Will art criticism also decline? The writer is surprisingly upbeat. Without the schedule of new shows to cover, he is spending more time thinking about what matters. “I feel far more free to like things without permission. … perhaps that will be the essence of after-pandemic criticism. More personal, more to the point, more empathetic, more open and less formulaic.”

Joan Mitchell in Another Dimension

Patricia Albers | Phillips | 7th November 2020

From Joan Mitchell’s biographer, an appreciation of two paintings. The first, from 1953, is a restrained construction of some remembered image. A second work, from 1979, is more exuberant, probably a garden scene. Mitchell had no time for the frenzied painting style of some Abstract Expressionists. She worked with great deliberation to harmonise assertive brushwork and vibrant colours. She emphasised “I don’t close my eyes and hope for the best.”

24th November 2020

The Metropolitan Museum at a Hundred and Fifty

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 23rd November 2020

After a lengthy shutdown, the Met’s 150th anniversary show has re-opened. One reviewer states the obvious – it is the world’s best encyclopaedic museum. The linked piece is a more personal reaction. “Starchy conservatism” has weakened some areas but accommodated superb collections elsewhere, like decorative arts. The result is a “levelling effect … a relative deflation of major art, as a consequence of [paintings] having been made to compete.”

Dana Schutz: Shadow of a Cloud Moving Slowly

Joe Lloyd | Studio International | 2nd October 2020

Schutz was embroiled in a fierce 2017 controversy over her painting of the black victim of racial violence. That experience seems not to have hindered her art. New paintings portray grotesque “uglies” in lurid colour, some engaged in frenzied action. These are works that provide information but seem to want the viewer to “finish the painting”. To summarise this complex work, the reviewer clutches at a phrase – “grotesque realism”.

Toulouse-Lautrec and the Masters of Montmartre

Anna McNay | Studio International | 18th November 2020

Posters perfectly suited an urbanizing Paris with its cabaret entertainments and new department stores. Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec were but two artists to see an opportunity for cash and public exposure. However, the explosive growth of posters was due to more than a few exceptional artists. They were seen as democratic, an expression of street culture, art of “the best kind, mixed in with life, art without any bluffing or boasting”.

The Secret of the Unicorn Tapestries

Danielle Oteri | The Paris Review | 18th November 2020

Woven around 1500, the Unicorn Tapestries are one of the world’s greatest artworks. Seven tapestries in all, each at least 12 feet square and woven in wool, silk and metal thread, they display medieval mythology in sumptuous detail. Uncertainty about meaning only adds to their appeal. Perhaps the celebration of a marriage, or training aids for French courtiers? “It is alluring and elusive like the unicorn itself”. A Met video (30 min) is here.

A New Book Traces the Global Origins of Abstract Art

Marley Marius | Vogue | 13th November 2020

In the 1950’s, abstraction was seen not just as another art movement, but art’s most perfect expression. That view is now discredited. So, how do we make sense of abstract art? A new book argues that it is based on our experience of the real world – bodies, landscapes, the cosmos. If we are truthful, we should admit there is no such thing as pure form: “abstraction is a form of representation.”

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