The Easel

8th December 2020

Interiors: hello from the living room

Alfred Mac Adam | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st November 2020

Interiors are a genre with enduring appeal. Images of a simple room with sparse adornments offer “the chaste harmony of geometry “. More often, we get entangled in a painting’s “psychology”. When everything is as it should be, do we infer a sense of security. When things seem a little odd, is it normal messiness or evidence of a crime? And, especially when darkness falls, “looking out or looking in … is charged with voyeurism.” More images are here.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye review – ‘she’s turned Tate Britain on its head’

Jonathon Jones | The Guardian | 2nd December 2020

Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects are fictitious, but compelling. Mostly young, black and good looking, they show a “black society … as it exist[s] unto itself”. Her work – all oils on canvas – is loaded with the conventions of portraiture and “painterly erudition”. One reviewer is a skeptic – “these pictures smoulder, but never ignite.” The consensus, though, is elsewhere – “in so many ways, she already is [a living old master]”.

Bruegel as cinema

Jackson Arn | Art in America | 1st December 2020

Despite its pretty contrasting of black trees against white snow, Bruegel’s masterpiece The Hunters portrays the bitter suffering of winter. Its mix of “longing and horror” has caught the attention of film directors. Film, like the painting, can deploy details that delight the eye yet leave the viewer with a tumult of emotion. However, no film has matched the painting’s ability to create a “sense of failure, of the lost meaning floating just out of reach”.

Peter Saul: “Crime and Punishment” at the New Museum, New York, NY

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 1st December 2020

Saul’s early works anticipated later trends in the art world. His crisp graphics are technically impressive. Yet he remains at the art world periphery, a consequence of his acrid focus on violence and mayhem. “The unrelenting nature of Saul’s vision … is, over the long haul, dulling. His [anti-authoritarian] commentaries … retain their vigour [but] the rest is one man’s unrelenting misanthropy—pre-digested, prettified, and taxidermied to perfection.”

Black Lives Matter ranked most influential in art in 2020

Torsten Landsberg | DW | 3rd December 2020

ArtReview’s Power 100 is something of an institution, so is reported widely. What do its rankings signify? Seemingly, it reflects those who made headlines recently, those who influence those who made headlines, plus some others. Few will be surprised that #blacklivesmatter gets top billing in 2020. With the other 99, it seems a reasonable summary of … well, headline makers.

Irina Antonova, legendary art historian who ran Moscow’s Pushkin Museum for 50 years

Staff | The British Journal | 2nd December 2020

Antonova arrived at a dilapidated Pushkin in 1945 and departed in 2013 having turned it into a major cultural institution. She persuaded conservative Soviet leaders to show modern art to Moscovites. Efforts to amalgamate The Hermitage’s fabulous Impressionist art into the Pushkin’s collection led to a rare defeat. Controversially, she kept an iron grip on German art taken during WW2, describing these holdings as “the price paid for remembering”.

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.”

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