The Easel

26th January 2021

The Gloopy Glory of Frank Auerbach’s Portraits

Jason Farago | The New York Times | 21st January 2021

A ‘national treasure in Britain, Auerbach gets few shows in New York. Given one though, critics there are wowed. One ponders the show’s “almost heroic dimension”, a reflection of Auerbach’s “obsession with the painterly stroke”. This writer marvels at the intense, condensed Auerbach gaze: A portrait of the artist’s wife “appears to be just a dense knot of thick golden strokes. You looked at someone for a whole year and saw … this?”

How El Anatsui Broke the Seal on Contemporary art

Julian Lucas | The New Yorker | 11th January 2021

Something of a career stocktake of this Ghanaian artist made famous by his bottletop sculptures. This novel raw material beguiles, but what exactly is his work – contemporary abstraction, a modern take of an ancient craft or some unclassifiable other? Some thought his wall sculptures were a flash in the pan. That’s certainly wrong. Bottlecaps, says Anatsui, have “more versatility than canvas and oil”.

Provenance of a Collection, the Torlonia Collection

Staff | Art and IP Law | 9th October 2020

The Torlonias are a noble Roman family who, for centuries, administered the Vatican’s finances. With their wealth they acquired ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, mainly from nobles fallen on hard times. It seems no superlative is too grand for their 500-year-old collection, largely unseen since WW2. It is about to go on show in Rome, following resolution of squabbles impenetrable to all but the locals. The Torlonia Foundation website is here.

Blockbuster Bloat

Jackson Arn | Art in America | 12th January 2021

When do we reach too much of a good thing? In 1980, Cindy Sherman launched her acclaimed performative photographs Untitled Film Stills. Are her new works just repeating the same ideas? Sherman has been “dulled by decades of A-list indulgence. As pictures have gotten smaller and nimbler, [her] art has gotten bulkier and slower, not to mention pricier. Sherman has become beholden to big-spender audiences who expect the same joke year after year.”

In Making Gavin Brown a Partner, Barbara Gladstone Is Betting That You Can Get Big and Still Think Small

Sarah Douglas | ARTnews | 17th December 2020

To understand the dramas being caused by mega-galleries, read this. Smallish New York gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, was superb at finding new artists but kept losing them to mega galleries. Largish Gladstone Gallery is renowned for looking after its artists but its founder is now in her 80’s. Their merger last year, a rare event, poses the question – can a gallery be viable without being a global selling machine? Many hope so.

Learn to mind your mannerism

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 17th January 2021

Not sure if this item belongs under ‘education’ or ‘fun’. Mannerists came after the Renaissance but before the Baroque. And it was all a bit odd – “a prison break [by artists] fed up with the rules laid down by heavily policed Renaissance”. The essay is a users guide to their various aesthetic crimes and peccadillos.

From Medicis to Mythologies: How Sandro Botticelli Became One of History’s Most Influential Artists

Angelica Villa | ARTnews | 25th January 2021

Coinciding with a Botticelli portrait coming to auction is this somewhat textbook-ish essay. The Medici’s patronage allowed Botticelli to tackle the more ambitious pictures that now underpin his reputation. Often these blended mythology, Christian parable and deft gestures to Florentine politics. Those politics were nothing if not volatile and, once the Medicis lost power, Botticelli reverted to stern medieval painting conventions.

5th January 2021

Lucas Cranach’s Gothic Carnality

Michael Glover | Hyperallergic | 11th April 2020

Centuries after his life in stern Northern Europe, Cranach remains influential. Central to this are his luminous female nudes. To promote Protestant morals, he made his women dangerous – slim, pale, erotic. They are timeless images of temptation and its consequences. Add his shimmering depiction of furs and jewelery and you have a “precursor to Klimt’s Viennese fantasies.” A virtual tour (17 min) is here.

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.”

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.”

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.

Li Zhengsheng : The Genius who photographed the Cultural Revolution

Jean Loh | The Eye of Photography | 6th June 2020

Li was a photographer on the main provincial newspaper during the Cultural Revolution. While covering political events he also recorded, secretly, mob hysteria and communal violence. This body of work constitutes a unique documentation of “the “loss of mind” of a whole nation”. Says one critic, the “most important Chinese documentary photographer of the twentieth century.” More images are here.

The meteoric rise of Angelica Kauffman RA

Jenny Uglow | Royal Academy | 2nd January 2021

This show calls Kauffmann a “superwoman and influencer”. Quite! Swiss born, she trained in Rome before moving to London. There, her insightful portraiture chimed with the new interest in “the ‘self’, in the gap between … face and heart”. Made a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, she subsequently returned to Rome wealthy and “the most famous female artist in the age of Enlightenment”. Images are here.

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.

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