The Easel

16th February 2021

Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective

Staff | Hungarian National Gallery | 14th October 2020

Scully’s most acclaimed paintings depict richly coloured blocks and stripes. Those colours, plus Scully’s gestural painting style, give a sense of “geological compression” that makes the works seem both new and old. Scully says he is aiming for abstraction that is “more expressive and that relates to the world in which we live”. Most reviews of this show are truly horrible, some almost unreadable. The linked piece is okay – just – but does have great images.

Irving Penn: Photographism @Pace

Richard Woodward | Collector Daily | 2nd February 2021

From quite early, Penn showed that commercial photography could merge into art. Clearly, his early training to be a painter shaped his modernist aesthetic. But what magic did he bring to photography? An ability to balance “allurement with revulsion”? The graphic quality of many of his images? Perhaps the timelessness of his images reflects the lessons he derived from great painting and sculpture – “simplicity, rigor, wit, elegance”.

Man Ray’s Subtle Surrealistic Genius Women

Benjamin Blake Evemy | MutualArt | 12th February 2021

Man Ray left painting for photography only to keep striving for photography’s “painterly potential”. Surrealism’s ideas about paradoxical imagery were thus bound to appeal. Did he produce “stunning works of visual art”? He certainly expanded the boundaries of photography and created some memorable images. However, Ray’s work did nothing to prevent surrealism’s decline and, to modern eyes, his images seem overly full of young nude studio assistants.

Rembrandt and slavery: did the great painter have links to this abhorrent trade?

Jonathon Jones | The Guardian | 9th February 2021

The prosperity of Holland’s Golden Age was built on global trade and … slavery. A new exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum highlights this link and, controversially, includes works by Rembrandt. He did not participate in the slave trade but did paint portraits of those who were. Perhaps his moral unease can be seen in those works. A century later, when Britain controlled the slave trade, the same tainted windfall came the way of Gainsborough.

When the Painting Has Really Begun

Barry Schwabsky | The Nation | 19th January 2021

Between the fireworks of a newly launched artist and the insights of the veteran is the “amorphous phase” of mid-career. The two artists reviewed have approached it differently. One has changed her style and then, after a decade or so, changed back. Another has been more consistent to her impulsive abstract style. Both approaches have worked because mid-career has brought “a deeper vulnerability [and] in that vulnerability is strength.”

9th February 2021

Gordon Parks: Beautiful photos of an ugly history

Andrew Dickson | bbc.com | 4th February 2021

There are two sides to Parks’ photography. One was the chronicling of civil rights protests. Those images focus on individuals rather than scenes of conflict and show, in a way that still resonates, what it means to be black and American. His other side showed when Parks “allowed his poet’s eye to roam”. These images show “the ambiguity and complications of reality, genuine people … You just see a lot of beauty in these pictures, always beauty.”

A Close Look at Henri Matisse’s Bather

Michelle Kuo and Anny Aviram | MoMA Magazine | 21st January 2021

Forensic. Matisse wanted his paintings to appear spontaneous -and he wanted to use flat planes of colour. That meant working “exhaustingly” to communicate volume, movement, sensation. In Bather (1909) you can see “the drawings are done with force and how he’s layering the paint. Areas alternate between matte and glossy, thickly worked paint to convey an astonishing range of volume and light and hue. This was an opportunity for him to … go for broke.”

Joyce Pensato

Joanna Fateman | 4Columns | 5th February 2021

Bored with drawing fruit in still life classes, Pensato instead chose cartoon characters. Suddenly, sweet Disney originals, became charcoal-heavy figures with “malevolent” feelings. It proved her artistic liberation. Her characteristic style emerged – portraiture, done in an exaggerated abstract expressionist style that spoke to “the appeal and toxicity of Americana”. Said one critic “Pensato’s work is a jolt of manic energy … a kind that can’t be faked”.

Fabric Cybernetics

Samuel Goff | Tribune | 23rd August 2020

Textilemaking was deemed unimportant in Cold War Russia and thus less closely scrutinized. The designer Anna Andreeva used this to return to Constructivism, an art movement banned by Stalin in the 1920’s. Her striking designs, a marriage of “Constructivism, op art, and mathematical algorithms” went into both mass-market textiles and commissions for the elite. With her private archive now opened, expect some post-Covid shows. Images are here.

Deaccessioning Empire

Coco Fusco | The New York Review of Books | 25th February 2021

Restitution of colonial-era artifacts is a familiar topic. Now, authoritative books have appeared that will add yet more fuel to the debate. Research leaves little doubt that these artifacts often have sordid origins. Refusal by European and British museums to restitute looks increasingly like “the unfinished business of imperialism”, the equivalent of asserting “Western superiority”. Surely there is only one way that this issue is going to be resolved.

The Artist Disappears

Christine Smallwood | Harper's | 1st February 2021

Helen Frankenthaler’s contribution to abstract expressionism was important. So, a major biography is deserved. The criticism that has dogged her is that she was “insufficiently ambitious”, her paintings too “decorative”. This biography offers a defense which seems only partially successful. The reviewer’s conclusion – this book is “less a biography than a work of [mere detailed description]”.

Burning Cole

James Panero | The New Criterion | 8th February 2021

Temporarily ungated. Cole inspired the landscapists of the Hudson River School. Therein lies a paradox. Those artists, most notably Frederic Church, painted what they saw, allowing nature to “speak for itself”. Cole didn’t. He was anxious that progress would despoil the sacred wilderness and impose a human cost. He conscripted his paintings in support of such ideas. “His compositions were both allegories and real places … science and fiction in equal measure.”

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