The Easel

2nd March 2021

The Grand Tour and the Global Landscape

Tim Barringer | The Magazine Antiques | 1st March 2021

Wealthy young Britons in the 18th century were sent on the fabled Grand Tour of Italy to study ancient art and literature. They learned an idealized landscape – picturesque scenes that expressed “pleasure, power, ownership, and the extraction of value”. The British Empire took these ideas global and, well into the 20th century, landscape painting remained a “contest between the everyday and the ideal, of observed detail versus inherited form”.

A searing, all-star art show explores Black grief from the civil rights era to now

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 17th February 2021

A group show in New York, curated by the stellar Okwui Enwezor, considers racism in the US. Given the complexity of that issue, there is no single message, political or otherwise. Instead, the show is a meditation on grief in the face of anti-Black violence, an emotion that is private and “profoundly destabilizing”.  “An emblematic show” says the writer, combining “deep cultural tradition with a sense of immediate cultural crisis”.

When a museum feels like home

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 8th February 2021

An ode to New York’s Frick Collection and its riches. Frick, “insatiable”, was buying when European aristocrats were skint. He didn’t buy in depth, just “the simply superb—fantastic icing on not much cake”. In just one drawing room “two portraits by Titian, two by Holbein, and a Bellini … a potent El Greco, Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More” and “Thomas Cromwell”. But no nudes – Frick wanted dignity, “laundering the machinations of his avarice”.

A fresh vision for Pompeii as new director is appointed

Sabine Oezle | DW.com | 24th February 2021

In 2015, Italy hired a slew of foreigners to improve management of key cultural institutions. One of those appointees, a German archeologist, has now been promoted to manage the Pompeii archaeological site. Traditionalists are (again) affronted, protesting inexperience and the prospect of on-site digital displays, concerts and exhibitions. Meanwhile, the recent discovery of a ceremonial chariot at Pompeii is being called “unprecedented”.

Harvest of Nature

Cat Lachowskyj | Lensculture | 18th March 2020

Nettle has called some of her images “visual autobiography”, and you can see why. Layered, collaged images, made before Photoshop, tell stories about “family, motherhood, place”. Her determination to juggle an art career with the roles of wife and mother have given her career a fragmentary character. That has not stopped her “alternative photographic processes” being recognized as expanding photography’s vocabulary, especially its ability to convey mood.

A study in anguish preserved in Nazi-looted art

Kate Taylor | The Globe and Mail | 6th February 2021

The intricacies – and intimacies – of art restitution. Before WW2, two Dusseldorf Jewish families happily traded art works between themselves. One work ended up in a Canadian museum and has recently been restituted to one of the families. Now it seems the other family may also have a claim. With the museum and the families seemingly undecided about the next steps, title to the work is now tainted.

Folk art gets a proper pedestal at the MFA

Murray Whyte | The Boston Globe | 18th February 2021

Folk art is a more polite term than ‘outsider art’ but carries the same message – art that is “less”. A Boston museum is holding a dedicated exhibition, something of a “mea culpa” given its large holdings of these works. The art on show is a “rich terrain”. Some works are not signed, a problem for a market that only imparts value where there is a “brand”. Art outside the mainstream is confusing but “interesting … folk art is real, messy and maddeningly broad.”

23rd February 2021

Christie’s Auction House Will Now Accept Cryptocurrency

James Tarmy | Bloomberg | 18th February 2021

The above headline misses the point. Beeple is a popular digital artist whose images are each a digital file. Digital art is easily copied but if it is “published” to blockchain a verifiably original version can be created. For the art market, uniqueness means saleability. Spotting an opportunity to validate this artform, Christie’s will auction a Beeple work next week. Says Beeple “I don’t think people are fully recognizing that this is going to be a massive, massive shift”.

The self as cipher: Salman Toor’s narrative paintings

Ambika Trasi | Whitney Museum of American Art | 13th November 2020

New artists like Toor can struggle for recognition if (older) critics can’t describe a context for their work. This essay is a good example of how it can be done. The rise of “autobiography and memoir [in art] has likely been encouraged by social media. The “self” is formed through social constructs of gender, sexuality, and race. Being perceived by someone can be both liberating—to see an idea of you through someone else—but also really narrowing and debilitating.”

Why the Art World Is Embracing Craft

Glenn Adamson | Artsy | 13th January 2021

A 1969 survey show on American crafts “rebooted” respect for the handmade. A similar survey show, with new names, (review) has opened in celebration of that earlier event. It comes when craft is resurgent, especially in ceramics and fibre art. One piece of beadwork “communicates a nearly religious quality—a quality of wonder. Handwork provides a firm anchor … it gives us something to believe in. Art needs craft, and badly”

The typographic utopia of Tallone Editore

Antonio Carnevale | Conceptual Fine Arts | 22nd February 2021

Catnip for bibliophiles. Letterpress printing is now an artisanal process, affordable only for limited editions. Typeface characters, hand carved, are “little sculptures of thought”, their imperfections making the text “warmer”. Rare paper may be French (“Canson, the sublime one”), Italian or Japanese, while the ink should be “bright”, not “mournful”. Pages are cut and bound by hand. The end result – “small conquests of our civilization”. Videos are here.

Ansel Adams: the politics of natural space

Andy Grundberg | The New Criterion | 22nd February 2021

For a time, Ansel Adams was America’s most acclaimed photographer. What exactly was his aesthetic achievement? His images of pristine, majestic nature were not pathbreaking and nor were his technical achievements. Perhaps he was tapping into the Romantics idea of the wilderness as a “metaphor for heroic aspirations.” If so, the untouched frontier is now lost to us, making Adams images just “artifacts of a lost contentment.”

Chaïm Soutine: his best paintings

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 8th February 2021

Soutine doesn’t get many large exhibitions. That is surprising – he painted “some of the most touching and unmistakable art of the early 20th century”. Sitting outside the major movements of 1920’s Paris, his claim to fame is the “unrestrained expression of emotion” in his works, achieved with “thick, squidgy, excited paint”. Plus, an attitude to his subjects that can only be described as hungry – “like an aphid sucking at a leaf”.

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