The Easel

9th March 2021

The X-ed out world of KAWS

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 8th March 2021

Most critics hate the new KAWS exhibition. Why exactly? He can claim Pop art forebears – Warhol, for example, with his “conflations of fine art with demotic culture”. Or Koons, whose kitsch sculptures are “formally consummate … fantastically seductive”. The problem with KAWS is “the objects don’t feel motivated as art. They are aggressively ineloquent … like a diet of celery, which is said to consume more calories in the chewing than it provides to digestion”.

How Piet Mondrian’s abstractions became a new way to see the world

Tessa Solomon | Art in America | 5th March 2021

Mondrian believed his art would enlighten the world, a moment he waited for in vain. Cubism helped him abandon figuration but his belief in pure abstraction led him beyond cubism to his mature style, dimensionless black line grids and primary colours. These days, few believe in Mondrian’s ideas of perfectibility, yet his appeal endures through the “cerebral beauty” of his abstractions, notably his vision of Manhattan as the “ideal city”.

What’s next for art: a boom in drawing, experts fight back – and a reborn party scene?

Alastair Sooke | The Telegraph | 8th March 2021

With some light at the end of the Covid tunnel, what’s next for art? Blockbuster exhibitions will return only after confidence in travel has been restored. So, for now, few art fairs, less “profligate frolicking” (sob) and a greater emphasis on the local. Boring? Hopefully not – crises stimulate new ways of thinking, so new art may flourish. Whatever the new normal, it will be less “splashy … [and will] drive for authenticity and emotional resonance”. Well, maybe.

The Group of Seven Doesn’t Define Canadian Art

Tatum Dooley | The Walrus | 19th February 2021

The brightly coloured landscapes of Canada’s Group of Seven artists helped forge a national identity. Their popularity endures but is this inheritance a limiting one? It was a men-only group who benefitted from a “relentless” campaign that put their work “in every classroom, every bank”. Indigenous people are invisible in their work. “The time has come to give other, contemporary voices the same opportunities … a new zeitgeist must form”.

Pioneering Women

Grant Gibson | The Design Edit | 9th February 2021

Studio ceramics boasts few women luminaries like Lucie Rie. Recent auction results suggest other women may soon join her. Is gender a factor here? Maybe – the practical, sometimes rough hewn pieces of Bernard Leach, have fallen from market favour. Now there is a preference for the refined, delicate forms associated with women potters. Says one writer, in this “most feline” of art forms, “these objects just are”.

Why Joseph Beuys’s Mysterious Art Continues to Inspire—and Incense

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 5th January 2021

The centenary of Beuys’ birth has arrived with, so far, few commemorative articles. He remains widely influential – perhaps some writers are put off because his work is so baffling. Notable performance pieces included explaining art works to a dead hare with his head covered in honey and gold leaf and locking himself in a cage with a coyote. The linked piece is fairly basic; hopefully better is on the way. A notable interview with Beuys is here.

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.”

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