The Easel

16th March 2021

The Downward Spiral: Popular Things

Dean Kissick | Spike Art Magazine | 11th March 2021

Wow! Christie’s has auctioned Beeple’s crypto art for $70m. Some reactions seem too cerebral – “the violent erasure of human values inherent in the pictures”. More interesting are those focused on culture. Much current art and entertainment has “the uncanny feeling of having been made by algorithm, even though it wasn’t … We’re all looking for more popularity, new ways to find an edge; and yet, all this competition only seems to lead to blandness”.

An Unwitting Monument

Stassa Edwards | Laphams Quarterly | 8th March 2021

“The human body contains histories.” Vienna in 1918 faced hunger, national decline, disease. Schiele’s art triumphed in that year’s Vienna Secessionist exhibition but then, the Spanish flu. Klimt died in February 1918, Schiele’s wife in October, Schiele himself three days later. Five days after that the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed. His last portraits, sparse drawings on scraps of paper, are collectively “an unwitting monument to immense loss”.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented

Margaret Sundell | 4Columns | 8th January 2021

Artists in the new Soviet Russia eagerly joined in the re-making of society. Posters, in particular, became “form-givers of a new modernity”. It was a “seismic” change because these were images made for mass production. That meant mass consumption – “from individual to collective reception, from rapt absorption to off-handed viewing.” Official support for these artists was fleeting but what remained was a visual culture that is still highly influential.

Jules Olitski in New York

Karen Wilkin | The New Criterion | 15th January 2021

Olitzky absorbed from his Abstract Expressionist predecessors not the dramatic expressive gesture but the power of colour. He launched into colour-driven abstraction, showing a colour sense that “walks a tightrope between the ravishing and the vaguely disturbing.” What gives these works a feeling of prescience is that their wonky cellular and blobby shapes signalled that Pop was just around the corner.

Detective who found Munch’s Scream and Irish Vermeer stolen by Martin Cahill dies at 73

Richard Sandomir | The Irish Times | 12th March 2021

Light relief. Art detectives, like the thieves they chase, enjoy a certain mystique. Hill’s back story – an Oxford educated Scotland Yard detective – may only enhance that romantic image. The anecdotes are splendid and the list of artworks he helped recover impressive. His views on the thieves are interesting – “there is a madness that afflicts these people”.

The Frick Madison

Jason Rosenfeld | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st March 2021

New York’s Frick Collection is famously housed in the mansion Frick lived in. Forced to relocate by a renovation, do its treasures look different in a modern gallery setting? The Vermeers, now hung together, have quite different relative merits. With improved lighting, the Bellini is more obviously a masterpiece. Smaller details “pop” without the clutter of Frick’s furniture. Mostly, the art is better without the “complicating aura of its Gilded Age robber baron of a founder”.

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.

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