The Easel

30th March 2021

Alice Neel, Painter of the People

Billy Anania | Jacobin | 25th March 2021

Neel didn’t fit her times – a communist in capitalist New York, a feminist before the era of women’s rights, a figurative painter when abstraction was ascendant. Recognition was slow to arrive. Now her paintings, with their bold colours and frank depiction of people, have one critic calling her the “greatest American portraitist of the century”. Her portraits were not exercises in flattery but a “redefinition of how the human condition appears in art.”

Caravans of gold fragments in time

Juliet Highet | New African | 1st June 2019

Medieval Africa? The exhibition explaining this term was cut short by the pandemic. Using both archeology and art history, it proposed that 1000 years ago Africa was central to global trade. It sent gold and ivory to Europe and took European metals for its artistic uses. Medieval Africa boasted the world’s first university (in Fez) and, apparently, history’s wealthiest person. A paradigm-shifting exhibition that makes visible a quite new world history. Images are here.

The Frick on Madison finally lets you see Fragonard up close

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 18th March 2021

Fragonard, one of the Rococo’s leading artists, found fame with images of flirtatious, gambolling aristocrats. The Progress of Love is a classic, “pinks, powder blues, blooming fruit trees, bouquets of flowers”. Interpersonal dynamics are hinted at– “she’s warm … he seems clueless”. In the real world, though, the American Revolution was putting aristocratic Europe under pressure. “Only Fragonard’s extraordinary touch, lustrous colour … kept the wolf of reality at bay”.

The V&A’s restructuring plans are baffling, disturbing and wrong

Tanya Harrod | The Spectator | 18th March 2021

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is widely seen as the pre-eminent museum for design and the decorative arts. Might drastic cost savings forced by the pandemic undermine its position? Instead of its current focus on “material specialisms” like ceramics, metals, textiles, it proposes restructuring around historical periods. Protests one critic, it was “never a historical museum”. This change may undermine “over a hundred years of knowledge transfer”.

Remembering Duggie Fields: “I Have a Love of Creativity”

Louise Benson | Elephant | 9th March 2021

Fields was stylishly unorthodox. Despite training as an artist he did not see himself as part of the art world. Critics were standoffish, some dismissing his Pop-inflected fusions of abstraction and the figurative.  Yet, he became an “iconic figure in late twentieth-century counterculture” and finally won institutional art world recognition. Said Fields “I don’t see any separation between my art and my life. I live inside a painting.” A recent video work is here.

Best Books on the Art Museum

Charles Saumarez Smith | Five Books | 24th March 2021

An idiosyncratic and engaging interview, Smith having just written a book on art museums. The public no longer want to be taught “a master narrative” about art history, preferring to experience artworks for themselves. Issues about provenance and marginalized voices are as old as the hills. Designers, rather than curators, are usually behind well laid out shows. Favourite museums are on a small Japanese island and out-of-the-way Tasmania.

23rd March 2021

The Ideal Museum: Art Historian Kenneth Clark on the Formation of Western Institutions, in 1954

Kenneth Clark | ARTnews | 19th March 2021

From the famous director, a ‘big picture’ essay. The first galleries, in fifteenth century Italy, simply gathered famous pictures and were a means of showing off. Great collections are now in the public domain and are works of art themselves. There are no rules for what they should collect. A museum director must “not only know what the works of art are saying to him, but what they are saying to one another.” Their aim should be to provide “exalted happiness”.

Is the nude selfie a new art form?

Holly Williams | bbc.com | 19th March 2021

Art rendered the nude respectable. Selfies, like art, are edited to create an idealized image. Should we consider selfies, nude or otherwise, “the artwork of our time”? A useful test question – is the intent of a nude selfie to assert identity or simply to titillate? Ironically, the smartphone nude may be a return to “the aesthetic of the traditional respectable art historical nude: codified, safe … designed to be gazed upon”.

The UBS & Art Basel Art Market Report 2021 – Key Findings

Angie Kordic | Widewalls | 18th March 2021

The annual art market scoreboard. Global art sales totalled $50.1bn in 2020, a whopping 22% below 2019. Gallery sales fell 20% and auction sales fell 30%. Galleries responded by going online. Those sales doubled and now comprise 25% of the market. Over half of scheduled fairs were cancelled. For a change, smaller galleries weathered the pandemic somewhat better than those at the top end. Purchases by female buyers rose but representation of female artists stagnated.

In search of Irma Stern, whose paintings still embody the contradictions of South Africa

Sean O’Toole | Apollo | 19th March 2021

Stern was the classic insider / outsider. She was born in rural South Africa but grew up in Germany. Returning to Capetown after WW1, her modernist style ruffled feathers as did her respectful portraiture of black Africans. After WW2 her acclaim (and white skin) brought support from the Afrikaner government, while she also supported the anti-apartheid cause. Her work, with its contradictory back story, “speaks loudly to our contemporary moment”.

Awarding the Prtizker to a team synonymous with refurbs marks an important shift in architectural vales

Phineas Harper | Dezeen | 17th March 2021

All too often, architecture seems to reward the new, the flamboyant. This year’s Pritzker Prize – the profession’s highest honour – has instead gone to a firm that emphasises re-use of neglected buildings. Their mantra is “never demolish … always add, transform, and reuse!” Said the jury, their work “renews the legacy of modernism, but they have also proposed an adjusted definition of the very profession of architecture.” Images of 10 key projects are here.

Germany moves toward full restitution of Benin bronzes

Catherine Hickley | The Art Newspaper | 22nd March 2021

A significant moment. After widespread procrastination, Germany has become the first nation to commence “full restitution” of its Benin bronzes. These artifacts – statues, plaques, ivory carvings, made over hundreds of years – were looted by British soldiers in 1897 in Benin (southern Nigeria). Says one curator, “Benvenuto Cellini could not have made a better cast. [They are] at the summit of what can be technically achieved”.  An excellent backgrounder is here.

5,000 photos from the fall of the Berlin Wall

Marcel Fürstenau | DW | 18th March 2021

Besides being politically momentous, the fall of the Berlin Wall was aesthetically significant. Conrad, an East German resident, photographed the Wall prior to its fall. It was, he states, “architecture at its most vicious”. He then documented its lengthy physical removal. “Photographing buildings or military installations that may have outlived their purpose is a form of reflection on how we deal with the past.”

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