The Easel

6th April 2021

Waldemar Januszczak on identity issues in the art world

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 5th April 2021

An English defence of identity politics in art. Women have spent decades pushing the art world for recognition. Now, people of colour are making similar demands. It’s “exhilarating” says this writer, because it is forcing art back to basics – “image-making, painting, storytelling”. That’s why figurative painting, especially that dealing with black lives, is currently so vibrant. Where does this leave art museums with collections that focus on white men? “In a bad place”.

Better than Cadbury

Kris Manty | Antique Trader | 31st March 2021

The first of the Romanoff Imperial Eggs was made in 1885 to celebrate Easter. Over the following decades, fifty were made, all modest in size, of which 43 survive. They are the “absolute summit” of craftsmanship, examples of jewelry as a decorative art “unequaled since the Renaissance”. Given that it’s Easter time, feast your eyes on history’s most beautiful eggs.

Indulging in the oxymoronic appeal of MoMA PS1’s latest Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition

Sara Radin | Sleek | 12th March 2021

De Saint Phalle’s early performance art works are probably seen as her most innovative. By mid career she had moved on to making huge female sculptures. These in turn were gradually displaced by fantastical sculptures for parks and playgrounds. A Gaudi inspired sculpture park took up the last decades of her career, reflecting perhaps her discovery that “there is nothing more shocking than joy”.

Feminist art historians get Artemisia Gentileschi wrong

Jacob Willer | The Critic | 6th December 2020

Los Angeles’ Getty, which can afford whatever it pleases, has purchased a newly discovered Gentileschi. Gentileschi’s celebrity is so recent that her oeuvre is “a mess”, with attribution of key works still in dispute. Is the ‘frenetic” enthusiasm just because her assertive female protagonists appeal in our #metoo moment? “All this exaggeration … is truly a shame because Artemisia’s talent was real”. The Getty collection now boasts two oil paintings by female artists!

The Glamor of the Department Store

Sabina Stent | Magnum Photos | 21st January 2021

Department stores once had allure – “glamor, status … endless possibilities for life improvement”. Now they seem so, well, 20th century. Their ability to survive the onslaught of Covid and online shopping seems questionable. These images, culled from the Magnum archives, thus have an unintended air of melancholy.

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.

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