The Easel

1st June 2021

More than four decades into her trailblazing career, Lorraine O’Grady finally has the world’s attention

Jillian Steinhauer | Vulture | 2nd March 2021

O’Grady must be quite a talent – trained in economics, then a writer, photographer and a conceptual artist. At 86, after a career as a “gate crasher”, an outsider, she is getting a first retrospective. It shows a career expressing an “unshakable sense of self”. Her fascination with performance and with binaries – male/female, black/white, insider/outsider – have allowed her to “find out who I was and to make it clear to everyone else what that meant.” 

Breaking Ground for a Landscape in Light

Elizabeth McGoey | Art Institute Chicago | 25th June 2021

In 1917, a grieving widow commissioned the “pre-eminent” Tiffany to create a memorial stained glass window. A century later the window barely rated a glance in its church setting, despite being an exceptional example of a “stained glass landscape”. It has been gleefully acquired by a Chicago museum and installed atop a grand staircase. A curator describes the piece as “Dazzling. Luminous. Monumental. Unparalleled. Transformative”. Perhaps gleeful is an understatement.

Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life review – a blockbuster of diminishing returns

Rachael Cooke | The Guardian | 30th June 2021

Hepworth vies with Henry Moore as Britain’s pre-eminent modernist sculptor. A new biography documents how her career was hampered by being a penniless single parent with four children. Hepworth thought it a “miracle” that she produced any work. After those years, she was prolific. The verdict on a major retrospective is mixed: “Its sheer, dogged tastefulness makes it easy to like … difficult to love … [but] undeniably imposing.”

Two Paths for Erotic Sculpture

Sophie Madeline Dess | The New Republic | 18th June 2021

Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke entered the art world in the 1960’s when minimalism was under challenge. In different ways they sought to break away from its “rigid, inorganic geometric forms”. Both used unconventional materials – latex, fiberglass, plastics – to achieve a more organic and textured aesthetic. Critics point to the eroticism of their work but is it any more noteworthy than the “phallo-centricism” of their male contemporaries? More images are here.

Should we censor art?

Daisy Dixon | Aeon | 27th June 2021

Odious attitudes are visible in many art works. Titian eroticized sexual violence, public statues laud slave traders, Gauguin predated on Tahitian girls. Art works are “communicative objects … [they] do things and say things”. Leaving them unchallenged implies an acceptance of their values. Removing them, though, means losing a reminder of past misdeeds. Counter-speech or curator notes can “recontextualize” works, but that risks being seen as a form of censorship.

If You Frame It Like That

Lincoln Perry | The American Scholar | 2nd March 2021

Erudite. How should artists “frame” an experience of the world? Landscape format “lends itself to narrative time”. Vertical formats, especially for portraits, emphasise “power … rectitude”. A square frame implies “stasis, a moment contained.” Shape may constrain but it also allows the artist to create a particular impression. “The painter who uses format as a box might resemble the composer who writes in sonata form or the poet who opts for the haiku.”

25th May 2021

Nan Goldin Gets Your P.A.I.N.

Christian Viveros - Faune | The Village Voice | 21st April 2021

“Flashbulb memory” characterises Goldin’s diaristic photography – a way of remembering what happened the night before. A “vast” show of new work draws not just on the drug-addled 1980’s but also on more recent photography. Her work blurs into her anti-opioid activism but this does not stop them adding significantly to “the requiem-like power” of her oeuvre. Showing the “wonder and untold dangers” of addiction is a “reason the camera was invented”.

Reflections on Elsa Peretti, the Visionary Who Changed the Way We Wear Jewelry

Heather Haber | 1stdibs | 23rd May 2021

At a guess, a good chunk of the population has an emotional response to beautifully designed jewellery. No less an authority than Vogue says Peretti was the most successful jewellery designer ever. That success came from innovative designs (sensuous but disciplined), her passion for craft and a long relationship with Tiffany. And the emotion her pieces create? “They serve as a kind of armor and give me a sense of power”.

Tony Cragg is the star of Houghton Hall’s summer sculpture exhibition

Annabel Sampson and David Jenkins | tatler | 11th May 2021

Houghton Hall is a magnificent English country mansion that hosts an annual solo sculpture show. Only superstars get invited – this year it is Tony Cragg and his biomorphic, abstract forms. Difficult to interpret, they are Cragg’s take on nature, expressed in form and surface. The works in the show are “elegant … expressions of our current anxieties” but seem optimistic about “our presence in the biological realm.” An excellent backgrounder here.

How Yoshitomo Nara’s Manga-Inspired Paintings Tap Into Universal Feelings of Anxiety

Angelica Villa | ARTnews | 27th April 2021

Resist comparing Nara to Japanese “Neo-Pop” artists like Murakami. Yes, both have a cult following and both sell cute, manga-influenced works for millions. However, Murakami’s “superflat” paintings are about consumerism while Nara is focused on expressing emotion. Nara’s figures tap into a universal sense of angst, a mood that, over time, seems to be darkening. Says one critic “one of the most egalitarian visual artists since Keith Haring”.

Stephen Shore: “Photography Isn’t Very Good at Explaining”

Brigitte Ollier & Jonas Cuénin | Blind | 11th May 2021

Shore came to prominence with images of “what American culture looked like”. That led to a project photographing steelwork towns in the Rust Belt. The resultant series gave a face to large scale industrial decline and the “deaths of despair” that it brought. Shore’s acclaimed deadpan aesthetic captures a sense of sadness among the affected workers who “seem to question the photographer, as if in the hope of a miracle solution”. More images are here.

Make Room, Mona Lisa—Paris Welcomes a New Museum

James McAuley | Town and Country | 19th May 2021

It’s not often that critics are all gushing with praise. After years of trying, billionaire François Pinault has opened a much-anticipated museum in Paris to display his “legendary” art collection. He has renovated the historic, circular Bourse de Commerce with impeccable taste. And the art – well, it’s a roll call of contemporary art stars, 39 of which are included in the opening exhibition. Post-covid, up to 1m. visitors per year are anticipated. That’s confidence!

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