The Easel

8th June 2021

A Year Lived Inside With Instagram and a Dutch Master

Benjamin Moser | The Nation | 3rd June 2021

Elegant interiors are hugely popular on Instagram. Vermeer’s tranquil interiors are similar escapisms, as are those of Vermeer’s near equal, Pieter de Hooch. Sadly, they were “inventions” because war and strife were commonplace. De Hooch moved to Amsterdam to exploit his renown, but in the bigger city his works lost “freshness”. Those late pictures are “a shipwreck”. Like Instagram, de Hooch’s main act had been to keep ugliness “carefully at bay”.

Epic Iran at the V&A review: five millennia of glittering culture

Nancy Durrant | Evening Standard | 26th May 2021

An ambitious show on Iran’s artistic heritage somewhat obscured by writers and critics trying oh-so-hard to not cause offence. Iran’s culture is just as accomplished as that of Egypt – the first written records around 5000 years ago, political unification in 550BC, a flowering of Persian art around 1000AD. The writer’s summation is very clear– “The stuff is incredible … [contemporary works are] as vivid as the rest” A potted history of Iranian heritage is here.

A Moment of Reckoning: Thomas P. Campbell and András Szántó on Museums and Public Trust

András Szántó | Literary Hub | 4th June 2021

Familiar issues, yes, but articulated with oomph by a museum director who has to fix them. Museums are “not entertainment … we are places of education.” To do that they must be trusted by their communities. Winning new audiences brings new expectations. Return stolen antiquities and “appropriated” objects. Tell the history of colonialism fully. And “you still have to fundamentally enjoy objects … embrace the romance of the physicality of the objects”.

David Smith: Follow My Path

Phyllis Tuchman | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st June 2021

Iron and steel are quintessentially modern materials and Smith was the master of their use in sculpture. His works tended to be modest rather than monumental, and often were painted to achieve a desired effect. Welded steel can seem old hat, now that assemblages predominate. That doesn’t diminish Smith’s development of 20th century modernism, something he achieved with nothing more than “manual labour, grit and a bit of magic”.

Martin Wong’s Tender, Gritty Cityscapes Helped Me Appreciate My Hometown

Lisa Wong Macabasco | Artsy | 25th May 2021

Wong’s favourite colour, it seems, was brown – the colour of the brick buildings in his Lower East Side locale. Self-taught, he developed a documentary style and focused on his local community. The highly detailed buildings were but a backdrop against which to “glorify that which often gets passed over”. His community was a hybrid, one that “crosses racial boundaries and challenges gender stereotypes … a community simultaneously real and imagined.”

Itō Shinsui: Modern print master

Staff | Asian Art Newspaper | 26th May 2021

Starting work at a print factory at 10, Shinsui rapidly became famous for his woodblock prints. His best works combine technical excellence with western techniques like perspective and lighting. Hugely popular abroad, at home it was more a case of honoured. He had helped printmaking survive and his bijinga (images of beautiful women) brought a contemporary feel to ukiyo-e, the traditional artistic contemplation of life’s worldly pleasures.

“Alice Neel: People Come First” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 1st June 2021

A show covered previously, but this review couldn’t be more different. Neel was a “second tier” talent with a “meanness of spirit”. Striving to communicate immediacy, her portraits instead can come across as “blunt” and “superficial”. The character of her sitters is unexplored, making them seem like “butterflies in a curio cabinet” and the works “peculiarly neutral”. She was “a painter endowed with a cruel and unlovely gift.”

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.”

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