The Easel

13th July 2021

Paula Rego review – phenomenal paintings, shame about the decor

Jonathon Jones | The Guardian | 5th July 2021

Rego is one of the major artists of our age. Her highly imaginative works portray violence, the complexities of relationships, families, stories told in a hyper-realist style. One critic says “to describe this show as stunning would be an understatement”. Another gushes “no artist has more powerfully and persuasively mastered then subverted the language of male painterly tradition to express modern female interior experience”. Images are here.

William Gedney’s Timelessly Intimate Photographs of San Francisco in the 1960s

Rebecca Bengal | Aperture | 29th June 2021

Gedney didn’t lack for recognition in his day – prestigious fellowships, a solo show at New York’s MoMA, admiring friends – yet his photography is now little known. Perhaps a lack of self-promotion explains why he didn’t publish any of the photo books he had put together. Now they are being published, what do they show? “Many of his photos are a hymn to an age he knows to be transient, full of ambiguities, freighted with a fascinating immaturity”.

Gustave Moreau at Waddesdon Manor review — dark and decadent

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 12th July 2021

The writer politely notes that the nineteenth century Symbolist movement was a bit over-the-top. So, when Moreau, one of its stars, painted La Fontaine’s Fables – with their monsters and demons – the result was always likely to be an explosion of “madcap imaginings”. It was. “The first image we see is an allegory of Fable herself, flying across the sky on the back of a hippogriff … [whose] wings are a blue so intense they would shame a sunlit peacock. “Wow,” I gulped.”

‘The Blue Boy’ is returning to London. Why experts fear the trip presents a grave risk to a masterpiece

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 6th July 2021

To loan or not to loan, that is the question. Museum directors loan works to generate you-owe-me’s, a very valuable currency. Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, “a painting of supreme poise and elegance”, is being loaned in a “truly exceptional” deal. Locals protest that a loan may damage the painting. The museum, which has spent three years conserving the work, dismisses these concerns as a product of “biased reporting”.

Photo story

Richard B Woodward | The New Criterion | 15th June 2021

An archive piece. Having been given a camera as a child, Eugene Smith was “famous at twenty and a legend at forty”. Inspired by a crusading humanism, he used “Rembrandt lighting” to take some of the century’s most famous images.  His photo-essays were even more highly acclaimed. In contrast to his heroic reputation, Smith was in reality a loner, an obsessive perfectionist, almost impossible to work with. Said a contemporary “he’s crazy, but he’s great.”

10 things to know about Milton Avery

Staff | Christie’s | 17th May 2021

Avery was far too good an artist to be forgotten but not good enough to be great. He adored Matisse and was adored in turn by Rothko who found inspiration in Avery’s exquisite sense of colour. Though he helped inspire colour field paintings in the 1960’s, Avery was committed to figuration. And his figures are just not that communicative – “ideograms” says one critic. Once abstraction took off, it made his representational work look old hat. He was eclipsed.

6th July 2021

EASEL ESSAY: Smudgy Areas: the art of Berthe Morisot

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 6th July 2021

Berthe Morisot was a first-rate artist and the Impressionists’ sole female member. Like them, she was interested in “the fuzziness of visual experience”. Her greatest fascination was with those moments when we lose focus, when our attention drifts elsewhere. How can such moments be captured in a painting? Perhaps a smudge might do it?

“The woman in Woman in Grey Reclining, [Morisot wondered], might not have very precise boundaries at all. The result is a picture that seems on the verge of falling apart, in the same way that a melodic line in one of the more evanescent compositions by Debussy threatens to evaporate into a tissue of dreamy, disconnected notes that float away into the breeze.”

Paul Cadmus and the Censorship of Queer Art

Bryan Martin | Perspectives | 25th June 2021

Art has long been a carrier of coded messages. Employed to capture “the American scene”, Cadmus painted The Fleet’s In in 1934. It’s satirical image of drunk, flirtatious sailors with sexualized bodies caused a scandal. Homoeroticism, a clear element of the painting, went unmentioned, presumably because homosexuality was a topic absent from mainstream discourse. The Navy protested it was “not true to the Navy”. Well, not all the Navy.

On Taste

Thomas Kaminski | Claremont Review of Books | 1st July 2021

An acclaimed Rembrandt turns out, embarrassingly, not to be by him. Authenticity is an important quality of an artwork. Were the experts who were fooled lacking taste? Training helps develop taste, but the standards that are taught are only based on trial and error. And who is to say that today’s standards are not about to be overthrown by a new way of looking? “Times change, tastes change. That’s the way of the world.”

Sabine Weiss: A Century of Photography

Charlotte Jean | Blind | 5th July 2021

Nearing 100 years old, Weiss has recently stopped taking pictures, but awards and recognitions continue. She, along with Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis, helped established the humanist school of photography that is now synonymous with black-and-white street photography. And, she reminds, she did it without assistants. Her images are all spontaneous, she says – “I photograph to preserve the ephemeral.” A good bio piece is here.

Why this Rodin scholar would gladly see the back of The Thinker

Natasha Ruiz-Gómez | The Conversation | 30th June 2021

Wow – a Rodin scholar who dislikes this famous work! When Rodin made it, a male body building “craze” was sweeping France. It was seen as a bulwark against moral degeneration. The sculpture’s “in-your-face machismo” and prominent genitals also extoll artistic creativity. An example of toxic masculinity? “Embodying virile masculinity, exemplifying outdated sexist and classist ideas, The Thinker is now past its prime.”

Picasso: echoes of Iberia

Cécile Godefroy and Hélène Le Meaux | The Past | 17th June 2021

Young Picasso had an eye for ‘primitive’ art. African and Etruscan influences are well known, but the impact on him of ancient art from Iberia has been “underestimated”. When he first moved to Paris, Iberia was just being recognized as a Mediterranean civilisation. “Picasso’s ‘Iberianism’ is now accepted as a crucial stage in the journey from a sentimental [literal] representation of the figure to a ‘conceptual’ representation … [the path to] Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

Older links
Newer links