The Easel

20th July 2021

Jennifer Packer and Hans Ulrich Obrist discuss the meaning and method of painting today

Hans Ulrich Obrist | Cultured | 14th June 2021

With a highly praised show in London, Packer seems a star in the making. In an artist interview that works better than most, she reflects on the Old Masters and her portraiture which has been described as “startlingly intimate”. “I saw Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas where he’s strung upside down, and I was thinking about Titian painting this body and deciding how much care to give to Marsyas. I feel the same way: the idea of painting as an exercise in tenderness.”

Colour, Geometry and Pure Radiance

Jennifer Higgie | Tate etc | 1st June 2021

The importance of this retrospective is that it surveys all of Taueber-Arp’s work. And there is plenty to survey – textile designer, artist, painter, sculptor, architect, interior designer and dancer. What held these disparate areas together was “the vocabulary of modernist abstraction”. Says one critic “there is no design-Taeuber-Arp and art-Taeber-Arp, there’s just a singular, unified approach to creative life”. An excellent video is here.

Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes at Wallace Collection review – Let’s keep them together

Melanie McDonough | London Evening Standard | 7th June 2021

When Rubens retired and was painting for his own pleasure, he produced not his signature fleshy figures but … rural views. Two such landscapes – painted as a pair – have been hung together for the first time in 200 years. Described as masterpieces and being entirely by Rubens, they reveal something about his mindset. They are “grand but also cosy” says one critic. Rubens’ saw his life as one of “autumnal plenty”.

‘At Once Funny and Melancholic’: Remembering Christian Boltanski (1944–2021)

Marie Darrieussecq | ArtReview | 16th July 2021

The traumas of WWII haunted Boltanski’s art. Not the deaths of specific individuals but memory and how it works. Self taught, his conceptual art took many forms – film, installations, site-specific works, sculpture – and was widely acclaimed. Explaining works in his 2019 Paris retrospective, he said “I want to create legends and mythology … it’s not about the object it’s about being aware of its existence.”

Have you heard of Nikolai Astrup?

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 19th July 2021

Astrup is apparently more popular in his native Norway than Munch! He painted Nordic landscapes with lashings of colour, “generalized forms” with details on top. What elevates his work is its intensity and drama, something the writer ascribes to Astrup’s self-doubt. Astrup’s hometown popularity is thus not due to “sentimental nationalism”. And his obscurity elsewhere is testimony to an artist caught in the “obscure eddies of the art-historical mainstream”.

Moving a Masterpiece, One Panel at a Time

Jonathan Curiel | SFWeekly | 25th June 2021

Wealthy Americans in the 1930’s sought out Rivera’s famous murals. He was the obvious choice to produce a gigantic work for a 1940 exposition in San Francisco. The mural has been in an obscure location for decades but, heroically, has been moved to a major museum for the next few years. To modern eyes, its advocacy of American – Mexican unity seems naïve. Even so, his abilities as a large-scale painter cannot be doubted. A video (12 min) is here.

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.

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