The Easel

10th August 2021

The epic style of Kerry James Marshall

Calvin Tomkins | The New Yorker | 9th August 2021

This beautifully written profile has an epic quality, reflecting the writer’s belief that Marshall is “a great artist, a virtuoso”. His works, “figurative but not realistic”, carry an historical narrative but with a contemporary feel. Cumulatively, they express Marshall’s grand theme – “there has always been more to the Black experience in America than oppression … Black lives have been and can be rewarding, diverse, and full of joy.”

Phillip King, constantly inventive British sculptor and former president of the Royal Academy – obituary

Staff | The Telegraph | 8th August 2021

King, like his friend and one time tutor Anthony Caro, started as an assistant to Henry Moore. By the early 1960’s both abandoned figurative sculpture for radical abstraction, often using painted steel. Both were acclaimed but Caro became the more famous. Perhaps King’s relentless innovation obscured an obvious signature style. Said he “[In painting] surface is everything. With sculpture, there is surface, but there is so much more going on behind”.

Little Canaletto’s sordid city in the sky – Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited review

Jonathon Jones | The Guardian | 21st July 2021

Frederick Augustus, ruler of Saxony, commissioned Bellotto to paint five large studies of his massive hilltop fortress. Reunited in London for the first time since they were painted, these works are an impressive vanity project. More than that though, Bellotto used these landscapes to express a new idea – the power of nature. With their panoramic views and sharp contrast of light and shadow, they are “the first true stirrings of Romantic storminess.”

Luchita Hurtado’s Spiritual Modernism

Max Pearl | The Nation | 4th August 2021

A profile of Hurtado who died last year. She painted prolifically for 70 years until getting her first solo gallery show in 2016 and first museum show in 2019. While absorbing influences from surrealism and abstraction, her work consistently explored the themes of “motherhood, the oneness of all things”.  Such themes were unfashionable in late 20th century art, but recognition finally arrived, especially via her late self-portraits. An interview with Hurtado is here.

Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “A Wild Note of Longing” — Mysterious to the Point of Holy

Franklin Einspruch | The arts fuse | 6th August 2021

As the Impressionists were conquering all, Americans were feeling a bit provincial. Among them, only Ryder could possibly be considered modernist. Was he the visionary modernist his contemporaries claimed? He stood out from the documentary style landscapists of his day with his awareness of surface texture and “brooding spirituality”. Undoubtedly, he was influential. But perhaps that is all – he successfully broke with the old without defining the new.

3rd August 2021

The Second Act of Andrew Forge

John Yau | Hyperallergic | 13th July 2021

Forge painted figurative work, unhappily. Mid-career, he moved to the US and abruptly adopted abstraction. Painting just tiny dots and dashes he created luminous fields of colour, “like looking into a storm of confetti”. These are not abstract expressionism’s random gestures but careful decisions about colour and placement. Indeed, perhaps they aren’t really abstractions, rather “an in-between state, neither dissipating nor coalescing into an image or shape.”

‘Here are the contradictions of Glasgow laid bare, with love’ – in the footsteps of Joan Eardley

Samuel Reilly | Apollo | 4th May 2021

Alongside the few superstars of art are multitudes who find limited success. Eardley seems to be one of the latter, acclaimed in Scotland but mostly ignored in England. She painted the children of the Glasgow slums and later, seascapes, her style reflecting the “twin orthodoxies of British art at the time, ‘kitchen sink’ realism and [American] Abstract Expressionism”. Sentimental or raw honesty – that’s where the debate about her work lies, unresolved.

Rolling Sculpture: on the Automobile’s Aesthetics

Juliet Kinchin | MOMA | 14th July 2021

Do cars belong in a contemporary art collection? As far back as 1951, New York’s MOMA recognized them as “rolling sculptures”. Of course, cars have greatly influenced popular culture. They appear as toys, are ever-present in mass entertainment and in online games. They are also a preferred symbol of status. Roads are a key part of the urban aesthetic. “More than any other single thing the automobile has changed our common view of the world”.

Bernini’s Rome: New Book Tells How a Baroque Artist and a Pope Changed the City Forever

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 29th July 2021

Expertly navigating the Vatican’s volatile politics, Bernini won favour with a succession of popes. Then along came Alexander VII who was ambitious to lift Rome’s fortunes. It was, says one critic “the greatest artistic double act in history”. For about a decade Alexander called on Bernini for sculptures, high profile architectural designs and urban projects. Together they “they took the ragged remnants of the ancient city and clothed it in Baroque”.

What François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce Means for the French Artworld

Louise Darblay | ArtReview | 29th July 2021

Now that opening celebrations have finished, a more considered view of François Pinault’s new Paris museum. The building, a grandiose but dilapidated structure, has become a “palace” its colonial aura obscured by ultra-modern renovation. Most artworks are by contemporary, big-name artists, some stunning but collectively lacking “coherence”. The place needs “a more committed curatorial and discursive approach [rather than celebrating] wealth”

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