The Easel

7th September 2021

‘I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer. I go anywhere’

Mark Feeny | The Boston Globe | 19th August 2021

After WW1, cameras become smaller and cheaper. Women, emboldened by education, new job opportunities and (imminently) the vote, took to photography in significant numbers. Across multiple countries, they were technically and aesthetic innovative, bringing a more nuanced approach to “social documentary” and “gender representation”. This groundbreaking exhibition has, according to one critic “the weightiness of a new definitive history” of photography.

Appreciating the poetic misunderstandings of A.I. art

Kyle Chayka | The New Yorker | 23rd August 2021

Just three years ago the first AI-generated artwork was sold at auction. Now, images can be generated via a Twitter account. Is this image making any more than a gimmick? It’s not clear. Many images are techno mashups, reflecting “the collective unconsciousness of the Internet”. But some have “incoherence” or “poetic misunderstandings” that are unmistakably non-human. What can we expect as AI tools improve further, as they will? “A cool civilisation”.

In the Late Hung Liu’s Historical Portraits, Layers of Joy and Struggle Are Exposed

Marlene Donahue | 1stdibs | 22nd August 2021

Liu grew up in the shadow of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Although later emigrating to the US, her art drew on old photos from that era, as well as Dorothea Lange’s ‘dustbowl’ portraits. What inspiration was she tapping into? ‘To show the truth, and the truth is that many people struggle … still today.” Liu died last month, just before becoming the first Asian American woman to have a retrospective at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery.

The Modernism of Hector Guimard

David Hanks | Yale University Press blog | 26th August 2021

Art nouveau was all the rage in 1890’s Paris and Guimard was its key figure. His buildings, subway entrances and domestic furnishings were stylistically innovative and promoted a harmony between building design and interior decoration. By 1910, the new century’s taste for functional simplicity was apparent and after the war, art nouveau was completely eclipsed by a modernism that it had helped create. Images are here.

New dealer partnership between Lévy Gorvy, Salon 94 and Amalia Dayan hints at post-pandemic shift in traditional gallery model

Daniel Cassady | The Art Newspaper | 1st September 2021

Covid-related losses and competitive pressures are leading to strange-looking deals. Small specialist galleries are bulking up. Auction houses are adding services that overlap with art fairs and galleries. Now a group of galleries and art advisers are merging to create … what? “A hybrid” admits one participant, one that creates more shows but reduces artist representation. “Perhaps [this] means the end of the traditional gallery as we know it.”

How Contemporary Art Became a Vibe

Martin Herbert | ArtReview | 20th August 2021

Streamed music and “ambient TV” are soothers. The writer worries that art is going the same way. Yayoi Kusama and teamlab, to name some names, are but two artists whose immersive work demands little of the viewer – “visual muzak”. Unlike the focus needed to read a book, such works cater to “diffused attention”. Some artists and curators appear now to prioritize Instagram opportunities over an intellectual challenge. “It’s chilling”, says the writer.

31st August 2021

Johannes Vermeer painting restored to reveal portrait of Cupid in once-bare background

Jonathan Ore | CBS Radio | 28th August 2021

Three cheers for technology. Art historians have long puzzled about Vermeer’s intentions in his early work Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. A restoration has revealed a naked Cupid that was overpainted after Vermeer’s death. With the overpainting removed, it is clear that he intended the work to be about romance. And the paper in the girl’s hand? “It’s a love letter, of course”. An excellent video on the restoration process is here.

Why is Yves Saint Laurent’s “Sardine Dress” So Compelling?

Alison Hawthorne Deming | Literary Hub | 25th August 2021

An elegy to “small-scale artistry”. The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watt regarded his Saville Row suits as works of art. What, then, about Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘sardine’ dress? The hand embroidery took 1500 hours and uses 19th century stitching techniques. Tiny gelatin sequins create a look of opalescent scales, or perhaps moonlight on “a disturbance on a calm bay”. “Hand embroidery is something emotional … it’s something that comes from the soul”.

Actions speak louder than words: Louise Bourgeois at the Jewish Museum

Jackson Arn | Art in America | 26th August 2021

A troubled childhood led Bourgeois to decades of psychoanalysis. She also stated that “my art is my psychoanalysis”. Putting these together, a current show claims that her jottings about analysis explain her work. Don’t be taken in, advises the writer, Bourgeois was known for “self-mythologizing” and mischief making. The more one looks at her work without preconceptions, “the less Freudian it gets … [Bourgeois] is still a few steps ahead of her archivists”.

The curse of Mies van der Rohe: Berlin’s six-year, £120m fight to fix his dysfunctional, puddle-strewn gallery

Oliver Wainwright | The Guardian | 30th August 2021

Mies van der Rohe’s museum in Berlin is a “global icon” of 20th-century architecture. However, a six year “surgical” renovation has revealed the compromises made for the sake of good looks. Cracking windows, dull underground galleries, under-sized doors, the list is lengthy. Van der Rohe knew of such practical difficulties but prioritized the purity of his design. Sniffs the writer “never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building”.

Sotheby’s New Hire: Can the Auction House Lion Lie Down with Gallery Lambs?

Marion Manekar | ARTnews | 23rd August 2021

If covid restrictions feel endless, spare a thought for Art Basel. Big art fairs have pretty much stopped, starving Art Basel and others of cashflow and halting their collaboration with galleries. Sensing an opportunity, the big auction houses are using their high-profile online sales capabilities to entice galleries to work with them instead. It is, says the writer, a delicate balancing act, an “alliance between competitors”.

Germaine Krull’s Queer Vision

Marina Molarsky-Beck | Metmuseum Perspectives | 17th August 2021

Krull’s 1928 photobook of industrial structures, Metal, led Man Ray (no less) to say she was his Modernist equal. There was, though, another strand to Krull’s work – images of “queer desire”. The subject was commonly broached using images of women gazing into mirrors – lesbian desire as narcissism. Krull’s approach, fifty years before Mapplethorpe, was just to be frank. Pioneering, yes, but it didn’t resonate with the times and she was forgotten. A backgrounder is here.

Ive by Gursky: A meeting of minds

Maria Morris Hambourg | Gagosian Quarterly | 28th August 2021

How best to photograph a creative person? Gursky, famed photographic documentarian, was asked to make a portrait of Jony Ive, ex-Apple designer. Should he surround Ive with his famous products, perhaps focus on his chic dress sense, or use some metaphor of his “cerebrations”? Gursky declined all, instead showing Ive in Apple’s vast, spaceship-like building, an object that, like some of Ive’s designs, is “lightly tethered to planet Earth”.

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