The Easel

2nd November 2021

Easel Essay Paula Rego: Yes, With A Growl

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 2nd November 2021

Rego’s paintings tell stories. There are stories of family dramas, real or imagined, stories about the Portuguese dictator Salazar, and about Rego’s flawed husband. This is an artist with a confessed fondness for the easy-to-follow narratives one finds in comics. So, asks Contributing Editor Morgan Meis, what accounts for the pervasive sense of oddness and unease in her work?

“Her stories are coded in layers of symbol and metaphor. [Dog Woman] is about mucking around in the dirt like a dog. And to some degree, liking it. That’s to say, there is a lot of power in this dog woman. Paula Rego once said, “To be bestial is good.” And yet, potential degradation lurks here too. Because to be a person, to be a woman, is not to be a dog. Is it? Or is it?”

Appetite and decay: the animal instincts in Bacon’s paintings

Colm Toibin | Royal Academy of Arts | 8th October 2021

Kafka wrote about a man who becomes an insect. Bacon was interested in similar territory, “the gap between the clothed human and the snarling figure hidden within the clothes”. Sometimes his man-creatures are on all fours, animality coupled with “a sort of suffering dignity … Their wildness includes a sense that they are in possession not merely of instinct but dark knowledge. Their quest is not only for food or blood but something unnameable and unobtainable.”

Everything you thought you knew about ‘feminine design’ is wrong

Elissaveta Brandon | Fast Company | 15th October 2021

Objects created by women designers have, to be polite, been “under-documented”. They feature in a new book, which shows an incredible diversity of materials and uses. A common theme across these objects is the home, historically an “overlooked space”. Skeptical of a feminine aesthetic, the author instead suggests there is a feminine design methodology, which is “sustainable, rooted in cultural traditions”. And the focus of today’s female designers? “Climate change”. More images are here.

The Triumph of Rubens

Lucia Marchini | The Past | 19th October 2021

When we think Rubens, we think sensual, fleshy bodies. Yet he was also a scholar and diplomat. An “all-encompassing interest” in the art of antiquity links what otherwise might seem divergent. He admired ancient sculptures and their buff bodies. Alluding to their mythologies in his own art made him seem learned, accomplished. But his exuberant re-working of those ideas makes his work truly his own, “part of his narrative, part of the expression that he’s bringing to these ideas.’

Harmonic demons

Kito Nedo | Süddeutsche Zeitung | 24th October 2021

A “spectacular” Goya show reminds that every generation finds something contemporary in his work, especially the works he did away from the royal court. His etchings, the “Horrors of War”, for example, portray death and brutality in a frank way that anticipated modern war photography. Viewing his modern-ish still lifes is like getting “an electric shock”. And his dream images, observed the poet Beaudelaire back in 1857, convey “something credible and harmonious about his monsters”.

The restitution of African works puts the Senate and the art market on the wind

Martine Robert | Les Echo | 26th October 2021

France announced in 2017 that it would restitute cultural objects looted in Africa. As promised, some 26 objects are returning to Benin this month. Other countries are following suite. Still, controversy continues. One artist in Benin points out that African museums have been plagued by theft, fire and a shortage of qualitied staff. Further, a French supporter of restitution admits that African artworks in French museums are “excellent ambassadors of the culture of their countries”.

26th October 2021

Hans Holbein’s Portraits Defined—and Immortalized—Tudor England’s Elite

Nora McGreevy | Smithsonian Magazine | 21st October 2021

Holbein the Younger lived through the charged politics of the Protestant Reformation. As the leading painter in Henry VIII’s Tudor court, a balanced deference was required to both Church and State. His most famous works, portraits of the court’s members, are masterful character studies, full of symbolism and psychological insight. They were also a balancing act – flattery versus truth, professional identity versus the person. Says one writer, Holbein was a “political artist to the tip of his brush”.

Cartier’s hidden debt to Islamic art uneathed in new Exhibition

James Tarmy | Bloomberg | 22nd October 2021

Around 1900, Europe’s interest in Islamic art was shifting from idle curiosity to avid appreciation. Cartier, famous for its opulent ‘garland’ style – romantic bows and rounded shapes – picked up this change and started to incorporate Islamic geometric designs. It was not a passing fad but an abrupt and sustained aesthetic shift – “there’s no evolution … they used all these Islamic patterns all the time”. More images are here.

Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel at the Barnes Foundation

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 10th October 2021

In the late 19th century, artist’s models were not taken too seriously. Valadon overcame this prejudice – and her working-class background – to become a notable realist painter. Her modern appeal comes from her psychologically insightful portrayal of people – often women – as capable individuals, rather than passive figures. She revealed the domestic realm, says one critic, “beyond the expectations of bourgeois propriety … [an explorer] of interior space”.

Land art was designed to disappear. This photographer preserved it for the world to see

Nate Berg | Fast Company | 1st July 2021

The vast spaces of the American West attracted Smithson and other 1960’s land artists.  Remoteness and scale meant that many works could only be seen from photographs. Gorgoni became renowned for making these images. Gorgoni once erected a scaffolding tower to record the large circular tracks made by a motor bike on a dry lakebed. Those tracks soon vanished, so were they, or the photograph, the artwork?  More images are here.

William Kentridge on Francisco Goya

William Kentridge | Frieze | 25th October 2021

As deft as it is brief. Kentridge, a South African artist, looks at a single etching to show how Goya used small details to communicate a great deal. It’s a lesson in looking carefully at works of art. Kentridge draws our attention to “the turning of the woman’s left leg as she puts her foot on the horse’s neck. A simple shape and black line give us all we need to know about her foot, the delicacy of the shoe, its decisive pivot toward us.”

Sword fights on canvas: Georges Mathieu at Perrotin and Nahmad Contemporary

David Ebony | Art in America | 22nd October 2021

Postwar European abstraction leaned toward the geometric which didn’t enthuse Mathieu. Visiting New York, he met Pollock and others who, like himself, were exploring gestural abstraction. Thus encouraged, Mathieu built his career on flamboyant gestural paintings, executed at top speed. A revealed liking for painting for an audience did not enhance his reputation. Neither does it diminish his role in pioneering a European expression of “testosterone-driven, postwar angst”.

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