The Easel

23rd November 2021

Arthur Jafa

Jafa’s 2016 video essays have made him a global sensation. His new work, AGHDRA, is quiet, comprising imagery of a lumpy surface of “stuff”, with waves going out to a distant horizon. This “supreme mass” is “terribly beautiful—beautiful despite the terror, terrible despite the beauty.” Jafa calls it an attempt to “embody black experience in non-narrative terms”. The piece has no conclusion, “just endless, gut-wrenching, but still gorgeous churning.”

Annie Leibovitz: “A lot can be told in those moments in between the main moments”

Leibovitz is having a moment with multiple shows and a book. The reviews reveal a photographer of disparate parts. Her fashion images often indulge in fantasy, evoking narratives from history or literature as much as they showcase clothing. Her portraiture is about realism, perhaps reflecting her photojournalism roots at Rolling Stone. For Leibovitz, though, everything is a performance, with “both the photographer and [subjects as] contributors to cultural moments.”

Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist review – Is the classic blockbuster exhibition in its death throes?

This show “loses its way” somewhat – but how far wrong can you go exhibiting Dürer? Travel to Italy allowed him to share his exactitude and dark Germanic imagination. Italian artists in turn exposed him to Venice’s sensuality, colour and focus on classical beauty. Who influenced whom the most is moot. Travel ensured that Dürer entered “the bloodstream of European art”. What he learned, says one critic, included a new, modern idea  – the artist as a genius.

Remembering Dave Hickey, brilliant art critic and renegade Texan

Hickey has been called “the philosopher king of American art criticism”. His reputation rested especially on two 1990’s books that contain “some of the best writing on art and culture that any American has ever done”. A critic described him as “a resolutely nonsystematic thinker …  a critic who constructs no rules, but instead rhapsodizes about what he loves, aiming not to convince you of its worthiness but to demonstrate that such love is possible.”

In Willem de Kooning’s Loft at the Dawn of Bohemian New York

What was it like to be in New York when, after WW2, it was the white-hot centre of the art world? Schloss was a young art writer who seemingly had a talent for “being in the blazing-hot There”. Walking downtown with de Kooning was like “walking with Clark Gable in Hollywood.” His loft had “the smell of fire and brimstone in the air … A man had been measuring himself against the gods with nothing but a stick covered with paint … “Wow, that man, just standing there in his studio, wow!””

Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution at the V&A exhibition review – still inspiring wonder

By the late 1890’s, Fabergé was the pre-eminent jeweller to the Romanov court. The “outrageously OTT” imperial eggs testify to his “gloriously creative vision” and a workshop that employed only “the brilliant”. Then came the horror of WW1 which made his objets de fantaisie “suddenly, utterly inappropriate”. Fabergé’s enterprise was finished off by the 1917 revolution, his legacy being those spectacular eggs – “ridiculous, yes, but exquisite, beautiful, magical”. Images are here.

22nd November 2021

In Jeff Wall’s photographs, it’s all about the details. But are they important?

Wall is credited with helping photography transcend its status as “a problematic subset of art.” Intrigued by artifice, he decided to create tableaux – near-documentary re-creations. These images have little details seemingly incongruent with the ‘face-value’ story. Once this is noticed, the “documentary value” of the image “collapses like a house of cards … [unlike a movie] Wall’s photographs seem stolen from a narrative timeline with no backstory, or denouement in the offing.”

Hong Kong’s extraordinary M+ museum opens amid ongoing censorship fears

At long last, Hong Kong’s M+ museum has opened. It is big by world standards, has a peerless collection of contemporary Chinese art and is a bold statement for a city some think is culturally sterile. Censorship is, sadly, the elephant in the room. “Curatorial integrity is intact”, claims the director. The museum’s key donor strikes a slightly different tone: “Maybe today we cannot show everything, but one day I am sure that whole collection can be shown. It’s for the long haul.”

Hogarth and Europe, Tate Britain, review: a show in paroxysms of embarrassment about its own subject

This show intended – pre-Brexit – to position Hogarth as a European. That view has now been soft-pedalled, though the point of the show seems unchanged – he was influenced by Continental social realist artists. By any measure, his satirical paintings of modern life packed a punch. Sadly, the “asinine” wokeness of the show’s wall labels gets up many noses. Was not Hogarth’s greatness that he held up a mirror to his times? Why mount “a sustained attack on the artist [you are] celebrating?” 

The Artist Behind the Bowler Hat

As a child Magritte was “a bit of a shit” and later lost his mother to suicide. He admitted committing rape as a teenager. In adult life he embraced the boredom of middle class Belgium – “dullness was a safe haven, a place free of devils.” Yet Magritte was one of the century’s greatest image makers and his deadpan sensibility remains hugely influential. He commented once in an interview, “everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”

The overlooked masterpiece warning of a Cold War apocalypse

A “magnificent” renovation gives London’s Courtauld Gallery the opportunity to display a key work by Kokoschka. He came of age in glamorous fin de siècle Vienna, but his art grew fearful about the modern age. In his Prometheus Triptych, Prometheus is a “symbol of intellectual arrogance”, reflecting Kokoschka’s anxiety about military technologies. He had learned, as a soldier in WW1, that playing with fire meant that “fingers would be burned “.