The Easel

15th February 2022

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, Hayward Gallery, review: So good it will give you shivers

Hettie Judah | iNews | 9th February 2022

Drawing on a troubled childhood Bourgeois fashioned a stellar career as a sculptor. Her late works were often in textiles, using skills picked up from her family home. Many are “sexy/violent” – cloth heads for example, that “howl, kiss, smirk, leer”. She saw spiders as “agents of repair” but in her work they also convey menace.  Some works are obvious but “my God, when Bourgeois’s good it gives you shivers.”

Huey, Dewey, and Louis XV

James Gardner | The Magazine Antiques | 7th February 2022

Walt Disney returned from WW1 with a new-found love – European art history. Its aesthetics infuse his films – German Romanticism in Snow White (1937), French Rococo lightheartedness in Beauty and the Beast (1991), gothic castles galore. Disney’s plundering of European culture is shrugged off as yet more of the “theft that animates art history”. Anyway, the end product was uniquely Disney – “populist and fun and … almost impishly irreverent.” A video (13 min) is here.

Astonishing and gripping: Van Gogh’s Self Portraits at the Courtauld reviewed

Martin Gayford | The Spectator | 12th February 2022

London’s Courtauld has re-opened with a “wonderous” show of van Gogh’s self-portraits, done in his last years of life. The suggestion that they are most notable for showcasing his evolving technique is so odd that one critic snorts, “[the curators] can, frankly, piss off.” Rather, they collectively reveal van Gogh’s struggle to cope with periodic mental collapse. “These pictures amount to an utterly gripping exercise in self-examination. [His] will to paint was more powerful, apparently, than the will to live.”

Room service: Review of The Hotel by Sophie Calle

Michael Quinn | Star-Revue | 14th February 2022

In 1981, Calle briefly worked in Venice cleaning hotel rooms, covertly recording what she found. The resultant text / photographic document is regarded as a seminal artwork. Ethical issues obvious then are now even more so. Is this voyeurism or merely “frisky predation” which yields portraits of people based on their mess? Is her “deliberate aesthetic detachedness” a defence? Whatever the ethical wriggle room of 1981, it is surely a whole lot less now. A commentary by Calle is here.

Why Leonora Carrington’s work feels so of the moment

Kate Dwyer | W Magazine | 5th February 2022

A backgrounder on the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Rebelling against her wealthy family she fell in with the surrealists, establishing herself on equal terms with the men. Her paintings of enigmatic situations and otherworldly creatures are underlain by a “slightly offbeat humor”, which is “not what you get in French [or American] Surrealism.” This year’s Venice Biennale is titled The Milk of Dreams, the phrase taken from one of Carrington’s books.

Truthless Trust

Domenico Quaranta | Spike | 1st February 2022

An assault on NFTs and cryptoart markets. The NFTs attached to works of cryptoart carry any conditions of sale an artist wants. Sounds good for artists – except that high transaction charges can gobble up sales revenue. Meanwhile, the buyer of an NFT gets a claim on a digital file, not the artwork itself. This arrangement looks like “a Ponzi scheme” and the confidence to on-sell an NFT requires “a consensual hallucination”. Similar hallucinations, by the way, apply to normal money.

8th February 2022

Is acclaimed sculptor Charles Ray losing his magic touch?

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 2nd February 2022

Ray has had earned many accolades for his sculpture, including a current retrospective. It features the kind of work that has brought acclaim – “conceptually teasing” hyper-real tractors, cars, reclining nudes, done in a variety of materials and immaculately finished. Except, there is a “disjunction between intention and effect … what is horribly unclear is why we should care. Many pieces, for all their shininess, look as lifeless as ash”. Images are here.

Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism

Natalia Gierowska | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st February 2022

A Basel show makes the case that Pissarro was the nerve centre of Impressionism. His influence was widespread – painting and drawing with Cézanne and others, collaborating on printmaking, lending his support to Seurat and pointillism. He was “a catalyst bringing together the various vectorial forces” behind modernism. Paris-based artists were unpersuaded by Pissarro’s anarchist beliefs and blunt portrayal of rural labourers. But that style too won fans – among the social realists of the Soviet Union.

Florine Stettheimer: A Biography

Johanna Fateman | 4Columns | 28th January 2022

Although she exhibited regularly, Stettheimer never joined a gallery and resisted selling her work. Little wonder the art world forgot her. A biography is evidence of renewed interest. Her theatrical style, perhaps sparked by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, was seen by some as flippant. A closer examination reveals her work as complex, full of a “cagey kind of politics” that is expressed through “murmured satire”. Says the writer “a quintessentially modern artist”. Images are here.

A Look at the Wallace Collection, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Brian Allen | National Review | 3rd February 2022

The Wallace Collection bequest is probably the most valuable such gift Britain has ever received. That makes the collection a story in itself. Five generations of the family used their wealth to build an immense art collection – Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez, French Rococo paintings galore, galleries “full of grand stuff”. The Collection has recently started loaning works and has a plan to “transform the visitor experience”. Says this US writer – “Perfection is never transformed for the better.”

Jeff Wall with Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st February 2022

Amidst a flurry of shows, Wall discusses his acclaimed “staged” photography. From the outset, he was attracted to artifice, something photography had long rejected. And he sensed that making his images large was a “central” step because big pictures are “a more physical way of capturing your imagination”. With these elements, Wall happily calls his approach “cinematography”. Just don’t conflate that with the cinema – “They’re really not the same thing.”

Edmund de Waal: Lettres à Camondo

Anna Sansom | The Design Edit | 1st February 2022

Rarely is the venue of an exhibition as notable as the exhibition itself. Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris was originally the opulent home of a Jewish banking family. Having donated it to the state as a museum, they later perished at the hands of the Nazis. A show of de Waal’s ceramics in the museum is “an exercise in restraint” with simple bowls, slender vases, thin slithers of porcelain alluding to the family’s tragedy. Stone pieces in the courtyard, says de Waal, are “markers of loss and repair”.

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