The Easel

19th April 2022

The Melville of American Painting

Susan Tallman | The Atlantic | 6th April 2022

People have long puzzled how to read Homer, the “chronicler of 19th-century America”. His contemporaries wondered why he painted foot soldiers rather than generals and called him the “obtuse bard”. For a time, he was seen as having “a kind of wholesome stupidity”. Rather than stupidity, modern eyes see complexity – “what is happening but not what will happen. He is the master of the ambiguous outcome, which also makes him the master of the unclear moral.”

Discovering Frank Auerbach’s true colours

Anthea Gerrie | The JC | 7th April 2022

A show of Auerbach’s paintings and drawings reveals the intricacy of his work process.  He is renowned for attempting a painting, scaping off the result and then repeating that process multiple times. This formidable effort is preceded by repeated drawings of the image. He draws not to record an image, he says; rather, “it’s a question of invention”. Drawings “drive” a new show and are Auerbach’s response to discovering, when he turned to painting, the “struggle to get it right”.

A State of Matter: Modern and Contemporary Glass Sculpture

Joe Lloyd | Studio International | 10th March 2022

Some think glass is too pretty a material to be taken seriously as fine art. The writer pushes back, politely, noting the many innovative ways glass is now being worked. True. What he bypasses, though, is whether the complexities of working with glass limit its use. Says a curator “interest in glass as a material for sculpture has never been greater.” Responds one critic “what really astonishes about contemporary glass is how little progress has been made since the Romans.”

Architect Norman Foster’s Guggenheim Exhibition Is A Requiem For The Age Of Combustion

Nargess Banks | Forbes | 9th April 2022

A “thoroughly beautiful” show, curated by a famous architect, celebrates “the artistic dimension of the automobile”. You may or may not agree that cars are “rolling sculptures”, but the forty automobiles on display make a strong case. At the very least, this is eye candy of the highest order as well as, Foster admits, something of a “requiem for the last days of combustion.” Images are here.

Visions of Spain

James Panero | The New Criterion | 9th January 2022

Underfunded and off the beaten track, New York’s Hispanic Society is an “outsider” institution. It is re-opening after a five-year renovation, financed partly by loaning its spectacular collection of paintings, books and sculptures. A strength of its collection is painted wooden sculptures – “arresting works” – that show how Spanish artists leaned toward an expressive realism quite different to the idealism of Renaissance sculpture. Out of the limelight, such work has quietly had “a life of its own”.

The Story of a Stare Down

Penelope Rowlands | The American Scholar | 7th April 2022

Holbein’s status as a “supreme” portraitist bestows renown on all his works. Some, though, become famous in their own right. New York’s Frick holds two, a “lushly painted” Thomas More and a “slit-eyed, hunted” Thomas Cromwell. The machinations of these adversaries and the convoluted path of the works before falling into Frick’s hands are the subject of this elegant essay. Perhaps enjoying the historical antagonism, Frick hung them either side of a mantlepiece, “staring each other down”.

12th April 2022

Mondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, review: not cold and sterile, but imperfect and human

Alastair Sooke | The Telegraph | 2nd April 2022

Art history sees Mondrian as an austere intellectual whose painted “pristine” abstractions. Well, perhaps he was livelier than that. He spent decades experimenting before producing his wonderful abstractions, so he knew about imperfection. In some paintings “his black lines break off abruptly … sometimes they are not even straight. And those planes of supposed white are, in fact, all manner of subtle shades”. His paintings, in the flesh, reveal Mondrian as “social, mortal and approachable”.

The Theology of Perspective

Robert Good | a-n | 27th March 2022

Hockney – he of the sunny swimming pools – has a serious side. He argues that western painting is too influenced by ‘linear’ Renaissance perspective. Cameras and camera-devices are to blame (excellently explained here) and it matters because a single point view doesn’t reflect our actual visual experience. For starters, linear perspective puts the viewer outside a scene whereas two-eyed viewers experience a scene from within. The “one-camera view of the world” Hockney says “can’t show you that much.”

Candida Höfer composes staggering portraits of vacant public spaces

Emily McDermott | Wallpaper | 28th March 2022

Höfer’s images have been criticized as being emotionless architectural photography. Yes, all her images are deserted building interiors – libraries, theaters, museums, opera houses. But emotionless? These are social spaces that, when empty, almost shout their expectations of their users. Says Höfer “What interests me is … what a space does to the imagination. What does the space intend? What did happen … how would I feel being in that space?” Images are here.

Neuroscience Gets in the Way of Appreciating Art

Kevin Berger | Nautilus | 6th April 2022

Some neuroscientists claim their science can explain our experience of art. What’s wrong with that? Plenty, says Noë, a philosopher. In the domain of aesthetic experience “there’s something intellectually bullying [when neuroscience says] “here’s the truth about you. There’s never any right or wrong way to see art. What I deny is that neuroscience is the aesthetic arbiter. Neuroscience thinks it’s doing science when really it’s participating in aesthetic conversation.”

Raphael, National Gallery review: ‘A show that adds heroic scale, bromance, even sex to effortless beauty’

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 8th April 2022

It’s possible that Raphael’s “luminosity and clarity” and serene Madonnas mean he will never have contemporary resonance. But think of the big picture. A “master” painter at 17, then a noted portraitist in Florence, commissioned at 25 to paint the Vatican apartments, by his 30’s he had produced “some of the key works of the western tradition”. Even casual portraits of his friends have “breathtaking fluency”. More than enough to “run out into the street and shout “I love Raphael””.

Commission impossible: why galleries love buying ‘off the plan’

John McDonald | The Sydney Mornijng Herald | 8th April 2022

A newly expanded Sydney museum is on a “commissioning binge”. Why buy work in this way when the market for existing work offers a wide choice? Is the museum wanting to influence the type of work deemed “significant”? Artists are faced with a dilemma – is the money sufficient to endure having to accommodate a curator’s tastes? Such institutions are “no longer holding up a mirror of our times, but actively trying to stage-manage art history.”

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