The Easel

17th May 2022

Bringing The Procession to life

Joel Campbell | The Voice | 4th April 2022

London’s Tate – founded on a Caribbean sugar fortune – must have seen this coming when awarding its annual installation commission to Locke, an artist of Caribbean heritage. Locke’s vast, “extraordinary” work contains over 100 cardboard and fabric figures, arranged in a flamboyant procession. A more careful look reveals colonialist icons and symbols everywhere, giving the colourful work a slightly sinister edge. “It’s about history, but it’s about sugar, you’re dealing with Tate, you have to deal with that.”

Matthew Wong’s life in light and shadow

Raffi Katchadurian | The New Yorker | 9th May 2022

Wong, a Canadian artist, died young after an art career marked by “a furious outpouring” of work and disrupted by mental illness. His artistic development was lived out on social media and reveals how he came to make works of “astonishing lyricism, melancholy, whimsy, intelligence, and, perhaps most important, sincerity”.  He was, says one critic, “a genius from nowhere.” A shorter piece focused on a current exhibition is here.

The vibrating beingness of Seurat’s pointillist paintings

Summer Brennan | Psyche | 10th May 2022

Seurat thought colourful Impressionism needed the discipline of the Old Masters. His remedy was pointillism – painting with meticulously applied dots of “simultaneously contrasting” colours. This technique “aims to deconstruct the act of seeing … Something about Seurat’s work just pulls you in. The mind wants patterns in the same way that the eye wants colours to merge. We want definition and borders. But sometimes, no matter how hard we try to keep it together, we cannot.”

Dissident artist Alexander Archipenko rediscovered in the Estorick Collection

Staff | newsofcanada | 7th May 2022

Paris in 1910 was a magnet for modernist artists, among them the eastern European sculptors Brancusi and Kyiv-born Archipenko. Rejecting Rodin as “outdated”, Archipenko used the new ideas of cubism to create elegant, radical biomorphic forms. Italian Futurists loved his “optimistic sculptures of a Brave New World” and their advocacy only increased his influence. All this caught the eye of an unknown Giacometti, who moved to Paris and, in 1925, rented Archipenko’s former studio.

Swirls of flesh: Dorothea Tanning at Kasmin Gallery

Jackson Arn | Art in America | 13th May 2022

A recent biography of Tanning claimed that she occupies “a singular position in the history of modern art”. Some reviews of her current show in New York are similarly enthusiastic. But not all. The linked piece suggests that her early Surrealist works overstate her whole of career achievement. “On the whole, her efforts amount to overtures more than full symphonies”. And what’s the problem with that? “Great becomes meaningless when nothing can be merely good.”

Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet

Allen Tager | Psyche | 23rd June 2021

The colour violet, it seems, carries a mystery. An analysis of 14 large art museums reveals that, before the 1860’s, less than 4% of paintings used violet. For the rest of the 19th century, it appears in 37% of paintings and, in twentieth century paintings, 43%. The explanation offered is, in part, that violet rarely appears in nature.  The Impressionists, looking for colours to contrast with the yellow sunshine they loved to paint, discovered that violet worked well. “Violettomania” howled the critics.

10th May 2022

The Space Between: An Introduction to the Exhibition

Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani | Yale Centre for British Art | 3rd March 2022

Longish, but insightful. Riley’s early black and white abstractions were so startling they were viewed as optical illusions. Time has revealed that to be a gross underestimation. Her prolific output is about “open space, shallow space, multifocal space”, an exploration of perception via the use of ovals, circles and lines. From mid-career, Riley’s increasingly “liberated” use of colour has been an exploration of a different kind – “I was trying to paint sensation.”

Full frontal flatness – Marlene Dumas in Venice, reviewed

Edward Behrens | Apollo | 1st April 2022

Dumas paints portraits, mostly single figures. From that point, her work heads off in all directions, addressing death, eroticism, gender politics, racism. But if her subject matter is various, many of her works share a certain starkness. One critic calls the show “extraordinary” but this writer seems to feel  confronted by that style. “There isn’t a sense here of ‘the pleasures of painting’ … It is fascinating to look at them, but it is also unnerving”. Or, as Dumas has said “A painting is not a postcard.”

Andreas Gursky

Max Dax | Gagosian Quarterly | 5th May 2022

Gursky makes photography seem analogous to painting. Some analogies are purely visual. People in a frozen landscape look like a Breugel painting; images of tulips have a “formal similarity” to Rothko. Then there are analogies coming from how he manipulates his images – for example, adding a jet’s contrail to a landscape. That suggests a conceptual analogy – paintings and photography both need an underlying inspiration. Gursky’s current inspiration … “portents of a period of upheaval”.

Artist Simone Leigh’s work transforms the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Lauren Williams | wbur.org | 22nd April 2022

Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the USA at Venice, states quite plainly that her work primarily addresses other Black women. If that seems exclusionary, it’s worth considering how little of the art canon was intended to be inclusionary. Leigh’s art – notably her bold ceramic and bronze statues – sympathetically imagine a history of Black women that was never written. These works have “grandeur … the power that exudes from Leigh’s art is unrelenting.”

Matisse’s Miracle in Red

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 3rd May 2022

When Matisse’s painted The Red Studio, his adoring patron baulked. Its “flat pictorial figuration” and enveloping Venetian red created “weird spatial architectonics” that, in 1911, were shocking. Ignored for decades it is now thought a masterpiece. Why? Sensing a distant future of contemporary art, Matisse was “an artist turning away from the “real” world of space, structure, color, narrative, surface, and composition — an artist bound for new beauty”. An excellent video with the curator (8 min) is here.

Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the devil

Zsuzsa Borbély | Papageno | 17th April 2022

A new Bosch show seems too soon after the 500th anniversary hoopla in 2016. Still, looking at the strange work of this star of the northern Renaissance is no chore. The writer struggles (unsuccessfully) to decode the demonic imagery. Why did Bosch provide so few clues about “the order of importance of what is seen”? Doesn’t this mirror modern life where “we are not always sure that we are always in the front when something is happening?” Morgan Meis’s Easel essay on Bosch is here.

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