The Easel

31st May 2022

Easel Essay: Goya: Bearing true witness

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 31st May 2022

Once he was appointed as court painter to Charles IV, Goya knew nothing but worldly success. Yet, over his career, his art became bleaker, culminating in the “Black Paintings” done on the walls of his final house. The usual explanation is that Goya, beset with ill health and appalled by war, became disillusioned. While that is true, says Morgan Meis, there is more.

“Human beings tend to clump together. It just happens. It is born of randomness and yearning, of anger or of dreaming. Goya was interested in this clumping … and perceived clumps and pyramids [everywhere]. In this sense, Goya was never a painter of The Enlightenment. He was a painter of tendencies and forces that are deeper and more fundamental. Clumping was, for Goya, a core truth not to be denied.”

Why we’re all still screaming for Edvard Munch

Alastair Smart | The Independent | 23rd May 2022

Munch had woes – anxiety, alcoholism, unsuccessful romances. They appear in his work via a vocabulary of symbols, such as staring eyes, sunken cheeks and pallid skin, collectively expressing his view of the self as “a battleground”. A show of his overlooked early work reveals a more nuanced Munch, one more obviously connected into European art of his time. For a change, the omnipresent The Scream is absent. That, says one critic, is “very welcome”.

Eye-catching textiles from India, at the Textile Museum

Mark Jenkins | The Washington Post | 18th May 2022

Indian textiles have long been a case study in diversity. Regional differences have always existed in the raw materials and dyes used and the customer base spans all social classes. As Islamic influences grew in northern India from around the 12th century, floral and figurative elements started appearing. Chintz, with its floral designs, arrived in the 1700’s and, via its popularity as a sofa covering, now influences interior design everywhere. A quick tour of the history of Indian textiles is here.

Celebrating 50 Years of ‘Ways of Seeing’

Jeremy Millar and others | Frieze | 25th May 2022

In 1969 the BBC screened Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. Three years later it broadcast Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Where Clark offered scholarly veneration, Berger used plain English to argue that art reflects society’s values. A Gainsborough landscape was, to Clark, an enchantment but to Berger a celebration of property ownership. Berger also pointed out that, in art, “men act and women appear”. And, he anticipated our media age where images “structure our understanding of ourselves”.

Damien Hirst’s Natural History at Gagosian

Mersa Auda | The Upcoming | 30th March 2022

When Hirst first exhibited a shark in a tank of formaldehyde, it shocked. A similar work of cow and calf soon won him the Turner Prize. Does a show featuring 30 years of such works bring another round of applause?  Not exactly. Some criticize him for “wasting” animal lives, though he is surely not alone in this. The bigger criticism is a clear lack of inspiration. Says this writer “most of the works seem lazy or forced [and] points to a lack of worthy ideas”. Another is more acerbic – “art for oligarchs”.

Sean Scully: the Shape of Ideas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 27th April 2022

Scully’s work is so often on show that it takes a “massive” retrospective to attract attention. This review falls toward the ‘adoring’ end of the spectrum but is thorough. Scully’s early career in New York yielded tight geometric abstractions. Since his acclaimed Backs and Fronts in 1981, his work has become less tightly controlled, more self-expressive. The writer admiringly uses Robert Hughes’ comment that Scully’s stripes possess “something fierce … a grandeur shaded by awkwardness”.

24th May 2022

Cornelia Parker exposes the hidden meanings of everyday objects

Michael Prodger | The New Statesman | 17th May 2022

Parker, a conceptual artist, is nothing if not resourceful. One work comprises the fragments of a garden shed, reassembled after being blown up by the military. There’s silverware flattened by a steamroller. A tapestry made in part by lawyers and criminals. These are objects each of which has a back story that changes their meaning. Parker describes it as “sympathetic magic”. The reviewer says its “a kind of alchemy, turning mundanity into profundity”.

Seen as They Are

Celia Paul | Commonweal | 9th May 2022

Paul, a British portraitist, discusses the genre. “Rembrandt depicts himself in old age as he is—the squashy nose and sagging jowls—but it is clear that he accepts himself. Lucian’s [Freud] and Rodin’s main subject is ‘flesh’ [but their] emotion is sometimes overblown and theatrical. Old age has always been my subject matter. I often think of those old women [subjects]… and I wonder at their inner reserves … riven as they all must be by memories and fear of the approaching dark.”

‘It’s worse than the USSR’: how the censors returned to Russian art

Owen Matthews | The Telegraph | 20th May 2022

It seems like there is a slowly unfolding crisis in Moscow’s contemporary art world. Until recently a booming sector with new world-class museums, the start of the war with Ukraine has marked “another age”. Censorship measures have emerged along with pressures to be “patriotic”. As a result, some institutions have lost staff and cancelled exhibitions. Says one uncertain artist “There could be a creative explosion like in the 1920s … or we could be heading into a swamp.”

Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’

Naomi Grant | London Review of Books | 12th May 2022

When Gainsborough painted this famous work, the “fancy picture” was fashionable. These were pictures intended for public viewing, sentimental and often featuring children. Blue Boy was intended as one of these but isn’t entirely successful. It is “rather brown” which, in reproductions, makes the blue stand out. This masks the “shortcomings of [Gainsborough’s] colour management … the fabric never really shines, it just tells us it does.”

Breyer P-Orridge

Elvia Wilk | 4Columns | 13th May 2022

A New York show highlights the body modification art of Breyer P-Orridge. Two artists who shared an enthusiasm for pandrogyny (total equality, oneness), their art was to merge their distinct selves into a single presence. Matching plastic surgery was frequent, reflecting a view that bodies are but “cheap suitcases”, destined to become obsolete. Breyer P-Orridge’s view was that “difference is the core problem”. A startled reviewer responds, “the self is … where the potential of intimacy lies.”

Architecture or Jewelry? Josef Hoffmann’s Modern Brooches

Magda Michalska | Daily Art Magazine | 2nd May 2022

The Vienna Werkstätte was dedicated to the decorative arts. Led by Hoffmann, a pioneering modernist architect, it aspired to create gesamtkunstwerk a ‘total work of art’. His jewellery combined Japanese “vegetal patterns” with a modern geometric aesthetic, seemingly contradictory elements that yielded designs “monumental in their minimalized architectural forms”. They anticipated both art deco and the later International Style. Images of other Hoffmann designs are here.

Radical Landscapes review – ‘Is loving green fields really wicked?’

Jonathon Jones | The Guardian | 6th May 2022

The Brits love their damp landscape. A show suggests that traditional “conservative” landscapes – think Constable – are better represented as places of “trespass, land use and the climate emergency”. Why make this the predominant way to view the great outdoors?  “Love of landscape not only has radical and conservative sides but they coexist in the same work of art, the same experience of nature. If loving green fields is wicked, why go there?”

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