The Easel

14th June 2022

Paula Rego: Yes, With A Growl

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 2nd November 2021

Of the many obituaries to appear following Rego’s death, this is among the best. One critic notes that she “uncovered a type of female experience that no one had depicted before.” True, but how? The best discussion of her work (by far) is Morgan Meis’ 2021 essay. “Rego believes in stories [yet] her paintings do not deliver clear-cut narratives. Her greatest paintings [veer] between obedience and defiance. Paula Rego once said, “To be bestial is good.” And yet, potential degradation lurks here too.”

Gaudí

Ana Beatriz Duarte | Studio International | 1st June 2022

Think Gaudí, think the huge Sagrada Familia! Huge yes, but he was also a fiend for detail. Early career house designs reveal that he was greatly influenced by art nouveau and its mantra that architecture and interior design be unified. He specified the smallest details, including wall panelling and furniture, all showing art nouveau’s sinuous lines. Likewise, the Sagrada Familia and its “extravagant” detailing. One reason, no doubt, it has taken so long to build. More images are here.

Senegal’s Dakar Biennale: From red swimmers to floating teapots

Annika Hammerschlag | bbc.com | 27th May 2022

The Dakar Biennale bills itself as West Africa’s top contemporary arts festival. With a 34-year track record and a roster of hundreds of featured artists, it seems a reasonable claim. Africa’s dark history of colonialism is a recurring theme across many shows but so too is exuberance and optimism. Says one artist of the event, its “a sort of beautiful disorder”. Background on some prominent artists is here, here and here.

Polymath Artist Frank Walter’s Paintings Shine at David Zwirner Gallery, Curated by Hilton Als

Annie Levin | Observer | 9th June 2022

When it first participated in the Venice Biennale in 2017, Antigua featured landscape artist Frank Walter. His landscapes are “off kilter”, taking the perspective of “an insect or a person who is lost”, implying that nature should be “a part of us”. They differ sharply from the European tradition of man ascendant over Nature. Walter’s works have been treated as “outsider art”, a categorization that is quite unhelpful. Judge art solely on its aesthetic merits, argues one writer – “would this be the worst thing?”

The plaster cast collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Eckart Marchard | The Burlington Magazine | 1st June 2022

If students of sculpture want to learn from canonical works, what do they do? Look at a plaster cast! The opening of a major collection of casts, near Budapest, may have one asking whether they belong in a museum. These are “dignified substitutes” that offer “excitingly unfamiliar perspectives” – casts of Michelangelo’s works are placed alongside casts of the classical works that he studied. Many other famous names are also represented, all “legitimate sons” of distant wonders.

A stolen, horribly damaged De Kooning gets the Getty treatment

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 31st May 2022

No wonder this epic tale has been turned into a film. De Kooning’s Woman-Ochre was taken by thieves in 1985 and serendipitously recovered in 2016. Substantially damaged during the theft, a restoration of nearly three years has returned the work to a “state of remarkable cohesion”. Now back on display, debate over the alleged misogyny of the work will probably resume: “Woman-Ochre will return to being its troublesome self – a picture loaded with sexual anxiety”.

Rejecting the Standard

Barbara MacAdam | Art and Antiques | 1st June 2022

As “dashingly radical” modernist art raced ahead in early twentieth century Europe, many American artists liked what they saw. Here were new ways to express the exuberant social change happening around them. Plenty of their works were “duds”, says one critic, too reliant on following Europe’s example. Overall, though, a show covering this period, with its roll call of overlooked artists, has real charm. It portrays a “less-than-coherent time” that saw “the ascendancy of abstraction” in a nation becoming modern.

7th June 2022

Nicholas Galanin

Aruna D’Souza | 4Columns | 3rd June 2022

Shows of contemporary indigenous art seldom receive such a full size review. Galanin’s multimedia work addresses the survival of traditional indigenous culture in the face of ghastly “assimilation” policies, as well as inappropriate handling of indigenous cultural objects. As befits an artist represented in some major public collections, this show is full of “indelible imagery”. Says the writer, “his art makes me squirm.”

The Art of Knowing When to Stop

Maxwell Carter | The Wall Street Journal | 27th May 2022

Picasso accused Bonnard of being “indecisive”. A new biography pushes back. While he admired both the Impressionists and, later, Cubism, Bonnard was a convert to neither. He loved domesticity and his interiors that show people and things dissolving into “in an iridescent haze” are the result of “a thousand tiny decisions piled on top of one another”. This was not indecision but Bonnard’s unique meditations on how what is seen gets represented on canvas. (Available outside the WSJ paywall here.)

How ‘Animal Crossing’ and the pandemic informed Takashi Murakami’s new Broad show

Deborah Vankin | LA Times | 23rd May 2022

Murakami is having a high-profile museum show, the first in years. His early works are a blizzard of “stridently cheerful” flowers and manga-influenced figures, presented in “primary colours and jewel tones”. Newer “darker” works, inspired by the pandemic and the Fukushima disaster, are rendered in “cotton candy pink, bright blue and lemon yellow”. And the curator is buzzy about his new AR works – “It’s the next step. He’s moving physical objects into the metaverse”. Images are here.

German art before the arrival of the Nazis

Ashley Cornell | Spam Chronicles | 12th May 2022

Germany in the 1920’s was “brutally” transforming, a result of military humiliation, febrile politics and the introduction of mass production techniques. Its art changed toward a “stoic”, less expressive figurative style that portrayed people as “interchangeable and disposable objects”.  Sander’s documentary photography was an exemplar of this “new objectivity”. It lasted but eight years, after which it suddenly was deemed degenerate. We all know what happened next.

The Prodigal Son of Spanish Baroque Art

Lauren Moya Ford | Hyperallergic | 2nd June 2022

Seville-based Murillo, one of the great religious painters of the Spanish Golden Age, loved to tell a story. The Prodigal Son was an ideal topic – a strong narrative but little detail that might restrict the artist’s imagination. Some of Murillo’s works are criticized as having “a bit of a bubble gum quality”. Not these. Full of little Seville details, they are an inventive and dynamic imagining of the protagonist’s progress “from lost to found”. Detail on the Prodigal Son cycle is here.

Why Britain should want to return the Parthenon Marbles, argued by a professor of Aegean archaeology

Jonny Walfisz | euronews.culture | 25th May 2022

Greece has long argued that Lord Elgin was a serial looter who took the Parthenon sculptures illegally. Britain has steadfastly maintained that the works were obtained fairly. British public attitudes have been shifting toward restitution and recently UNESCO announced that the two nations will hold formal talks. A breakthrough? Perhaps not – a British Museum official has suddenly announced a new justification for how the works were acquired. A case of two steps forward, one step back.

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