The Easel

26th July 2022

The Met’s New Show Dispels the Myth of White Greek Sculpture in a Blaze of Color

Tessa Solomon | ARTnews | 25th July 2022

Both the Egyptians and Greeks attached meaning to colours and painted their sculptures accordingly. But pigments fade. By Michelangelo’s day, sculptors idealised white marble, unpainted, not just because it highlighted “pure form” but also because they thought they were copying the ancients. Modern painted replicas of ancient works, dismissed by some as “brassy, vulgar, will likely change how we interpret them. Says the museum director “for some, it will be a shock”. A video is here.

The Webb Telescope Shows the Universe as We Hope to See It

Pippa Goldschmidt | ArtReview | 19th July 2022

The aesthetics of space. Light detected by the Webb telescope is transmitted as numbers and subsequently shown as arbitrarily assigned colours. Images are oriented so that browns appear underneath areas of blue, resembling the 19th century’s language of the sublime. These aesthetic choices reinforce astronomy’s “heroic aspects – it’s us alone facing the mighty and awesome cosmos … and we’re able to understand it with our human-sized technology.”

A Blockbuster Met Exhibit Shows How Bernd And Hilla Becher Turned Industrial Blight Into High Art

Jonathon Keats | Forbes | 18th July 2022

Bernd and Hilla Becher spent decades photographing industrial plants, starting with Germany’s Ruhr Valley. A “monumental” retrospective reveals their strictly “neutral” approach – front-on portrait format, no human presence and shot in flat light to minimise shadow. This approach highlighted sculptural form, giving objects like blast furnaces the “dignity of artwork”. It was a groundbreaking step for photography and recognized at the 1990 Venice Biennale with a Golden Lion … for sculpture.

When did humans start making art and were Neanderthals artists too?

Michael Marshall | The New Scientist | 15th July 2022

We tend to think of art as a uniquely human activity.  Well, science might spoil that story. New dating technologies suggest that European cave art could be much older than first thought and include symbolic markings by pre-modern species such as Neanderthals. That undercuts the story that only homo sapiens were interested in and capable of art making. Going back to the start, then, art may be an inherently human activity but perhaps not a uniquely human activity.

Brutalism: What Is It and Why Is It Making a Comeback?

Jessica Stewart | MyModernMet | 12th April 2022

Brutalist architecture is, shall we say, an acquired taste. For some decades after WW2 it was all the rage – “rational” modernist design that expressed ideals of a better, more egalitarian society. Its subsequent fall from favour is not surprising – concrete is expensive to maintain and, after a while, can look oppressive. So why the recent revival? Is it its “graphic quality” or because “permanence is particularly attractive in our chaotic and crumbling world”? More images are here.

Henry Moore: The sculptor who achieved the impossible

Laura Gascoigne | Country Life | 17th June 2022

A nice bio piece on the perennially popular Moore. The themes of his career were evident from the outset – mother and child figures, the influence of pre-Columbian sculpture, elemental human and landscape forms. Picasso’s “dominance” in art prior to WW2 shows in Moore’s emphasis on abstraction but, post-war (and by then a family man), he moved toward figuration. This writer’s indicator of Moore’s talent – he could break for lunch every day without losing his creative impulse.

19th July 2022

Remembering Claes Oldenburg

Siri Engberg | Walker | 18th July 2022

A critic once called Oldenburg “the thinking person’s Walt Disney, the most inventive of the Pop artists”. His small 1962 sculpture “Two cheeseburgers, with everything” (see this video) epitomized a keen eye for the self-contradictory. This interest emerged in his later public artworks of prosaic objects such as a clothespeg, made strange by their monumental scale and impracticality. Such works speak loudly to Oldenburg’s love of art that “does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”

In Chicago, there’s no unseeing the world Cezanne left us

Philip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 15th June 2022

The critic Barbara Rose said that every Cezanne painting asks the question “is this what I see?” His still-lifes largely ignore perspective – we don’t see a bowl with 12 apples, we have the impression of a table full of fruit. The writer notes “how little information Cezanne gives the viewer”. Perhaps he intended his paintings to only provide essential “visual data”, leaving the viewer to recognize the image. No wonder he is seen as “the patron saint of the 20th century and abstraction”. More images are here.

Milton Avery: conversations with colour

Kelly Grovier | Royal Academy | 11th July 2022

Avery came to art late – he made his “breakthrough” work at 60 – but then produced work of “astonishing resplendence”. Was he a quirky follower of Matisse or someone who saw more radical uses of colour? The above piece definitely thinks the latter but other opinions vary. Avery only painted “things seen”, observes one critic. The more radical step – using colour to “evoke thoughts and feelings rather than to describe the visible world” – had to await the next generation.

Larry Bell saturates senses and bends perception at Hauser & Wirth London

Harriet Lloyd-Smith | Wallpaper | 23rd May 2022

A casual job at an art framing studio taught Bell that glass absorbs, reflects and transmits light. That inspired his art career. Glass panes, coated with chemicals to alter its colour and reflectivity, are assembled into geometric shapes that create “sensory saturation, a collision of right angles, colors and planes”. Bell’s acclaimed large standing works “exist in in-between worlds; their currency is their illusion; how volume can be so heavily implied, without needing to exist”. More images are here.

Finding the forgotten

James Balestrieri | Art and Antiques | 1st July 2022

Once Spain established colonies in the New World, it became for some centuries the world’s dominant power. The “provincial” art from its Spanish-American empire expressed a hybrid Christian-Indigenous culture that, to European eyes, implied a “pliant” indigenous attitude to Spanish rule. Yet, because the “vitality and energy” of these works equaled anything in Europe, they comprise a “subtle form of cultural subversion … a thumb in the eye of authority”. More images are here.

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