The Easel

2nd August 2022

Jennifer Bartlett, Titan of the New York Scene Who Forged a New Path for Painting, Dies at 81

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 26th July 2022

Bartlett loved the grid pattern, not so much for its aesthetics but because she “liked to organize things”. Squares were coloured using a maths program, yet somehow this austere-sounding approach produced paintings that retained emotional, and sometimes figurative qualities.   Her epic work, Rhapsody (1976), comprising 987 steel plates painted in enamel, was described by one critic as “simultaneously landscape, object, and map”. Bartlett, he said “thought, painted, and lived large”.

New York: 1962-1964 at the Jewish Museum, New York City

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 26th July 2022

New York eclipsed Paris in the early 1960’s with a torrent of new art and artists. Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Lichtenstein and many more responded to the social change of the time with “a new sense of beauty [arising from] the disorder of city life”. Accolades for Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale confirmed New York’s art world ascendancy. Peter Schjeldahl’s elegant (but less informative) personal recollection is outside the New Yorker paywall here.

The Modern’s sensational ‘Women Painting Women’ exhibition aims to balance the scales

Matthew Bourbon | The Dallas Morning News | 23rd June 2022

Aware of the underrepresentation of women in post-war figurative art, a “magnificent” Texas show comprises just works of women, by women. As one would expect, women’s “realistic complexity” is revealed in states of “realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness”. Not all these works are factual – “anytime an artist depicts a human being there is fiction involved”. It’s just that we can see a diversity of fictions, “outside of male interpretations of the female body”.

The Clamor of Ornament, Drawing Center — Unnecessary Desires

Staff | News of Canada | 30th July 2022

Ornamentation can get caught in the debate between traditional tastes for decoration and modernism’s zeal for clean, uncluttered lines. The writer suggests that ornamentation reflects “a global need for abundance and complexity.” Ornaments all “start locally” but centuries of borrowing ideas from everywhere means that claims of ownership are dubious. Except, that is, for designs from indigenous populations, which have regularly been ignored.

Human bones, stolen art: Smithsonian tackles its ‘problem’ collections

Peggy McGlone | The Washington Post | 27th July 2022

The recent repatriation of Benin bronzes from the Smithsonian and elsewhere suggests that the restitution debate is over. Perhaps not. Past museum acquisition policies allowed “a whole bunch of, like, crappy behaviour” of which the bronzes were obvious examples. Smithsonian wants to engage with communities on restitution issues, a huge task given its 155m item collection. One official admits “there is a limit to our capacity”. Another adds “there’s unfortunately no tag that says ‘stolen’”.

John Berger on What the West Can Learn from Indonesian Art

John Berger | ArtReview | 22nd July 2022

Appreciating art from other cultures is a challenge. Work by the “genius” Indonesian artist Affandi has features we find strange – unstretched, rough canvasses, bright colours, lesser quality in some works. This reflects his attitude to art which is an art “of participation rather than contemplation”.  Writing in 1952, Berger argued that “aesthetics have triumphed over vitality” in Western art. Affandi, in contrast, has a “complete, unselfconscious loyalty” to Indonesians that outweighs his concern for “Taste”.

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.

Older links
Newer links