The Easel

25th October 2022

Jadé Fadojutimi: Can We See the Colour Green Because We Have a Name for It?

Beth Williamson | Studio International

Fadojutimi is young, and hot property. Still under 30, her work has already been acquired by Tate and she is represented at this year’s Venice Biennale. That’s the easy part. Rather more difficult is how to evaluate such a young artist with a limited output.  Her work has “intense graphic energy” and, says one critic, “exists in a thrilling mid-point between the abstract and the figurative”. The above writer expects Fadojutimi will eventually be ranked as one of the greats of British landscape painting.

One Man’s Trash

Eric Wills | The American Scholar | 24th October 2022

An ode to Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture, located east of Los Angeles. He was a social worker with a low-ish profile art career, who retired to the desert to make sculptures using salvaged materials. Dozens of works sit out in the open and “reveal themselves as if in some fever dream, their range and ambition astonishing.” A 2015 retrospective led one critic to describe Purifoy as “the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years.”

The painter who revealed how our eyes really see the world

Matthew Wilson | bbc.com | 18th October 2022

Not a review of Cezanne’s London show but rather an explanation of the visual effects observable in his paintings. Since Descartes, the eye was thought to be like a “passive camera”. Not so. The eye makes “continuous darting movements”, seeing objects from different perspectives, with varying levels of accuracy, and improvising in real time. “A conventional still life gives us a frozen moment … There’s no such thing as a present, Cézanne tells us – only a continuous flow between past and future.”

New Yorker Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl Dies at 80

Jasmine Liu | Hyperallergic | 22nd October 2022

Schjeldahl came to art criticism via poetry, a background that equipped him to say a lot in a few words. He only ever wrote essays (“I am a miniaturist”) and preferred painting above all other art forms. A stellar critic, he was by his own lights “just another art lover” who tried to communicate with clarity. “Writing clearly is immensely hard work that feels faintly insane, like painting the brightest possible target on my chest. To write clearly is to give oneself away.” Some notable essays are here.

Art and advertising collide in ‘Objects of Desire’

Susan Stamberg | NPR | 18th October 2022

In 1970, serious art photography had to be black and white, in an 8×10 format. Meanwhile, commercial photographers like Irving Penn were having a wild time working in colour. Eventually, artists began working with ads, manipulating them to create new meaning, while commercial photographers were picking up some of the aesthetics of art photography. It’s an obvious marriage, says one writer: “what is art without manipulation? What is advertising photography without seduction?

Turner prize 2022 review – as baffling as ever

Laura Cumming | The Guardian | 23rd October 2022

It’s Turner Prize season, with works by the four nominees now on display. Past controversial – even incomprehensible – nominations have been avoided in favour of (gasp) traditional-sounding artists. One critic likes the result – “ferocious imagination [given] blazing form”, but the above writer is more circumspect. While admiring the individual artists, she admits that this prize often seems like the art world talking to itself. “The Turner prize never makes any sense”.

18th October 2022

The Waning Years of Edward Hopper

Richard Lacayo | Literary Hub | 13th October 2022

By his late 60’s, Hopper – “the virtuoso of American solitude” – was being showered with accolades. His art, though, wasn’t exactly celebratory. He was conscious of the passing of time and his own “inevitable slow fade”. Ideas for new paintings were becoming scarce and even the profusion of awards did little to lift his mood. A friend visited while he was painting an image of a sunlit but empty room and asked the aging artist “what he was after in that picture. Hopper shot back. “I’m after ME!””

Why Art Was Such a Powerful Tool for England’s Tudor Monarchs

Meilan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | 11th October 2022

With a tenuous claim to the English crown, the volatile Tudors needed to boost themselves. Art was one way to do it and they spent grandly on paintings, tapestries, precious objects, anything that emphasised power and entitlement to rule. Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII are classic images of kingly virility. Elizabeth I tried to convey power by emphasising ageless beauty. “Elizabethan art isn’t naive. It’s not provincial. It’s the result of conscious choices.”

Now you see it, now you don’t: the blockbuster exhibition that’s not really there

Aviva Lowy | Plus 61J Media | 18th October 2022

Having staged a popular sculpture show, Jerusalem’s Botanical Gardens has followed up with an augmented reality exhibition. It features internationally recognized artists whose works appear on a smartphone as the viewer moves through a garden. Most works do not exist IRL. Does it work? “You walk inside [the Ai Wei Wei piece] … When you’ve had enough you can walk away. But people don’t. They go back to the exit. They continue walking around as if they are trapped inside”.

Diane Arbus was accused of exploiting ‘freaks’. We misunderstood her art

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 26th September 2022

Arbus was not a big name until a 1972 posthumous retrospective unleashed a fierce debate about her work. A re-creation of that show, on its 50th anniversary, again stirs the pot. Arbus said she celebrated “differentness”, but some accused her of voyeurism or of exploiting her subjects. That criticism now seems silly. “What artist isn’t interested in the gaps between … our private selves and the selves we present in public. Arbus was simply one of the first to recognize the camera’s unique way of revealing them”.

Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, National Gallery review – a powerful punch in the gut

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 5th October 2022

Yet another show of Freud portraits has one writer asking, “how much is too much?” Both curators and critics try to prioritise his paintings over retelling his colourful private life. So, what gives Freiud works their power? “Nearly all his encounters in the studio seem full of tension; there’s a power struggle going on. Who is in control?” One suggested answer – Freud was less interested in realism than the painting process: “the act of creation was more vital and rewarding than the end product”.

The irresistible cool of Bernice Bing

Jonathan Griffin | Apollo | 26th September 2022

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has long focused on its collection of ancient Asian works. Only now is it holding its first show of a contemporary Asian American female painter. Bing’s story began with a turbulent childhood in post war California, followed by an adult life as part of an ignored minority and a nearly invisible career as an abstract artist. Her “cohesive” works indicate she was able to “reconcile the separations in her selfhood”, but so late in life that she left a “fragile legacy”.

Older links
Newer links