The Easel

15th November 2022

Still hot. Maurice Sendak’s ageless imagination

Nicole Rudick | Artforum | 31st October 2022

Believing children capable of pragmatic thinking, Sendak’s acclaimed illustrations combine “seriousness and play … and above all, truthfulness”. ‘To convey this complexity he frequently drew on art history. His art in Mr Rabbit and the Lovely Present, for example, seems to set the story in Monet’s gardens. Other work contains “a symphony of homages” to Titian, El Greco and Blake. All were used in “blending a child’s perspective with the visual vocabulary of “grown up” fine art”.

Hollow City

Jackson Arn | The Baffler | 2nd November 2022

The Whitney’s Hopper exhibition is different, it claims, because it highlights his focus on New York. Hopper’s paintings, though, are not exactly strong evidence. Where are the New York crowds, or New York’s looming skyscrapers? Are we back to Hopper’s theme of “quiet desperation”? Perhaps not – his New Yorkers don’t seem miserable but instead, seem to just “sit and wait”.  If Hopper’s pictures have a mood of despair, they also carry a “twinge of hope”. In this particular city, things can change.

We’re Witnessing the Birth of a New Artistic Medium

Stephen Marche | The Atlantic | 28th September 2022

Sensible optimism. When photography emerged in the 1850’s, it was called the “mortal enemy” of art. Of course, things didn’t turn out that way. The same applies to AI. “It’s simply going to reconfigure the nature of creativity, as machines have been doing since the advent of modernity.” What form that creativity might finally take is an unanswered but “tremendously joyful” question. “Creative AI is the art of big data … what could be more suitable to our moment?”

Edouard Manet, the man who shocked France with nudity, executions and everyday life

Michael Prodger | Country Life | 2nd November 2022

A profile. Manet could be difficult – ambitious, petty, provocative, “never shy of the unorthodox”. When sentimental pastoral vistas were popular, he painted life in Paris. Rejected by the 1867 Exposition, he simply hired a venue and exhibited himself. So what? Besides, his own innovative (but misunderstood) painting, Manet mentored “young rebels” such as the Impressionists and was prophetic in his challenge to the art establishment to accept the radical art arriving on its doorstep.

Extraordinary Bronze Statues Discovered at the Sanctuary of San Casciano dei Bagni

Gary Manners | Ancient Origins | 8th November 2022

Before the Romans, it was the Etruscans who dominated central Italy. In “one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of the ancient Mediterranean” a trove of 24 well preserved Etruscan statues has been found near Florence. They are notable for being bronze (rather than terra cotta) and date to the period – about 200 BCE – when the Romans were gradually absorbing the Etruscan civilisation. Says an official “It’s a discovery that will rewrite history”. More images are here.

Lee Bontecou, Artist of Delightfully Uncategorizable Sculptures, Dies at 91

Jasmine Liu | Hyperallergic | 9th November 2022

Recognition arrived quickly for Bontecou, on the strength of her unclassifiable sculptural reliefs – bulbous works with fabric stretched across a metal armature. Often, they featured a central black void-like structure. She didn’t help much by way of explanation, stating that these works were “too rich” for minimalism (obvious) but weren’t about “feminist issues”. Over the last decade there has been a revival of interest in her work. A video is here and detailed review here.

8th November 2022

Easel Essay: Armour for contemporary living

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 8th November 2022

Readers can be assured that Morgan Meis is about as far from a dedicated fashionista as one can get. Yet, the recent death of the designer Issey Miyake prompted him to write an appreciation. Apart from being a survivor of Hiroshima, what was it that made Miyake so special?

Miyake was “one of the great popular artists of the last hundred years. He wanted to make art that could be worn by everyone. Maybe his greatest accomplishment was to have tackled polyester. Polyester is not high fashion. His ready-to-wear line, Pleats Please, is polyester. The pleats create a sense of elegance and structure to the garments. You can put Pleats Please garments in your luggage and they come out again looking great. He managed to create a kind of soft and gentle armature against the uncertainties of contemporary life and, especially for women, against the constant pressure of bodily perfection.”

A Painting for a World in Collapse

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 28th October 2022

Géricault’s great work, The Raft of the Medusa, was made amidst political turmoil in France, “art made … waist-deep in the mud of politics”. Contemporary artists who make ‘political art’ could learn from the power of this work. Most importantly, Medusa was innovative art and not just about politics. Much political art, in contrast, is “dogged, generic”. The Medusa “is great not for what it’s supposed to be about but for the ways it employs imagination. It starts conversations rather than ends them.”

Alex Katz’s Massive Guggenheim Retrospective Is the Season’s Biggest Disappointment

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 2nd November 2022

Some critics have misgivings about Katz. Reviewing his 1986 retrospective, one disapproved of the “prettiness” of his art and claimed that he lacked a sense of the “weight, pathos and energy of the human body”. Decades on, Katz hasn’t shaken off the doubters. Granted, the deadpan, Pop-inspired aesthetic he brought to his early portraits was innovative. Further, some think his paintings of social gatherings are “astute”. For this writer, though, Katz’s art, once “edgy, has calcified and grown stale”.

Steve Keene’s art caters for the many, not the few

Staff | The Economist | 24th October 2022

Keene trained as an artist but then decided ‘quantity over quality’. For decades he has painted about 10,000 works a year (not a typo) and priced them to be “irresistible”. Small pieces sell for about $5. Bigger pieces are available at 6 for $70. His images are often derived from popular culture, use bright colours and have quirky text. Art, says Keene, is a “system of losing yourself or finding infinity. Or something”. A good backgrounder is here and a recently released book is here.

The Magic of Reality

James Balestrieri | Art and Antiques | 1st November 2022

Trompe lóeil, the illusionistic protruding of objects beyond the picture plane, is often derided as optical trickery. A New York exhibition draws attention to just how often trompe lóeil tropes occur in Picasso and Braque’s cubist work. Why was it important to them? Because trompe lóeil and cubism were, in different ways, playing the same game – using visual deception to make the viewer question perception. As the writer notes, “Perception itself is a kind of magic trick”. An excellent video is here.

What Remains of the NFT Hype

Carola Padtberg | Der Spiegel | 4th November 2022

Things have gone rather quiet on the NFT front. Perhaps that is due in part to such works having lost, on average, 92% of their value in the past year. Still, the writer is not pessimistic about NFT’s because “a scene of serious artists” continues to make virtual works. Some use AI to make images, others focus on bringing virtual images “into the analog space” using a 3D printer. Those artists are pleased the hype has cooled – “It will separate the wheat from the chaff”.

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre

Julia Curl | Hyperallergic | 2nd November 2022

After a long-running retrospective of the Bechers work, a postscript. Their hugely influential photography of industrial structures is sometimes criticized for being “aloof, impersonal”. How can it be impersonal when their work is so “immediately identifiable?” Their images reveal not just “an elemental beauty of geometry” but also the “human individuality” of these structures.  “Google “black and white industrial photograph” and nothing even remotely similar appears.”

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