The Easel

14th February 2023

King Tut’s long, long afterlife

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 14th February 2023

The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun was a great moment in archeology and culture. A century on, Tut remains a figure of great fascination.  Contributing Editor, Morgan Meis, delves into the strange attraction of the tomb’s art that sat unseen under the desert sands for millennia.

[All that bling in the tomb], including the actual body of the deceased king, was a way to ensure stability of the cosmic order. The mummy of Tutankhamun, and all the stuff he was surrounded by in that tomb, weren’t meant to go anywhere. They were meant to stay right there, forever. The ancient Egyptians weren’t really obsessed with the afterlife. They were obsessed with life. The giant pyramids of ancient Egypt are not launching pads to the hereafter; they are giant weights that keep divine order firmly anchored in the material realm.

There will never be another Vermeer show as great as this one

Philip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 7th February 2023

Vermeer died penniless, in 1675 and was ignored for two centuries. A retrospective, “one of the most thrilling exhibitions ever conceived “ seemingly cannot explain why he is now so famous. A mastery of light and perspective, his exquisitely careful compositions, are all important, but hardly new. One critic looks elsewhere – “What happened to us, after Vermeer’s long oblivion, to leave us so susceptible to his hushed views of writers and maids”? Video narration of the show (4 min) is here.

Getty Museum Presents Porcelain from Versailles: Vases for a King & Queen

Jeffrey Weaver | Getty | 7th February 2023

On matters of refined taste, eighteenth century Europe looked to France. At the top of any ‘must-have’ list was Sèvres porcelain. The Sèvres factory – originally owned by Louis XVI – had developed hard paste porcelain that fired white and enabled a variety of decorated surfaces. The vases owned by Louis and Marie Antionette, that somehow survived the Revolution, are regarded as among the finest achievements in porcelain. They are, says one writer “extremely important and extremely fabulous”.

Peter Doig at the Courtauld Gallery review: magnificence among the masters

Ben Luke | Evening Standard | 9th February 2023

Doig is often called a painter’s painter, a recognition of his painterly skills and distinctive, rich imagery. His canoes floating on forest lakes or, more recently, sunny island scenes are shifting combinations of the remembered and the magical. Not infrequently, they feel vaguely unsettling. “Doig is unmatched in contemporary painting in just this equilibrium of the specific and the inchoate … of unusual colour and of unexplained but intriguing incident across the canvas.”

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits that question history

Kelly Grovier | bbc.com | 17th January 2023

During a brief, covid-interrupted run, this show’s reviews mostly focused on Yiadom-Boyake as a portraitist. Second time around, attention turns to just how enigmatic her portraits are. These are imagined characters, not easily linked to a particular moment or place. Despite the “mute language and furtive glances” there is rarely a narrative. Yiadom-Boakye has taken a genre usually focused on white males and given it vitality through a new focus – “the infinite possibility of blackness”.

When art entered the computer age

Lady Cactoid | rightclicksave | 7th February 2023

Before personal computers, computer art involved writing code for mainframe machines. Even then though, inspiration was drawn from modernists like Mondrian or the subsequent conceptualist and minimalist movements. Musicians were also quick to see potential in computers. The first work was computer drawings using typeface but quickly became more elaborate. Interest in computer art faded once the PC arrived but not before Rauschenberg had declared computer code “the new artistic material.”

Richard Avedon’s Overwhelming Murals

Vince Aletti | The New Yorker | 23rd January 2023

By the late 1960’s Avedon was running out of creative puff and looking for new inspiration. He launched into a series of huge group portraits of those he thought culturally influential. More interesting than the inevitable Warhol images are the dynamics between his subjects. Said Avedon “a portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.”

7th February 2023

Giorgio Morandi review – sublime still lives shimmer with mystery and joy

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 7th January 2023

Cezanne’s many studies of apples greatly inspired Morandi. Yet it is the Italian, this writer claims, who made the still life genre a “20th century art form”. How did Morandi do that?  Many critics note the intensity of focus he brought to his modest collections of vases, bottles and dishes. It reflects his respect for life in Bologna, as well as a personal humility. His carefully arranged bottles, so precisely observed, thus come to have a poetic quality – this is art that “aches with humanity and love”.

Dame Vivienne Westwood – the godmother of punk

Staff | bbc.com | 30th December 2022

Westwood was one of the few fashion designers to become a cultural force. She was made so by her irreverent punk and new wave designs that changed “how clothing could be used to express social and political norms”. One obituary described her designs as “rooted in the English tradition of pastiche and irony and satire”. Westwood’s own view was somewhat related: “It’s not about fashion. For me, it’s about the story. It’s about ideas”. More images are here.

A history of Spain in 150 objects

Michael Prodger | The New Statesman | 21st January 2023

New York’s Hispanic Society has loaned out some of its spectacular collection to help pay for renovations. In London the tapestries and ceramics of Spain’s Islamic period impress, but then Velazquez and Goya appear and their paintings carry the show. Critics tip toe carefully around Spain’s brutal colonial record, suggesting that a full reckoning is some way off. Is there a unifying theme to this “four millennia worth of artifacts”? One critic suggests “a sense of Spanish pride”.

Soul is the goal for Killip and Smith

Colin Pantall | Blind | 3rd February 2023

Thatcher’s tough economic policies in the 1980’s still remain divisive in parts of Britain. Chris Killip and Graham Smith, leading photographers of that period, captured the impact of those policies on the impoverished communities of northern England, many of which were ill-equipped to cope. This is documentary photography at its most powerful. More images are here.

Philip Pearlstein Painted the Naked Truth

Samantha Baskind | Smithsonian Magazine | 9th January 2023

Abstract expressionism in post-war New York indoctrinated the art world that the picture is a flat plane, without depth. Pearlstein’s realist paintings – with illusionistic depth – which he began in the 1960’s, thus came as a shock. Often, he painted nudes, seeing the body as “a kind of complex still-life object”. These were works concerned with form and perspective. And that is the calling card of realism, a style that Pearlstein revitalized in American art. A video (27 min) is here.

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