The Easel

21st February 2023

How Donatello shaped the Renaissance

Staff | The Economist | 14th February 2023

This Donatello show is attracting comments like ‘greatest ever sculptor’. Wow! Stand out works include his “schiacciato’, incredibly fine sculptural reliefs carved on thin sheets of white marble. Another stand out is his David, the first standing male nude since antiquity. And then there’s Attis-Amorino, a bronze cherub with falling down trousers, perhaps high on opium. By creating the sculptural aesthetic of the Renaissance, Donatello deserves to be its fourth great name.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons at the Hayward Gallery review, one of the best surveys I’ve seen

Ben Luke | Evening Standard | 21st February 2023

Nelson’s acclaimed installations are hugely ambitious and huge – a labyrinth of “dingy rooms, full of grubby decorations”, salvaged industrial machinery, a woodshed partially buried under sand. Many are “speculative fictions” that feel “uncanny”, tempting the viewer to construct an explanatory narrative. “It’s like walking through a novel, each room a chapter deepening the intrigue, only the protagonists are nearly entirely conjured in our heads … one of the most original shows I have seen.”

‘The Language of Beauty in African Art’ at the Art Institute is ambitious — though far from perfect

Lori Waxman | Chicago Tribune | 1st February 2023

An exhibition of African artworks tries to explain how they were appreciated by the communities that made them. Beauty, for example, meant symmetry and balance and (like ugliness) had moral connotations. A worthy effort, says the reviewer, but not entirely successful. Our incomplete knowledge of African culture and the limits of written descriptions mean that only so much can be conveyed to Western viewers. The “decolonization” of art history has “barely begun”. Images are here.

Olivia Laing, Hilton Als and More on the “Unapologetic” Art of Alice Neel

Violet Conroy | AnOther | 17th February 2023

Neel’s self-portrait at age 80 is acclaimed because it “tells it as it is”. That about sums up her career in portraiture. Taking people from her neighborhood or her artistic network, she revealed “what the world had done to them and their retaliation”. Of her portrait of Warhol – “Alice saw straight through [the mask he made for himself]. You can feel how much he longs to be beautiful. She’s done him out in the most flattering, girlish pastel shades but she’s also stripped him bare.”

Is this Yayoi Kusama’s final evolution?

Thu-Huong Ha | The Japan Times | 18th February 2023

Do we judge artists who achieve great commercial success as somehow compromised? Kusama has, for decades, built her name with her art and a flair for publicity. Now, thanks to Instagram, she is known globally and her art/fashion collaboration with the luxury brand Louis Vuitton is wideranging. Asks the writer “Is she a master huckster or simply too big to be confined? [She has become] infinitely shared and memeable … a hashtag that exists everywhere and nowhere, forever regenerating.”

Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism

Kevin Salatino | The Burlington Magazine | 15th January 2023

As a professor at London’s Royal Academy, Fuseli was a figure of propriety. In private, though, he churned out erotic drawings. The museum claims that these works illuminate 18th century anxieties about polite appearances.  However, Fuseli intended them as private works, undercutting claims that they are a commentary on Enlightenment society.  So, where is the compelling rationale for this show? Private fetishes may be “timeless”, but that doesn’t make them of general interest.

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.”

Older links
Newer links