The Easel

4th April 2023

Gerhard Richter’s gift to Berlin now on show

Stefan Dege | DW.com | 1st April 2023

Looking to his legacy Richter has permanently loaned 100 works to a Berlin museum. A hugely valuable gift, its centerpiece is the Birkenau cycle, four abstract paintings inspired by photographs secretly taken inside Auschwitz-Birkenau. One critic describes these works as “something of a German national treasure” being an artistic response to the Holocaust and its horrors. Digital duplicates of the cycle hang in Germany’s Reichstag.

Joshua Reynolds ‘Portrait of Omai’is a national treasure. Why is Britain struggling to keep it?

John Gapper | Financial Times | 23rd February 2023

A breathless tale, so read this piece while the FT paywall lets you. (An alternative is here.) Precious few paintings are “must haves” for the top museums but Reynolds Portrait of Omai is one. It has it all – exquisite rendition, glamorous back story, the subject a person of colour, a touchy seller and a monster price. After 20 years of wrangling, two museums (one British one American) will acquire it jointly. In a fundraising video (3 min) Simon Schama calls it “one of the greatest things British art has ever produced”.

Gilbert & George on their new art centre in east London: ‘We all want to live forever, don’t we?’

Harriet Lloyd-Smith | Wallpaper | 28th March 2023

Gilbert & George – two men, one artist – have opened a museum in East London dedicated to their own art. Why? They claim that museums are too busy being “woke” to include them. Needless to say, that hasn’t gone down well. The museum, a renovated former brewery, is a tasteful, “expensive remake of old grot” and its first show is a group of brightly coloured works of fruit, leaves and flowers. All this, says the artist(s), is in the cause of “art for all”. A discussion with the duo (24 min) is here.

Goya’s Coded Love Letter to the Duchess of Alba

Michael Glover | Hyperallergic | 2nd April 2023

An appreciation of Goya’s great portrait.  When he visited her estate in late 1796, the Duchess of Alba was 35, a noted beauty and recently widowed. Goya, by then famous, places her against a hazy landscape. She is tall and, while dressed in mourning black, has a “potentially frisky” air. He captures in crisp detail the embroidery on her dress and her “slithery, snaky mantilla”. And, of course, she is pointing to his name drawn in the sand, a gesture that betrays “Goya’s impotent howls of yearning”.

An artist’s fantasy or the real world?

Sebastian Smee | Washington Post | 22nd March 2023

Even before Admiral Perry hove to in 1853, Japan’s middle class was growing. Mimicking the wealthy, they developed a taste for art, including titillating paintings of the pleasure district at the edge of Tokyo city. This “floating world” was, in truth, mostly imagined because Japanese society was not especially permissive. Most likely, these works offered an escape from the daily realities facing the middle classes – “the fixed world of social obligation and feudal hierarchy.”

Jewelry as a Pure Art Form

Staff | Art Aurea | 16th February 2023

Jewelry was once a way to display wealth. The came Lalique who, through his use of glass, showed that preciousness didn’t require expensive materials. “Art jewellery” is now a recognized category of museum interest. Pieces are now “carriers of emotion”, using whatever materials best tell the story that the piece intends.  A good review of a prestigious Munich show is here and coverage of the prizewinning piece here.

28th March 2023

Gagosian’s DALL-E–Enabled Art Exhibition Throws Us Headfirst into the Uncanny Valley

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei | ARTnews | 24th March 2023

This writer hurries to shout ‘crisis’, mentioning it in her second sentence. Do image generating algorithms like DALL-E comprise a crisis? Beeple (remember him?) and crypto art emerged in 2021 and the sky hasn’t fallen in. Images from DALL-E are more sophisticated, but have we crossed a “digital Rubicon”?  Irrespective of any crisis, the idea of “authenticity” needs re-thinking. We already live in “an era of unreal-ness. Since when is “realness” [in art] a metric?”

The Many Dimensions of Murakami’s Mr. Pointy

Annie Morse | Art Institute of Chicago | 21st March 2023

Murakami’s superflat creations are all high gloss and “cartoon gaiety”. Is it serious art? The writer thinks so and references Murakami’s work, Mr Pointy. The figure’s pointy head, a connection to the celestial, is a reference to Buddha. It adopts a Shiva-like pose and is supported by a squat figure, the colour of which suggests both “galactic vastness and the detailing on a muscle car”. Under all that is a lotus blossom, an emblem of purity. Murakami, she says, deserves “repeated, close looking”.

Centurion SH Raza in Paris: ‘Child of five elements’

Uma Nair | Times of India | 21st February 2023

Raza embodies the idea of transcultural. He trained in the Indian figurative tradition of sculpture and miniature painting before modernism drew him to Paris in 1950. His work morphed accordingly, from figuration to ‘French” landscapes and then (following a visit to the US) to his acclaimed abstractions. The constants in his work were high contrast colours and geometric symbols, both distinctly Indian. Said Raza “I remained an Indian painter in my heart”. More background is here.

Guggenheim Bilbao honours Kokoschka as “Rebel From Vienna”

Staff | Archyde | 17th March 2023

By temperament and life experience, Kokoschka was a rebel. A outré member of Vienna’s avant garde, his early portraits of intellectuals and artists are, at their best, psychologically intense and disquieting. After fighting in WW1, he addressed his art to the political, requiring him to flee to Britain during WW2. After the war, his defence of figurative painting against the encroachment of abstract expressionism was sufficiently spirited that one critic remarked “the old dog could still bite”.

“Chronorama”: Photography as a work of art

Nathalie Dassa | Blind | 16th March 2023

The collections of famous individuals, when put on exhibition, sometimes feel ambiguous. Are they an expression of curatorial ideas or a flaunting of wealth? The Pinault collection exhibition in Venice is a “banquet” of famous images, many drawn from the storied archive of Condé Nast. The nagging question is whether the show has a unifying theme. Perhaps it is simply a reminder of the glamour that photography had before the age of social media.

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