The Easel

6th June 2023

A Monumental Survey of Black Figurative Painting Exposes the Limits of Representation

Nkgpoleng Moloi | Art in America | 30th April 2023

More black faces are now seen in art. A major show at Zeitz in Cape Town surveys how a “frenzy” of contemporary black figurative art expresses “Blackness and Africanness”. What are their inherent qualities, independent of narratives about colonialism? Complicating things, there are few independent African art institutions contributing to the discussion. The show has an optimistic tone, something needed at an institution with avowed but unproven continental ambitions.

The art of the inventory

Lucy Davies | Prospect | 2nd June 2023

Inventories of artists’ household effects allow a glimpse of the person behind the name. Rembrandt’s many paintings were arranged to impress guests. Degas’s huge art collection hung on the top floor of his apartment as a private pleasure. Ditto Freud who, from his bed, looked at a Corot. Vermeer’s inventory itemises many of the household effects we see in his paintings – his wife’s blue housecoat, Spanish chairs. Such objects “populate his paintings almost as actors would a cycle of plays.”

Every breath she takes: Ming Smith at MoMA

Mark Feeney | Boston Globe | 4th May 2023

Although the ‘decisive moment’ approach to photography favours image clarity, such precision can also be “the enemy of evocation”. This observation is apt given Smith’s abstract/documentary style.  A long-time chronicler of Black life, she uses slow shutter speeds to capture movements where “atmospheres alter, light shadows, souls whir”. Says one artist, she is the “absolute master of the blur”. A background piece is here and images here.

Exceptional career woman, unexceptional painter: Lavinia Fontana, at the National Gallery of Ireland, reviewed

Laura Gascoigne | The Spectator | 3rd June 2023

Art history forgot about Fontana after her death in Rome in 1614. Was that simply gender prejudice? Her recently restored masterpiece, The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, does not fare so well under scrutiny. Its women look like “a flock of swans” with their elongated necks, architectural details are “squiffy” and her paint handling “finicky”. Her nudes, unprecedented for a woman artist at the time, were a smart career move. But, as an artist – “unexceptional”.

Man Ray’s Paris Portraits: 1921–1939

Mary Ann Caws | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st May 2023

A straightforward review dissects Ray’s portraiture – inter-war Paris, famous members of its avant-garde community, his innovative aesthetic. The linked piece, by a renowned critic, better captures the ‘heady perfume” of these “astonishing” images. “How can anyone not be enticed into the wheel of the Méret Oppenheim image … with her navel appropriately exposed and the hub of the wheel making itself felt, while the printer’s ink adorning her left arm speaks loudly of [her] artistic medium”?

In a new exhibition, Hannah Gadsby takes aim at Pablo Picasso

Staff | The Economist | 2nd June 2023

Few shows get as mauled as “Pablo-matic”, curated by the comic Hannah Gadsby. It’s a small collection of paintings and etchings that, she admits, aims to “stick one up him”. One critic moans that  Picasso’s misogyny gets more focus than his pictures and likens Gadsby’s wall labels to “bathroom graffiti”. Yes, Picasso was a misogynist, but he was also “a genius … his nubile nudes are clearly meant to be devoured but also feel romantic and womanly. Gadsby’s blunt commentary seems churlish”.

30th May 2023

Liu Xiaodong with Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st May 2023

Liu’s neo-realist paintings are large scale, unidealized, renditions of people and places. He chooses a town about which he knows little and, after getting to know the place, chooses subjects pretty much at random. This “casual” approach yields portraits that are impartial yet also empathetic. Liu claims he doesn’t “wish to investigate and tell some truth about a place”. Except, perhaps he does anyhow – in the face of modernization, these are portraits of “local ways of life”.

Are We Asking Too Much of Public Art?

Seph Rodney | Hyperallergic | 25th May 2023

A statue of a female has been installed atop a New York courthouse. A blessed relief to the ubiquitous patriarchal statuary, right? No, say some advocates for womens’ rights because it insufficiently “interrogates the concept of justice”. So how do we judge a piece of public art? “Public art often reflects our values, but also demonstrates the limits of our civic imagination. Our culture is too bound to the idea of the static, unchanging hero. What if we made no public monuments to people?”

Morocco’s Iconic New Wave: The Casablanca Art School

Stephanie Bailey | Ocula | 26th May 2023

North African art can boast its own modernist heritage. Six years after Morocco’s independence in 1956, an art school opened in Casablanca. It aimed to build post-colonial artistic traditions spanning both art and design. While not immune to Western influences, the school developed a signature style – highly coloured abstract works incorporating Berber and Islamic designs. These tangibly expressed the founder’s dictum, “tradition is the future”.

Rosemarie Trockel’s Disquieting Puzzles

Mitch Speed | Frieze | 28th April 2023

Two things are true. Trockel is one of Germany’s most important conceptual artists. Secondly, to look at her works is to “enter the ranks of the bewildered”. Her sculptures, collages, ceramics and knitted works “delight in paradox” and offer “subtle social critiques”. However, they are difficult to decipher and so various that there is no apparently dominant aesthetic trajectory. “Little consistency = little comprehension = sparse grounds for evaluation. What’s a critic to do?”

Tate Britain’s Rehang: A Zombie Social Art History

JJ Charlesworth | ArtReview | 25th May 2023

Social and economic factors help our understanding of older art, although most agree that art is about more than just social history. But where to strike the balance? A re-hang of Tate Britain’s collection sparks an acrimonious debate on that issue. One critic calls the result a “hectoring history lesson”. The above writer is equally annoyed.  The rehang “[insists] on turning art into a cipher for social history, into illustrations for a contemporary version of what Britain might have been about”.

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