The Easel

18th July 2023

Measuring Infinity, at the Guggenheim, presents drawings, collages, and sculptures from architect-turned-artist Gertrud Goldschmidt

Angie Door | The Architects Newspaper | 27th June 2023

Gego was long in transition – from pre-war Germany to Venezuela, from architecture to art, from painting to her métier, delicate, abstract wire sculptures. It was worth the wait. These works articulate “the tensions and irregularities of organic form”. Some are small and, hung from a wall, resemble “drawings in space”. This is “magical, slippery engineering”, distinctive and infinitely varied. Says one critic “some of the most radically beautiful sculpture of the second half of the 20th century”.

Watercolors at Harvard and MoMA

Kevin Murphy | The Magazine Antiques | 11th July 2023

Does watercolour painting need a PR pep-up? Because its materials are relatively cheap and portable, the medium is often associated with “amateurism”. In fact, many great artists were exponents, using it to quickly capture an image or for experimentation. Its great quality though, is unpredictability, the way paint can “flow and bloom into darker and lighter areas”. That process gives a work a spontaneity and energy that offers the viewer “emotional experiences”. Images are here.

Mary Jackson has turned sweetgrass basketry into a fine-art form

Staff | The Economist | 7th July 2023

Growing up, Jackson regarded basketry as a summer “chore”. Returning to the craft in adulthood, she combined traditional materials – coastal sweetgrass – and basketry techniques with a contemporary aesthetic. Her baskets, distinguished by bold shapes and exquisite, demanding weaving skill – abandon utility and become an artform. Says one collector, “like great sculpture, Mary Jackson baskets beg to be touched.” A backgrounder is here.

Appreciating Critic Peter Schjeldahl’s Vivid, Unforgettable Prose

Jackson Arn | Art in America | 12th July 2023

Writing well about art is difficult, something quite obvious when one reads the very bad or very good. Schjeldahl was in the latter camp as this appreciative essay makes clear. He had a gift for vivid expression – Diane Arbus’s photographs “resemble the gaping barrels of loaded guns.” His writing was focused, always “in command of what it omits”. Perhaps most importantly, he didn’t take art criticism too seriously, viewing it with “a gruff, good humored affection at least as deep as love at first sight”.

The strange poses of modern man

Christiane Meixner | Tagesspiegel | 12th July 2023

Genzken is a star German artist, with a CV full of prestigious exhibitions. But how to characterise her work? Starting as a Bauhaus-influenced minimalist, she has moved toward “punk conceptualism” – trash, concrete windows, “deranged mannequins” and, of course, plaster casts of Nefertiti. Genzken says, cryptically, she is “concerned with fluidity and opposed to rigidity”. Says a Berlin collector “Isa is a tsunami”. A video (22 min) is here. (Google translate)

Ansel Adams: Eight of the most iconic photos of the American West

Cath Pound | bbc.com | 10th July 2023

Adams “stirring” black and white images remain hugely popular. His aesthetic was shaped by the romantic idea of manifest destiny – an America, expanding ever westward to find prosperity and fulfillment. An immediate motivation, though, was to make images that promoted the new idea of national parks. With Yosemite in his image finder, Adams hoped to capture the spirituality of the wilderness, thus tapping into nostalgia for a “pure” frontier America that no longer existed.

Spotlight on Reynolds at Kenwood House: celebrating the artist who dominated English cultural life in his age

Melanie McDonough | Evening Standard | 13th July 2023

A London show celebrates the 300th anniversary of Reynolds birth. Coverage is mostly deferential – founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, his renowned portraiture and so on. This fawning is all too much for one critic who can’t resist speaking plainly. “Reynolds has no imagination as a painter. [He] doesn’t have enough empathy with his sitters to expose their souls, His portraits are cynical hackwork. A minor talent [who] like the aristocracy, just won’t go away.”

12th July 2023

A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography opens at Tate Modern

Staff | Alt Africa | 5th July 2023

So much of the commentary about this show references European colonialism. That’s understandable – colonisers used photography to establish stereotypes of Africa that validated their occupation. Now, photography is a means by which a diverse group of nations express their identity. It’s not a summary of the continent’s photography but, as a critic puts it, “as a document of art as a form of ongoing survival, it’s brilliant”. Images are here.

How Hokusai’s art crashed over the modern world

Jason Farago | ArtDaily | 27th June 2023

Less a review than a contemplation om artistic influence. Hokusai, “one of the greatest of all printmakers”, revitalized the “visual vocabularies” of 1870’s Paris. Part of this was his “blocky colors and flattened spaces”, as was his choice of subjects – the stage, the street, the bathhouse. His work encouraged the Impressionists, in particular, that city life was worth observing. Hokusai affirmed repeatedly that “there’s no such thing as a pure “culture” divisible from others”.

American Illustration at Its Most Stylish

Jerry Weiss | Linea | 2nd June 2023

In the early 20th century, Leyendecker was America’s pre-eminent illustrator. Creator of the Arrow Collar Man, his imagery portrayed “square-jawed young hunks” as the mainstream male ideal. Daringly, his work also carried a barely disguised homoerotic charge, with his men exchanging long, lingering looks, oblivious to adjacent women. His images amply justify his fame. One pinstripe outfit shows “the movement of crisp material … a tour de force of painted material, meant to sell material.”

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