The Easel

7th November 2023

The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans

Phoebe Farris | Cultural Survival | 4th October 2023

Washington’s National Gallery is having its first show of contemporary native American art in 70 years. So overdue! One challenge to appreciating this work is its radically different ideas of landscape. Says the curator, an acclaimed artist, “a sacred place is everything around us … all six directions. [These] works do not necessarily fit into the mainstream European definition of landscape, with a horizon line and a blue sky.” The linked piece is something of an explainer.

Robert Irwin, pioneer of Light and Space art who designed Getty’s Central Garden, dies at 95

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 25th October 2023

Irwin was a young Los Angeles artist when a study trip to Europe confirmed his lack of interest in art history. Subsequently deciding that “the pure subject of art is human perception”, he became the leading figure in California’s Light and Space movement. Using a wide variety of materials, he created “fastidious” and widely influential site-specific pieces intended to “get people to perceive how they perceive”. Irwin, says this writer “is an eminence of post-war American art.”

El Anatsui – interview: ‘My inspiration comes from things people have used – there are so many endless delights’

Veronica Simpson | Studio International | 27th October 2023

A commission for Tate’s Turbine Hall is a great career opportunity. Given its vast proportions, though, it is not an opportunity for the faint-hearted. El Anatsui’s voluptuous sail-like sculptures, made with his signature bottletops, are so big that most reviewers do no more than describe. One brief assessment suffices – “a shimmering, gorgeous, powerful elegy for a half-forgotten past”. An interview with the artist in the linked piece is illuminating.

Judy Chicago Didn’t Stop at ‘The Dinner Party’

Jillian Steinhauer | Vulture | 17th October 2023

The art world is all the better for Chicago’s long career. Art in 1960’s LA was a man’s game and Chicago’s demands for access weren’t appreciated. Early minimalist works, glossy and in soft colours, were deemed “too feminine”. Now, they are “exhilarating”. However, perhaps her activism distracted her from her art, one critic noting that some works are “clumsy and crass”. The writer seems to agree – “not all of women’s work is about womanhood.”

The Story Behind Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Most Beguiling Photographs

Lydia Figes | AnOther | 30th October 2023

Sugimoto found that the camera is loose with the truth. Careful lighting and long exposures allowed him to make stuffed animals appear alive. Similar effects could also be achieved, he found, with waxwork figures. Long exposures of seascapes create weirdly flat – almost abstract – images that somehow speak of a post-human world. Says the curator “no-one has ever made photographs like these. His work isn’t about documenting the world.”  Images are here.

Nicole Eisenman: the lesbian pioneer who changed art

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 30th October 2023

Eisenman’s first retrospective in London has opened with surprisingly little of the effusive praise associated with much of her career. Says one critic, her fusing of “Renaissance aesthetic with comics and queer porn … comes across as grandstanding and narrow”. The above writer more or less agrees. “Eisenman’s recurring weakness [is] the absence of an edit button. [Her current work is] increasingly weak and increasingly big. As art they are clunky fails.”

A show of Hans

Tanya Harrod | The World of Interiors | 16th October 2023

The extraordinary 35-year collaboration between British studio potters Lucie Rie and Hans Coper generated a global reputation for each. Rie, being the more gregarious (and long lived) has enjoyed most of the posthumous attention. That’s a pity. Of the two, Coper was the more sculptural and his pieces “full of stilled energy”. Rie acknowledged as much, saying “I am a potter but he was an artist”. A video about Coper’s work (11 min) is here and some images here.

3rd October 2023

In an unforgettable new show, Manet and Degas are much more than rivals

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 21st October 2023

The best review by far of this “stupendous” show. The Monet-Degas friendship formed over a shared antipathy toward the “listless” art establishment. Degas was interested in “psychological interiority” while Manet focused on devastating painterly technique. Friends became frenemies as they strove to make “modern” imagery. In their relationship, “the dynamic of rivalry is never resolved. How much did they hate each other [becomes] how much did they love each other?”

Hyperreal art is Instagram-worthy and booming

Staff | The Economist | 28th October 2023

Half way through its run in Paris, Mueck’s show continues to divide opinion. The problem is that his hyper-realist works straddle “tenderness [and] horror”. Some love his exquisite, technically precise craftsmanship. Others – art-world insiders, apparently – “loathe” hyper-real sculpture, viewing it as “unimaginative … more spectacle than sublime.” Few, though, will disagree with the observation that “in an era of screens, the body still matters.”

Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas, Tate Britain, review: Toilets, dildos, fags and boobs – the YBA is still perverse

Hettie Judah | iNews | 28th October 2023

Lucas has been around for decades, but her bawdy humour still has some critics calling her a joker. To be fair, there are tits and penises everywhere, making for “blokey, off-colour” jokes. For one writer this is 1990’s feminism all over again, making it “as rebellious as paper doilies”. In contrast, this writer calls some of Lucas’s work “brutal”. Her figures made with stuffed tights “look as though they’re waiting for us like working girls in the world’s loneliest brothel.”

‘Rubens & Women’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery: who’s afraid of Peter Paul Rubens?

Jennifer Scott | artuk | 27th October 2023

Think Rubens, think fleshy, buxom beauties? Well, perhaps we shouldn’t. Yes, he painted nudes, but a curator argues that he didn’t objectify women. If so, that explains why he had numerous female patrons. Rubens was a devoted family man whose mother was a role model for the strong females that appear throughout Rubens’s work.” Says one critic, “He paints what he admires, in a way that respects and empowers”.

The Art of the Great Depression

Alison Rudnick | Perspectives | 18th October 2023

Facing the Depression, the US government funded employment creation. This included “art for the millions” as a way to promote American cultural identity. Male images predominated with few female workers or workers of colour. Small town imagery, evocative of American values, was promoted as was photojournalism and modern design. The end result was a familiar melange: “consumerism and moderation, tradition and innovation, and imperialism and cultural tolerance”.

Divinity Incognito

Nicholas Penny | London Review of Books | 7th October 2023

This book, previously reviewed, yields in different hands a different story. Elsheimer was a mid-level artist, painting in Rome around 1600. For a time, he was influential – Rubens, Gentileschi, Rembrandt. Elsheimer “loved clutter”. Rembrandt, aware of Elsheimer, leaned opposite. This essay also reminds that art history is detective work. Did all these artist connections exist back in 1600 or is it a mirage caused by scant historical evidence? The reader must judge.

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