The Easel

28th November 2023

Drip Painting Was Actually Invented by a Ukrainian Grandmother… Not Jackson Pollock

Noel Charney | Literary Hub | 9th November 2023

There are multiple angles to this story. It sets the record straight that the first person to use drip painting was Janet Sobel. Jackson Pollock saw her work and copied it. It acknowledges that the person who comes up with an idea isn’t always the person who best exploits it. What it doesn’t mention is Pollock’s supporting cast, notably his artist wife Lee Krasner, and Clement Greenberg the pre-eminent critic of the day. They helped carry Pollock’s self-doubt, especially when he painted duds. Sobel had no-one.

Botticelli Drawings offers visitors a new look at an Old Master

Staff | Christie’s | 8th November 2023

Paintings such as The Birth of Venus make Botticelli one of the great humanist painters of the Renaissance. His drawings get less attention because they are few and fragile. Yet it seems that drawing – especially of the figure – was “central” to all his works. It was where he worked out “new ideals of male and female beauty … how to convincingly model the face.” And that matters because, as one writer puts it,  “the face is the central focus of Western painting, and its central challenge.”

Larry Fink, photographer of the American Society, dies at 82

Miss Rosen | Blind | 26th November 2023

Fink’s mother, a partygoer, raised him as a communist. What endured from that upbringing was a non-hierarchical view of the world. Early photography of families drawn from hardscrabble America was notable, but greater acclaim came as a celebrity photographer. His images of the famous partying showed a knack for revealing portraits that tell a story. He observed “you wouldn’t think of fashion as a world full of violence, but it is … the violence of obsolescence”. More images are here.

History’s most famous pot: the Meidias hydria

A Villing and A Smith | British Museum | 24th November 2023

This hydria – a Greek water jar – arrived in Enlightenment London when the locals were potty over ancient Greece aesthetics. Its decorations depict Athenian gods and heroes enjoying the company of the young and beautiful. When it was manufactured (around 420BC), Athens was in a long war with Sparta. The decorations, although an escapist fantasy, are notable because they extolled concepts like love and health. Most likely the pot was exported to Italy where it became a burial object.

El Greco dialogues with Picasso: The new life of the European Paintings collection at the Met in New York

María Antonia Sánchez-Vallejo | El Pais | 22nd November 2023

The New York Met has re-opened its 45 European Galleries. With over 700 artworks, it is one of the world’s most complete collections of Western art from 1300 to 1800. So, what’s changed? More female artists are present. The lines of influence between artists are clearer. Several Picassos are seen in a room dedicated to El Greco. A Francis Bacon work is placed near Renaissance-era Madonnas. And Dali can be found next to Spanish religious art. It adds up to a big, new-ish story: Europe as “a cultural concept”.

Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters

Benjamin Moser | Literary Hub | 20th November 2023

Moser, having written a book on Dutch ‘golden age’ art, considers why artworks are often not successful. Some artists have no foresight of what others will like. Sometimes fashions change. Some transgress the fine line between frankness and the distasteful. Perhaps good art needs “the expression of excited passion”? Perhaps artists are simply trying to create one great work that will endure. If they do, perhaps inadequacies such as these are forgiven.

Picasso on Stein

Francesca Wade | Perspectives | 22nd November 2023

An elegant essay. Gertrude Stein’s Saturday salons attracted avant garde Paris, including Picasso. He offered to paint Stein’s portrait and 80 sittings later, it was done. Its fame rests partly on Stein’s literary reputation and her attachment to the painting. As an artwork, its mask-like face marks Picasso’s turn away from his ‘rose period’ and towards cubism. Ambitiously, Stein saw the work as embodying efforts by each of them “to kill the nineteenth century”.

21st November 2023

Mat Collishaw review – AI plants put the shock and sensation back into British art

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 21st October 2023

Much of AI-based art is ho-hum. As Collishaw demonstrates, though, it needn’t be. In a “creepy and beautiful” show of (broadly) botanical art, he uses AI to “fabricate” nature. Images of tulips imitate Dutch still lifes. Durer’s drawings of plants are animated so they ripple in the breeze. There is a 3D image of an oak tree. Collishaw’s botanical forms are recreated “with stunning exactitude while [life is] uncannily absent. It’s a natural history of our loss of nature [and] nature, it is implied, will have its revenge.”

The cathedral and the museum

Artforum, the venerated art journal, is in crisis after a staff posting about the Gaza conflict. This imbroglio fits into a broader art world malaise. Museums are under pressure to involve themselves more in social equity and diversity issues. No problem, except now “many museums are losing interest in art”. The great ability of art is to “share the human experience. Institutions which treat the image seriously stand the greatest chance of survival.”

A History of Performance Art

Kelly Grovier | Royal Academy | 16th October 2023

Performance art is so individual – literally – that it’s easy to miss its long lineage. Grovier highlights 14 notable performances over the last century, not the least of which is Yoko Ono’s “legendary” 1964 performance, Cut Piece. Even if you are sceptical about the ubiquitous Marina Abramović, this survey is a reminder of the impact the best examples of this art form can have.

The Will and Intensity of Marisol

Eva Diaz | Frieze | 23rd October 2023

Despite being hugely famous in the 1960’s, Marisol’s reputation faded quickly. A standard review of her retrospective – here – doesn’t explain why. The linked piece, although grumpy about Marisol’s wealth and glamour, does better. Marisol belonged to a world of privilege. Her sculptural portrait of the founder of Playboy is satirising but also “heroizing”, tolerant of his misogyny. “There was often too much Marisol in her works, which became ciphers for [female] profligate desire, will and intensity.” Images are here.

Marie Laurencin

Johanna Fateman | 4Columns | 17th November 2023

Laurencin was friends with the young Picasso but had no intention of following his cubist lead. Instead, she developed a world of female harmony, “diaphanous female figures in a blue-rose-gray palette”, engaged in flirtation. Notably, there were no men. To modern eyes, such images are code for gay relationships. Some might think her works too pretty but “when you’re feeling sick of great men, a dose of Laurencin is at least a sweeter kind of poison.”

What Do You Call Those Tiny, Winged Babies?

Meg Butler | Getty | 9th November 2023

How could I not recommend an article with such a cute title? There are some who delight in every last ornamental detail of baroque and rococo paintings. For the rest of us, one putto looks about the same as the next. To avoid possible dinner party embarrassment, be aware that there are putti, cherubs and Cupid. More essential details are in the Getty piece!

The revolution in Victorian fashion

Madeline Hewitson | Ashmolean Museum | 27th September 2023

Because Queen Victoria wore black mourning dresses for decades, we think of that era as gloomy. Not so. The discovery in 1853 of an artificial, cheap to produce, purple dye made purple fabric wildly popular. This set the ball rolling on a “colour revolution” that impacted many areas of the arts and fashion, and disrupted traditional colour symbolism. Sadly, the escape of men from black clothes had to wait for a later century.

Older links
Newer links