The Easel

6th February 2024

CUTE is a delight for the senses but has a darker complexity

Pamela Buxton | The RIBA Journal | 22nd January 2024

Sex sells, and so too does cute – just think of the multitude of soft toys with imploring eyes. Stimulated by the Japanese cute/lovable aesthetic, cuteness has become a western cultural force. A big part of its appeal is that, not being easy to define, it accommodates almost unlimited interpretations. Says a curator, it is a “mechanism for [young] people to find themselves. I think cuteness will only get stronger and stronger.” One down-to-earth writer quips, “this [show] is catnip for TikTok”.

Remembering Pope.L (1955–2023) 

Courtney Willis Blair and others | Frieze | 19th January 2024

William Pope.L tried writing before deciding to find a more direct way of impacting culture. He certainly did that! His “The Great White Way” saw him crawl the length of Broadway in New York dressed in a Superman costume with a skateboard strapped on his back. A landmark example of performance art, it led one museum to characterise him as “a consummate agitator and humourist”. Pope.L observed “it’s kind of uplifting – crawling. If you’ve never tried it, you should”. He also admitted “I did not enjoy crawling”.

Robert Crumb: from American counterculture to the French countryside

Ingrid Luquet-Gad | Art Basel | 26th January 2024

Crumb grouches that the art world is “oblivious to the graphic arts”. In the next breath, he admits that he and others have “turned comics into “fine art””. His drawings are weird and offensive, yet they appeal, One writer puts this down to how they “capture the id of America — in all its decadence, hypocrisy and lecherousness”. Crumb’s success doesn’t seem to have made him an optimist. “Comics are hard work for very little reward. This harsh reality does help to keep the medium authentic”.

Shining a Light into the Black Box of the Art Market

Ted O’Callahan | Yale Insights | 30th November 2023

A new book on art collecting has been conspicuously ignored by the main art journals. Perhaps one reason for this silence is that it uses statistics to puncture some art world myths. Excluding superstar artists “most remaining artists [over the last decade] have experienced declining sales due to a decrease in the number of art buyers”. Buyers are scarce because “most artworks offer little to no returns”. Art buyers should seek not only financial returns but also try to “find emotional value and to support artists”.

Her brilliant photos of the Depression made history. Did they twist it?

Kriston Capps | The Washington Post | 31st January 2024

Lange’s 1936 photo of a mother and her children, Migrant Worker, is perhaps the defining image of the Depression. Does it matter that the woman’s story didn’t fit Lange’s Depression narrative? She had trained in commercial portraiture where she learned the importance of lighting and telling details like hand gestures. Her Depression-era work went beyond portraiture into photojournalism. meaning she wanted images to tell a particular story. Inevitably, when trying to tell the national story, “facts drift over time”.

What Garry Winogrand saw in colour.

Vince Aletti | The New Yorker

A curator described Winogrand as “the central photographer of his generation”. Such lofty praise rested on his “plainspoken” black and white photography of the “boisterous ballet of the street”. Was he as successful with colour photography?  This critic thinks so, especially when his subject was “American emptiness”. Another veteran critic is sceptical – “Winogrand had an astringent take on the world … [Colour was] adding an unnecessary element to something fully formed”.

Albrecht Dürer and the commercialization of art

Ulinka Rublack | OUPblog | 8th January 2024

Behind Dürer’s spectacular art –covered in some 2023 exhibitions – is a back story on why he was one of the Renaissance’s “greatest self-promoters”. Dürer was continually poor and little prospect of improvement. Having failed to get adequately paid for a major commission, he changed his practice to focus on prints where he could charge a premium for autographed works. He died rich – and with his artistic reputation intact. It took until Warhol for those outcomes to be widely acceptable.

30th January 2024

Carl Andre, the pioneering Minimalist artist accused of murdering his wife, dies aged 88

Theo Farrant | Euronews | 25th January 2024

From his first exhibition in 1965, Andre wanted to show objects as “pure matter”, devoid of emotion. His severe minimalist works proved to be a huge influence on modern sculpture. One writer noted that minimalism shared with Pop “a coldness, an attachment to the novel and the technical no matter what form the results might take”. He was charged with his wife’s murder in 1985 and acquitted but some people never stopped wondering. An interview, as minimalist as his sculptures, is here.

600 years late, a forgotten Italian artist gets his first show — and it’s remarkable

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 16th December 2023

If an artist is forgotten for 600 years, shouldn’t art history just move on? In the case of Pesellino, the answer is no. In his short life he won patronage from Florence’s Medici and Rome’s papal court. His few works are small but masterpieces of narrative clarity, finely drafted details and spatial clarity. So, why forgotten? Perhaps simply because his output was small – and often misattributed – and because he liked to collaborate. Says a London critic “the loveliest winter exhibition in years”. More images are here.

Stéphane Mandelbaum

Johanna Fateman | 4Columns | 26th January 2024

Mandelbaum was an outsider. He died an outsider too, shot having just committed an art burglary. In his short life he produced hundreds of portraits of the Brussels demimonde. Everyone looks tired, “swollen cheeks, greasy hair … The line between victim and oppressor, innocent and guilty, gets hopelessly blurred.” There is a churn of ideas – shifting identity, war guilt, self-doubt – that is ultimately “transfixing, bewildering”. The curator agrees; “This stuff is beyond edgy,” A bio piece is here.

A Major Caspar David Friedrich Show Brings the Underserved in From the Cold

Edna Bonhomme | Frieze | 24th January 2024

Friedrich is getting a retrospective to mark 250 years since his birth. He remains the star of German Romanticism and it’s easy to see why. His melancholic pictures of misty mountains viewed by the solo traveller speak to contemporary ideas – individualism, a respect for nature. Fine, except that that is a rather watered down version of Friedrich’s pre-occupations – ideas about God, the sublime and the German nation.  Still, reinventing an old-fashioned white guy for the modern age is not such a bad thing.

Tiffany’s abstract window

Karen Azoulay | Maharam | 10th January 2024

In his studio, Louis Tiffany produced a variety of stained glass objects, often with Art Nouveau styling. For his own apartment, though, he installed a unique leaded-glass window. The window’s asymmetrical pattern partly reflected his interest in North African textiles. More obviously, though, the central S curve gives it a distinctly abstract feel. This was “shockingly modern” for 1880 and pre-dated the full emergence of abstraction in painting by decades. It perfectly expressed Tiffany’s ambition to “paint with glass.” 

How “Unnamed Figures” at the American Folk Art Museum Challenges Dominant Narratives of American History

Karla Méndez | Elephant | 4th January 2024

Portraits are intended to flatter, to elevate. They can tell other stories too. In the case of 18th century American folk art they reveal Black erasure. In some cases, the absence is literal but other times Black figures are simply placed in the shadows. Focusing on the “there but not there” tendency reveals new historical narratives: Black contributors to nation building; the presence of slavery in the north; successful Black property owners – in other words, a more complete American history.

Long-searched-for Andy Warhol piece goes on display in Edinburgh

Nan Spowart | The National | 21st January 2024

Many have forgotten that when Warhol was a commercial illustrator, textile design was a major part of his job. Long before soup cans, his fabric designs used repeating motifs – butterflies, ice creams, suitcases – that somehow make utilitarian objects memorable. One critic notes that “they are unmistakably similar to his advertisement work, and just as concerned with selling to America’s shoppers”. Most of the designs were sold anonymously through agents – after all, who was Andy Warhol?

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