The Easel

13th February 2024

Emily Kam Kngwarray

Janet McKenzie | Studio International | 9th February 2024

Kngwarray’s back story is the stuff of legend. Living in a remote community, she was introduced to painting on canvas in her late 70’s. Despite being unaware of the Western art canon, her work instantly bore a resemblance to abstract expressionism. This poses many difficulties for artistic analysis, not the least of which is that Kngwarray’s work makes the concept of “outsider art” seem ridiculous. “The sheer beauty and spiritual power of the works that is so difficult to describe [is] consistently incredible.”

Frank Auerbach, The Charcoal Heads: there’s a raw, vital power behind these haunted faces

Alastair Sooke | The Telegraph | 8th February 2024

Auerbach famously paints by repeatedly scraping off each day’s efforts and starting again. Likewise, his postwar charcoal drawings were drawn and erased so often that he sometimes wore through the paper. The images are intense – “unsmiling, stoic troglodytes, with downcast eyes”. Says one writer “We carry the marks of our experience in the flesh, and that’s what’s on these sheets of ripped paper: the battered, bruised and broken signs that somehow, despite it all, we’re still here.”

Barbara Kruger Is Still Flipping the Bird

Simon Coates | Observer | 8th February 2024

Kruger’s work was once described as a “long exercise in preaching to the choir”. Whether or not that was true, no-one is saying it about this show. Her aphorisms are as sharp as ever and the show “pummels” viewers with words and images. Says one writer, “if you could package social media into a room, this would be it”. This is twentieth century art, “over-explaining and oversharing [reflecting the] desperate urge to be understood in a clamorous, look-at-me-please world.” A backgrounder is here.

Elephants, Gods, and Kings of India Claim a Corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

AR Hoffman | The New York Sun | 8th February 2024

Hodgkin, the acclaimed abstract British artist, assembled a world class collection of Indian court paintings. Specialists delight in their portrayal of the subtleties of Indian life in the Mughal court, painted around the same time Vermeer was active. They are products of “one of the world’s great pictorial traditions”. And for non-specialist viewers? Well, there are the elephants. They are spectacular, “painted with the nuances that Europeans applied to ladies and landscapes”. Images are here.

Entangled Pasts 1978-Now, Royal Academy, review: An extraordinary achievement

Hettie Judah | iNews | 3rd February 2024

London’s Royal Academy carefully admits in a show that slavery is a part of its history. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is pleased. One critic calls it an “act of public self-flagellation … [showing] old paintings the RA is so clearly ashamed of”. The writer differs. The show in parts is “unexpectedly magnificent” and the “historic picture that emerges melds horror and hope. It lets the art have its own voice: this is very strong stuff” An excellent essay on power and clothing is here.

Between Risk and Control: How Mark Rothko Discovered His Signature Style

Adam Greenhalgh | Literary Hub | 7th February 2024

A Washington show has renewed interest in Rothko’s watercolours that preceded his colour field works in oils. Although having an “obvious facility” with this medium, these early works hint at his future abstractions – faces are reduced to blank masks while background details are “more confident”. In one show where he included both watercolours and oils, the former received greater praise. Rothko, though, had his sights set on oils and, for the next decade, exhibited nothing else.

National Gallery should scrap 1900 cut-off date, says art expert

Dalya Alberge | The Guardian | 10th February 2024

London’s National Gallery collects works pre-1900 while later works go to the Tate. This arrangement should be scrapped, says a curator. Many contemporary artists take inspiration from long-dead artists. How can museumgoers understand their work if it cannot be seen next to the works that inspired it? That argument also works in reverse – today’s art helps explain the relevance of old work. New York’s Met is gradually making such a change.

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.

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