The Easel

5th March 2024

Lee Ufan and the art of slowness

Martin Herbert | Apollo | 28th February 2024

Japan’s Mono-ha art movement explored the properties of natural and industrial materials. Lee, one of its founders, used those ideas to produce an acclaimed body of minimalist-looking paintings and sculptures. These works need slow viewing – the patina of the steel plates, the grittiness of the stone. His paintings display single or repeated small brushstrokes that peter out into nothingness. They exude tranquillity. This show “brims with abstract feeling but finally says only what a viewer brings to it.” More images are here.

Catherine Opie Goes Into Her Archive to Illustrate Why Harmony Is Fraught

Madison Reid | Vanity Fair | 1st March 2024

Opie’s images of LA’s gay community are notable because they combine the formalities of portraiture with photographic activism. Besides portraying members of her friendship circle her work includes images of LA city – “because I’ve always thought of the city as a body”.  This is Opie linking the public and the personal: “I’m trying to show all this beauty and all this love but, at the same time, remember that that beauty and that love … hits up hard a lot of the time.”

Thomas Hirschhorn

Alex Kitnick | 4Columns | 23rd February 2024

Hirschorn’s current show is described thus, “a den of mass delusion … long rows of [cardboard] workstations [surrounded by] binge paraphernalia.” One critic, more succinctly, calls it “clusterfuck aesthetics”. This is “social sculpture that gets its energy from the spontaneity of the street”, a mix of “the real and unreal”. Some find it “condescending … wilful, perhaps even undignified. Hirschorn’s art is an irritant [but] that might help us see the world more clearly”. A video of the artist (6 min) is here.

Lee Krasner’s Radical Reinventions

Grace Edquist | Vogue | 1st March 2024

Art history’s gushing praise for Jackson Pollock left Krasner in the shade. That oversight is slowly being corrected, most recently in a show of her early work. Created during the turbulent Long Island years, it is a testament to her creativity. Starting with her grids of glyph-like symbols, she moved on to “brushy geometric abstractions”, then rectangular colour blocks and finally the angular abstractions of her mature style. “What courage it takes to turn heel and continuously become who you are.”

Trouble in Paradise

Michael Prodger | Literary Review | 1st March 2024

Gauguin arrived in Polynesia in 1891 and mostly lived there until his death in 1903. This period defines his artistic reputation and generates the opprobrium that now attaches to his name.  A new book confirms Gauguin as an ethically flawed individual. Yet it is also true that his interest in Tahitian spirituality was genuine and the young women around him had agency in daily life and in their relationships with him. Careful scholarship shows him to be “more than merely a sexual predator gorging himself in paradise.”

Introduction to ‘Michelangelo: the last decades’

Sarah Vowles | The British Museum | 26th February 2024

At 60, Michelangelo might have opted for a genteel retirement. Instead, he headed for Rome and produced a late-career burst of creativity. In addition to a fresco in the Sistene Chapel he completed other religious paintings and, of course major architectural commissions. Such were the demands for his work that he collaborated with painters who executed paintings based on his sketches. Perhaps overwhelmed by papal demands, he scribbled on the back of some plans “I am not an architect”. Nobody listened.

27th February 2024

The Met is having a Black moment with the ‘Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism’ show

Ida Harris | Black Enterprise | 25th February 2024

The 1920’s Great Migration brought many Blacks to New York’s Harlem. New ideas about the “new Negro man” encouraged creativity in music and literature – the Harlem Renaissance. The visual arts, however, received scant attention, even though they produced a new “cosmopolitan Black aesthetic”. That aesthetic, says a curator, was a central force in American modernism because it “sought to portray the modern Black subject in a radically modern way.” Background on the Harlem Renaissance is here.

Edward Burtynsky on climate, abstraction, and hanging photos like paintings

Ravi Ghosh | British Journal of Photography | 23rd February 2024

Burtynsky wants his landscape photographs to have some of the qualities of abstract painting. He wants an “all-overness” of the image and the whole image surface to be “active” – just like a Jackson Pollock. This, he hopes, will disorient the viewer and prompt the question ‘what am I looking at’? Those aesthetic effects notwithstanding, everyone knows the subject matter is despoilation. As one critic observes about Burtynsky’s current show, “It’s room after room of bludgeoning you with evil gorgeousness.”

When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture @ the Hayward Gallery

Simon | astrofella | 24th February 2024

Bronze, being so solid and enduring, has long been a favoured material for sculpture. Yet so much of life is aboutp change. One part of contemporary sculpture takes life’s changeability as its cue and uses a proliferation of materials to explore and communicate transience. Elegance is not a priority – many works are “ungainly, off-kilter”. Instead they suggest “endlessly moving, changing organic life. We are allowed … off the leash of society’s endless worrying about ‘issues’. It feels fun”.

The Time Is Always Now review: Brilliant show puts Black artists at the centre

Hettie Judah | iNews | 22nd February 2024

Black figures, when they appear in western art history, are often portrayed as a marginal presence. As a corrective, a London show surveys the work of prominent figurative Black artists. It achieves the obvious – showing Black people as seen by Black artists. And, because the artists chosen are outstanding, so too is the art. Beyond that, there is a sense of the many Black lives that should have been commemorated but were not. Those lives are now more visible. “A compelling survey of figurative art”.

John Singer Sargent: back in fashion

Francesca Peacock | Prospect | 21st February 2024

Fashion, says a curator, was “central” to Sargent’s portraiture. An irate critic disagrees, arguing that this “horrible show” distracts from Sargent’s greatest talent –“it’s the way he paints that makes his art breathe”. Fashion mavens pile on, lamenting a perceived slight The above writer is a bit calmer: “There’s a sense of fun here, but it’s [more than that]. Sargent painted his subjects as individuals. Focusing on their fashion [was his] way of revealing the sitter’s personality beyond the frame.”

Auction pricing is about to become a lot more transparent

Felix Salmon | Axios | 1st February 2024

After decades of rising fees, Sotheby’s has suddenly announced a reduction. They claim the changes will improve pricing transparency and thus buyer confidence. Perhaps it also reflects concern about a less buoyant art market or even (shock) Sotheby’s desire to strengthen its competitive position against Christie’s and large galleries. “This is a very aggressive move … aimed squarely at gaining market share”.

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