The Easel

2nd July 2024

Masterpieces from the Torlonia Collection

Staff | The Louvre | 26th June 2024

The Torlonia collection, formed over centuries, is Rome’s “last princely collection”. Locked away for decades, it is the world’s most significant private collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. About 90 works recently shown in Rome are now at the Louvre for a first-ever show outside Italy. The linked piece tells the Louvre story but by far the best review of the collection is here. It gushes that “the sculptures [are] of such high aesthetic quality that the visual impression is almost overwhelming.”

How Ukraine saw ‘a period of real artistic flourishing’ in the early 20th century

Alastair Smart | Christie’s | 28th June 2024

Being next door to Russia, Ukraine and its artists have often been viewed as Russian. No longer. A show of works taken from Kyiv for safekeeping reveals that early 1920’s Ukraine was full of “cultural energy”, fusing modernism with the bright palette of Ukrainian folk art. Stalin’s purges in the 1930’s ended that, but not a yearning for national identity. Not all the art in this show is great, says one critic. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that art can provide a path “towards self-determination, towards self-expression”.

Stephen Shore: on the road, on the rails, and in the air

Jonas Cuénin | Blind | 21st June 2024

For many, long hours of highway driving can dull the senses. For Shore, however, it heightens his attentiveness, sometimes turning a journey into a photographic road trip. What catches his eye includes road signs, motels and gas stations, a set of subjects specific enough to comprise a photographic genre. Shore’s first such trip was in 1972 and they have since become central to his work. Documentary in nature they are exercises in recording quintessential “American vernacular”.

The afterlives of the wives of Henry VIII

Christina Faraday | Apollo | 28th June 2024

Such is the mythology surrounding the wives of Henry VIII that the writer feels a need to remind us that they were “people who really existed”. Especially at the Tudor court, royal portraits were always intended to project an image. The premise of this London show seems to be that his wives deserve greater recognition as individuals. A fine intention but, despite the curators’ best efforts, the status they derived from Henry is “inescapable”.

Art and Artifice

Donna Tartt | Harper'magazine | 18th July 2024

If we cannot explain why we humans make art, does that make art useless? Oscar Wilde famously made a comment to that effect. This piece is a full-throated – if cerebral – defence of art’s relevance to modern life. “To lose our connection with art is to lose our connection with what is best and most mysterious about us as a species. Much of art happens, and has always happened, in the useless spaces between things, in the eerie psychic junkyard that Yeats called “the rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Is there still life in British still life?

Laura Gascoigne | The Spectator | 1st July 2024

Another take on the still life, from a British perspective. Initially, 18th century British artists copied the successful Dutch formula – a moral message without religious fervour. After Cezanne, Picasso and the surrealists helped revitalise the genre, British artists stretched it further by painting consumer products. Still life remains an active part of many art movements, so what is its secret? “It’s the discovery of the unfamiliar in the familiar that makes [it] interesting.”

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking

Hattie Lloyd | The Nudge | 21st June 2024

Despite the ubiquity of Hokusai’s Great Wave, Japanese woodblock printing traditionally focused on urban life and its celebrities – Kabuki stars, wrestlers, courtesans. How odd that an artform from a closed feudal society, with its flattened perspective and planes of colour, helped form modern art in distant Europe. Despite its illustrious pedigree, enthusiasm about this show is muted. One critic ascribes this to its downplaying of social context, namely ignoring “the filthy mess of reality beyond art’s enchanted garden”.

25th June 2024

Joel Meyerowitz: A year of consecration

Jonas Cuénin | Blind | 24th May 2024

Meyerowitz seems to have gone against the tide in his career. He grew up as a “street kid” and still loves the chaos and spontaneity of street life. Yet, he says, “reportage” photography has never been an art world favourite. Further, he wanted to shoot in colour when the fine art market preferred black and white. Of course, there is the ever-present dilemma, “do I represent the world in the right way? Photographs may look like just pictures, but they’re really about your ideas.” A backgrounder and images are here.

Matisse and the Sea

Phyllis Tuchman | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st June 2024

Matisse grew up in France’s industrial north. On first seeing the Mediterranean, its colour shocked him – “blue, blue, blue, so blue that you want to eat it”. A “radiant” show suggests that the sea played a “paramount role” in his subsequent career. Both his hotel interiors in Nice, and his later cutouts, speak to the intensity of his reaction to blue and blue water. Matisse had realised, says one critic, that colour needn’t match appearances but instead could convey emotion. “Colour intensity became the new aim.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s MoMA Show Does Too Much

Madeline Leung Coleman | Vulture | 14th May 2024

Frazier grew up in an industrial town and her most acclaimed photography records family and friends amidst economic decline. That background gives her work an empathetic and collaborative feel, blurring the line between artist and subject. Frazier calls her groups of images “workers monuments” and says that she wants to “stand in the gap between working-class and creative-class people.” Says the critic “I was knocked sideways by the tenderness of the images, by their toughness.”

Once banned for his work, anti-apartheid activist highlights role of politics in art

Melissa Gronlund | The National News | 20th June 2024

South Africa has produced many distinguished photographers, but fewer painters. Jantjes is one of the latter whose major retrospective details decades of activism through art. The above writer thinks the work “terrific” with its urgent testimony about apartheid. Another writer sees it differently. Jantjes’ confrontational screenprints are “incredible” but his paintings are “just not great. Maybe anger can only fuel you for so long before you need to put down the weapon and treat art as … a soothing balm”.

Powers that bead

Ferren Gipson | The World of Interiors | 10th June 2024

If haute couture is art, then so too is beaded embroidery. Its most refined form comes from the French village of Lunéville whose tambour embroidery technique goes back to the 19th century. Specialist seamsters make pieces ranging from the small (for handbags) to large (complete dresses), the latter taking perhaps 1000 hours of work. Lunéville work is technically a form of lace and forms part of France’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. Craft? Well, if you insist. Better would be small-scale artistry of a most exquisite form.

The Power and Grace of Barbara Gladstone

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 19th June 2024

It is a truly rare compliment for critic Jerry Saltz to devote a column to an art dealer. This piece covers the late Barbara Gladstone. More revealing, though, is this interview that shows Gladstone was an art world ‘true believer’. She believed in looking at art “in the flesh”, that social media was just noise. She believed artists can tell us truths about our age. If able to change one thing in the art world, Gladstone said “I would change the idea that collecting is shopping … there is something that art adds to life”.

Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau: 100 years after its creation, his work is still a balm for a world in upheaval

Will Visconti | The Conversation | 17th June 2024

In the 1890’s art nouveau was all the rage in architecture, art and the decorative arts. Mucha, a Paris illustrator, decided to use this style in poster advertisements. That attracted a commission from Sarah Bernhardt – and his career was made. For about 20 years, art nouveau’s utopian fantasies and flowing aesthetic defined modern taste. With war in 1914, the spell was broken and more functional art deco came to the fore. Mucha wandered off to work on various patriotic projects for his beloved Czech homeland.

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