The Easel

9th July 2024

Christopher Wool Tries Blending Bad-Boy Energy with Blue Chip Clout

Chris Murtha | Art in America | 3rd July 2024

If your paintings sell for multi-millions and you have had a Guggenheim retrospective, what comes next? Wool’s answer, if it is that, is to mount his own show in a grungy vacant office block. His famous text works long gone, he has returned to abstract paintings, some made “gritty” through “degraded reproduction”. This is not traditional painting but rather feels like a return to the mid-1970’s when he was a struggling DIY artist. Wool seems to agree, indirectly; “I don’t recognize our culture”.

Vera Molnár: Parler à l’oeil

Richard Kalina | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st July 2024

Molnar’s art has its humour but essentially it is an intellectual exercise into order and the breaking down of order. Starting with a page of squares, for example, she “joins them, divides them, spaces them, squeezes them, flattens them and shakes them” until the image is reduced to an aesthetically pleasing incoherence. Some call her the “godmother of generative art”, but she was a godmother prone to intervention. In an interview, she said “I love order, but I can’t stand it,” Images are here.

The Next New Thing

Witold Rybczynski | The American Scholar | 4th July 2024

Debate amongst architects about cutting edge design versus tradition rumbles on. Some blame Le Corbusier for his uncritical advocacy of what is modern. Ignoring the past, though, means lots of “fresh starts”, some of which fail because they repeat past mistakes. Old is loved, often because it is beautiful, and it works. Suggests the writer, why not design buildings as a blend – for example, minimalist designs built using traditional materials. Depending on your viewpoint, that’s diplomatic or sitting on the fence.

Janet Sobel

Natilee Harren | Artforum | 15th June 2024

Art history knows Sobel as a “Brooklyn housewife” who was the marginalised inventor of drip painting. What should be her true status?  She was influenced by surrealism, just like Pollock and Rothko, but transformed those ideas into abstract expressionism’s foundational ‘all-over’ concept, sometimes accomplished using the drip painting technique. Misogyny and a move away from New York thwarted her progress. “History is not just a game of firsts. Innovation must be coupled with endurance.”

Ruys garden

Frederick Hervey-Bathurst | The New Criterion | 26th June 2024

The Dutch garden designer Mien Ruys is feted at home but almost unknown elsewhere. Influenced by the Bauhaus and later by the artists around Mondrian, she pioneered geometric “’modernist” garden designs, the humble components for which can be found in “millions of suburban gardens across Europe”. They often show a “dynamic connection” between building and landscape, which Ruys achieved using a “bold, restricted colour palette, geometric structure and appreciation of seasonality”. More images are here.

The body, pleasure and play: Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland united in London

Hannah Silver | Wallpaper | 16th June 2024

How serious is this new London show? Cook’s exuberant images feature working-class women with unapologetically ample proportions. Tom of Finland’s pioneering drawings of hypermasculine machismo define a lexicon of happy gay male imagery. Both artists loved to show “fleshy excesses”, notably “exquisite depictions of the bum” while raising broader issues of gender, sexuality and class. Sighs one critic, “this is a small show, but I wouldn’t want more.“ Images are here.

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”.

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