The Easel

24th September 2024

Van Gogh in Provence: ‘There was both a growing mastery in his work and a growing deliberation over what went into it’

Cornelia Homburg | Christie’s | 11th September 2024

Yet more van Gogh! London’s National Gallery is marking its 200th birthday with a show of 61 works, covering the artist’s two years in the south of France. Wanting to create “the art of the future”, he decided that colour would be his hallmark. Sadly, pigment deterioration now dulls many of his choices. Still, what remains is a “comet trail of splendour”. Says one writer, “How much light can you pack into a painting? How much love, despair, hope, anxiety? In the case of Vincent Van Gogh, the answer is: infinite.”

How Japanese Female Photographers Channeled Exclusion Into Experimentation

Pauline Vermare and Lesley Martin and Takeuchi Mariko | Literary Hub | 20th September 2024

Japan has a strong lineage in photography and some of its stars have global reputations. Those stars are all men. A new publication and “canon-revising” exhibition highlights that country’s female photographers who have long battled for attention. While covering some of the same tough subjects as the men (sex workers, big city street life), they also offer perspectives on domesticity and women’s roles that are “both delicate and blunt”. A revelation. A long essay on the topic is here.

All The Rage? We Need To Make Room Again For Anger In Art

Hanno Rauterberg | WorldCrunch | 21st September 2024

This writer seems riled up because he thinks the art world, increasingly, is not. Have artists become too well-behaved, like “dental technicians”? If so, is it because of the money sloshing around in contemporary art? Or is it that today’s big issues, beginning with AI, are so complicated that bafflement is a more likely response than anger? “The urge to always be unpredictable seems to be gone for good; today the art scene is focusing on remixing, remaking and recycling.” 

Arlene Shechet, Storm King review — colourful sculptures both monumental and intimate

Ariella Budick | ft.com | 14th September 2024

In the world of sculpture, Storm King is a sought-after commission. Shechet, who came to prominence via her abstract ceramics, has used the opportunity to lash out, producing six large metal sculptures dressed in conspicuous pastels. They are “biomorphic and baroque, a writhing mass of shapes”, qualities in line with Shechet’s reputation as one of America’s most imaginative sculptors. Mostly, though, they are “a rebuke to certainty”. If the FT paywall doesn’t like you, another review is here.

‘You must walk close to the edge’—the pioneering German artist Rebecca Horn dies, aged 80

Gareth Harris | The Art Newspaper

The many reviews of Horn’s work testify to her influence, even though her art is hard to characterise. She started with drawing but soon explored body-modifying costumes, performance, sculpture and film. One notable piece had a performer walking around in a wheatfield wearing nothing but a unicorn’s horn on her head. Such works didn’t represent a specific idea, says one writer, but rather “evoked … the experience of being half awake, poised between intention and instinct.” A review of her work is here.

Am I supposed to read all this? On spending time with Jenny Holzer’s word art.

Brittany Allen | Literary Hub | 17th September 2024

A fresh, disarming take on Holzer’s text-based installations. She is not the first text artist so why do we pay so much attention to her mix of “pseudo-philosophy, wise-guy polemic, and aimless chatter”? Some text clearly comes from the artist but at other times, who is speaking? If we don’t try to read the words as they scroll past, the whole show seems a bit absurd. And what if we do try to read them?  “If one clear, activating, right-headed message is the point—why take so many words to say it?

17th September 2024

Lucian Freud’s Sitters

Celia Paul | London Review of Books | 12th September 2024

A fascinating essay. Paul was one of Freud’s many lovers. She writes with a candour informed by their romantic relationship and subsequent long “complicated intimacy”. Reviewing Freud’s portraits of his lovers, she diagnoses the trajectory of those relationships at the moment of painting and the substantial impact they had on his art. Paul is also candid about Freud. There was an “enduring love and trust that Lucian could feel for men. He never trusted his female lovers to the same extent.”

The great French painter who had no time for France

Artemis Cooper | The Spectator | 7th September 2024

Gauguin is firmly one of art’s “bad boys”, courtesy of misdeeds in Polynesia. However, his memoir, re-discovered in 2020 and now a ‘scintillating” new biography, complicate this narrative. When he went to Tahiti, his relationships with Tahitian girls were acceptable within Tahitian culture, and he fought doggedly for Polynesian rights against French colonialists. Allegations that he spread sexual disease are in doubt. Who, then, was Gauguin? He was “a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach.”

Hannah Höch: Assembled Worlds

Christiana Spens | Studio International | 16th September 2024

Dada arose from the trauma of WW1 and, in 1920’s Berlin, Höch was one of its leading lights. A publishing job gave her access to printed imagery, which she used to make witty and elegant photomontages, pioneering a new artform and a new form of political commentary. Shut down by the Nazi’s, her art after WW2 took on a more surrealist quality. Höch’s legacy includes her “electric” portrayal of Weimar Germany, an articulation of a feminine sensibility, and photomontage itself. Images are here.

Style Is Nothing’: How Ralph Steadman Transformed Cartooning Into High Gonzo Art

Min Chen | artnet news | 10th September 2024

Steadman’s anarchic illustrations that accompanied the 1970’s writings of Hunter S Thompson are deservedly famous. He started with a training in technical drawing, but then discovered Dada, Duchamp and German expressionism. From there, his offbeat cultural perspective took over. His artistic range now covers political cartoons, sculpture, children’s books and paintings of extinct animals. Why these things? “I felt I had to be useful. Not just an artist doing a thing, but creating some of the useful kind of art.”

Impressionism is a war story. But also a love story.

Sebastian Smee | MSN | 13th September 2024

A new book on Impressionism considers what Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot reveal. She was his most frequent subject. Despite preferring subjects to have a neutral expression, his many portraits of her are “private, engaged and almost extravagantly expressive”. Her own painting was flourishing, yet she put it aside to pose for him. “They are paintings of intimacy, which is neither a subject nor an object but a charge enlivening the psychological space between two subjects.”. Morisot eventually married Manet’s brother.

George Stubbs (1724–1806): Hero of the turf

Toby Keel | Country Life | 30th August 2024

An appreciation of Stubbs on the 300th anniversary of his birth. In his twenties, he studied equine anatomy and, armed with a portfolio of horse studies, moved to London. He accumulated a clientele of racing aristocrats smitten by his life-like horse portraits. Some works verged on the melodramatic but all showed a respect for anatomical fidelity and an admiration for animals. Stubbs’ popularity faded after a time, but lovers of the genre view his horse portraits as having “never been surpassed”.

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