The Easel

15th October 2024

The Louvre’s New Exhibition Takes a Serious Look at the Jesters of Yore

Perhaps we need more jesters in our fractious age. First seen in European visual culture around 1300, they were subversive figures capable of the best or worst in personal and social behaviours. Unrelated to madness, they symbolised the social tensions associated with the development of capitalism. Jesters had faded in popularity by the Enlightenment (after 1600) but have never gone away entirely. A popular figure in the Batman movies was his arch-enemy, the Joker.

Machines like us

When Lee builds her “body horror” sculptures, she isn’t looking for a considered judgement but rather wants to “trigger extreme feelings.” As the recipient of this year’s Tate Turbine Hall commission, her latest work is there, writ large. The assemblage of pumps, motors and hoses drip and squirt yukky-looking fluids, leading the writer to call it “disturbingly dark work that balances on the edge of disgust”.  Another critic says its “the best installation for years.”  A third says its kitsch. Phew! Images are here.

Francis Bacon: A Very Human Presence

It has been said that Bacon’s work attracts admiration rather than fondness. That’s understandable given the “painterly violence” of his portraits. One is described as “monstrous … [the subject’s] face a pummelled, minced mask of meat”. Lovers appear in different palettes – “a bruised prism of hues, from rich plums to sickly greens and deep pinks”. Says one smitten critic “Bacon holds his own here with Rembrandt [and] with Velázquez’s flickering fluid brushwork”.

‘A painting to hear loud and clear’: Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half

Driving from LA to visit his family in Oklahoma City, Ruscha had ample time to contemplate the “impassive iconography of the road”. He published a book of photos of what he saw – “yammering signage and cheapo architecture”. Seeing no apparent reaction, he picked one photo that he made into an acclaimed painting. Its bold diagonal angle gave it a “surging velocity”. Said Ruscha, “Once you pick the object and reproduce it faithfully … you want to instill a thing with some earth-shaking religious feeling.”

Fashion photography is in vogue

Fashion photography is increasingly “coveted” as fine art. Is that because we are more celebrity-obsessed, or because fashion photography has changed? Deborah Turbeville’s photography suggests the latter. Diverging from the usual glossy fashion aesthetic, her images were unpolished and show women preoccupied with their own thoughts. Such images proved influential and brought a darker element to fashion. Said Turbeville “I never thought the clothes were the main thing.”

The de Young presents the first major American retrospective of Art Deco icon Tamara de Lempicka

It doesn’t hurt in the least for an artist to be in the right place at the right time. In de Lempicka’s case, that meant glamorous, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg and, after 1917, Paris. Developing a style that “blended classicism and modernism, her portraits of the 1920’s and 1930’s brought fame and fortune. Such images, rendered in geometric shapes and metallic hues, epitomize the aesthetic of the Machine Age. De Lempicka is now seen as embodying the “independence of the new woman”. Images are here.

How Surrealism Lost Its Shine

Is surrealism still in good health, a century after it proclaimed itself? Its big names still attract attention, but they are looking dated. Dali, for example, looks like his target audience was “fifteen-year-old boys”. And, to modern eyes, it’s hard to forgive that gang’s rampant misogyny. It’s not proving to be a fertile area for ideas, either. Much new work “looks flashily inert”. Surrealist work in film and writing is still interesting but in painting “it’s rather smaller than its reputation suggests.”

8th October 2024

Mike Kelley, Ghost and Spirit review: American artist’s conceptual art was trashy, visceral and hilarious

When looking at Kelley’s work, says the writer, just “[go] with the flow”. A product of working class Detroit, Kelley adopted the persona of the disgruntled adolescent.  His influential conceptual art is diverse – performance to video, sculpture to drawing, sewing and stuffed toys – full of ideas and, at times, “wilful crassness”.  “Whether he was a perverse genius or a slightly creepy provocateur (likely both) this show has incredible energy, a sense of the mess and confusion of real life blasting through it.”

Robert Longo with Amanda Gluibizzi

Longo was one of the 1980’s Picture Generation. Immersed in the new “image storm”, those artists developed the idea that identity is not innate but constructed socially and expressed via the mass media. That idea still runs through Longi’s work, notably his renowned charcoal drawings. He is “making pictures of pictures” but they are not just “representational images. Art is a form of understanding and [the viewer] is not experiencing that image; they’re experiencing this human energy of making it.”

Riots, disasters and cries for justice: the art show charting India’s wildest decades of political pandemonium

Few would be aware of India’s internal turbulence prior to 1998. That period gave rise to vivid art, described by a critic as “uniquely Indian art dealing with an entirely unique set of Indian circumstances”. So, is this art of general interest? India’s “national metamorphosis” is a particular story, but other themes are more universal– home as a place of safety, tradition versus modernity, human dignity. We recognise these stories in any language. Images are here.

Irving Penn + Issey Miyake: Design Meets Photography

In 1983, Irving Penn photographed two Miyake creations for Vogue. Startled by how differently Penn saw his clothes, Miyake asked him to photograph an entire collection. Thus began a collaboration that lasted 13 years. Miyake never attended the shoots or sent instructions. Penn never attended Miyake’s shows and sent his images back to Miyake without editing. “Miyake always waited with nervous anticipation for the photographs to arrive, like a student fretting over an exam score.” A book of Penn’s images is here

Confederate and Colonialist Monuments Are Finally Being Toppled, But Few Can Agree on What Goes in Their Place

Debate about the purpose of public art has yielded little consensus. What then of the many statues commemorating leaders of the US Confederacy? Their removal has been difficult, but so too is deciding what replaces them. A celebration of abolitionist leaders? A commemoration of slavery’s victims?  Something apologetic? There is a view that “history needs new monuments” and that artworks “allow more people in”. Yet “spectacle is not repair.”

“The Avant-Gardists; Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935”

When the Romanovs fell, Russia’s avant garde artists were filled with “a giddy sense of possibility”. They had all spent time in Paris. Yet Russia, barely started on its industralisation, was not so responsive to Parisian theories of combining life and art. In any case, the Bolsheviks had other plans for Russian society. Combining the petty rivalries amongst its “brilliant, talented crackpots” with their “almost unutterable naivete “, the artistic revolt was short lived and officially extinguished in 1932.