The Easel

22nd October 2024

The Met’s Siena Renaissance Show Is a Masterpiece

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 18th October 2024

Siena, being in the north, was influenced by art from both western Europe and Florence. Around 1300, its artists started to meld Byzantine figuration and proto-Renaissance naturalism. It was a “rupture in world art”, producing devotional art that was elegant, had narrative detail and emotional intensity. For a moment, the city approached its Tuscan rival Florence as an art centre. The Black Death reached Siena in 1348, halving its population and wiping out many illustrious artists. Florence prevailed. A “rapturous” show.

On Chaïm Soutine

Michael Hoffman | London Review of Books | 24th October 2024

Soutine’s approach to painting was “furious”. Using gobs of thick, “squidgy” paint, he “dissented” from the careful style of friends such as Modigliani. Whether it was the “pictorial violence” of his landscapes or the distorted figures in his portraits, everything he did was striking. Soutine “straddles a great generational and stylistic gulf in art history, between the cosy 1900s of Post-Impressionist Montmartre and the drip of Pollock … He fills this space, completely, by himself.” A video (20 min) is here.

Great American Dreamer

Alastair Sooke | The World of Interiors | 17th October 2024

Wesselmann was among the earliest Pop artists yet never got as much credit. He didn’t see himself as part of Pop, although his paintings and collages (some almost big enough to be installations) riff on American culture. Perhaps their air of “imperial [American] self-confidence” no longer resonates. Charges that his Great American Nudes series are sexist (rebutted here) have perhaps taken a toll. So, is Wesselmann’s art a “celebration or critique” of America? He gets the benefit of the doubt … just.

Haegue Yang review – a must-see show if the slats of venetian blinds make you cry

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 8th October 2024

Oh dear. Yang’s survey show has produced a pile-on. Her sculptures are made of a wide variety of commonplace materials and are intended to be immersive. They attract a few tepid compliments – “bold”; “exuberant” – but mostly criticism. “Sometimes a pile of stuff is just a pile of stuff” says one critic. “Completely unrewarding” says another. And, to top it off “Yang’s art doesn’t evoke much beyond the chaos and fun we experience when we go down the shops”. Ouch!

The World, and That’s All

Patrick Bringley | Met Museum Perpsectives | 3rd September 2024

An appreciation, by a guard at New York’s Met. Harvesters is one of perhaps six Bruegel works depicting seasonal change. (His famous Hunters in the Snow is another). In 1565, it was a novelty, a landscape where the land is the star rather than simply a backdrop to something more important. “This is a hazy-hot, gold-green day in sixteenth-century Low Countries. Bruegel has painted [the peasants] … comically, but they’re also sympathetic, and so human.  It’s the world, and that’s all.”

Sean Scully : a romantic geometry of colors

Michel Gauthier | Centre Pompidou | 7th October 2024

There are some who can’t stand Scully’s work. Many more think it is beautiful. Surprisingly, given the expressiveness of his stripes, he arrived at that visual language only after a long dalliance with precise minimalism. What changed was his preference for “rhythm over form”, with his stripes becoming diverse, blurry and in more nuanced colours. Says another writer, this is Scully’s big idea – marrying minimalism and expressionism. I could gaze at them for hours … it feels a lot like staring out to sea.”

15th October 2024

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

Devorah Lauter | Artnet | 13th October 2024

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

Silke Hohmann | Monopol | 7th October 2024

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

Christian House | Sotheby's | 23rd September 2024

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

Mark Rozzo | Christie’s | 14th October 2024

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

Staff | The Economist | 3rd October 2024

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

Sharon Anderson | The Voice of San Francisco | 8th October 2024

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

Martin Herbert | ArtReview | 11th October 2024

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.”

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