The Easel

29th October 2024

The ghostly worlds of Goya and Paula Rego

Tim Smith-Laing | Apollo | 18th October 2024

Paula Rego admired Goya’s sometimes baffling, sometimes terrifying images. With both artists having a dark side, an exhibition showing them side by side should be interesting. Well, maybe. Some Rego works are “marvellously grotesque” in portraying the cruelty found in children’s rhymes. However, Goya’s prints conjure a world of “monstrous dreams” and are altogether more disturbing. Says one writer, Rego “ends up being no more than Goya’s foil, pointing up the satanic majesty of his imagination”.

How Emmet Gowin Defines Intimacy in Photography

Rebecca Bengal | Aperture | 18th October 2024

Photography takes inspiration literally from anywhere in life. Gowin is renowned for his images of intimacy. Early in his career, this meant observing his wife’s extended family. Casual family snaps they are not. They are formally elegant compositions that speak to “the close bond shared between relatives”. So, how does he pick a key moment? “[It] is just wherever the family occurs, the awareness of how we fit into the places around us. Anything worthwhile is, in a way, something you’ll never see again.”

The Surprising Power of Piet Mondrian’s Lesser-Known Early Paintings

Nicholas Fox Weber | Literary Hub | 25th October 2024

Mondrian’s elegant grids emerged from a long evolution. At 20, he was painting still lifes in the great Dutch tradition. But he was drifting away from his father’s religious outlook and, in his art, showing a preference for primary colours. Around this time, he painted a puppy with the sun shining on its black and white fur. Although an odd subject, given his later work, it reveals Mondrian as already fascinated with “the interplay of neatly confined precincts of black and white. [It reminds that] looking begets enchantment.”

For a Master of Brutalist Provocations, a Modest Museum Appraisal

Kriston Capps | Bloomberg | 6th October 2024

Architects face the dual challenge of aesthetics and utility. Starting with innovative house designs in 1950’s Florida, Paul Rudolph went on to challenge the glass towers of International Modernism. However, the public never warmed to his brutalist megastructures that expressed his idea of a “return to the primal texture of caves”. Their users, it seems, didn’t like them much either. By the early 1970’s his celebrity had faded. Rudolph’s great ideas, says the writer, are now “framed by whispers of failure”.

The Cross-Pollination Between Prints and Textiles Yields Abundance

Julie Schneider | Hyperallergic | 29th October 2024

Printing and textiles have swapped technologies back to at least 1455 when Gutenberg used textile stamping techniques in his new printing press. By the 1600’s “dressed prints” emerged, prints that had patterned fabrics sewn onto them. The boundary between paper and fabric is now even less distinct. Fabric-like patterns are printed on paper and then embroidered with stitching, making an object that “could be seen as a quilt itself, a print of a quilt, or a collage”.  Images are here.

Toward Joy

Aruna D’Souza | 4Columns | 25th October 2024

To mark its 200th birthday, Brooklyn Museum has re-hung its American collection. That’s brave because, in choosing how to show its art, it must decide what stories it wants to tell. Navigating between our current discontents is tricky – gender and racial equity, environmentalism, colonialism all vie for attention, so the re-hang ends up being an “institutional critique”. Portraits of rich white males still appear, perhaps to mollify the traditionalists. “Some things are better left in storage”.

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.”

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