The Easel

19th November 2024

EASEL ESSAY Surrealism: A discovered space

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 19th November 2024

In this, surrealism’s centenary year, Morgan Meis takes us back to its roots. Amidst the post WW1 ferment of social trauma, disruptive technology and theories about the unconscious, ideas that deflected attention from the day-to-day were bound to appeal. Describing humans as a “dreaming animal”, the surrealists promoted dreams as essential to understanding life in a transforming modern world.

Andre Breton wrote that mundane life “strips us of the dreams and fantasies that once … made us fully human.” Renaissance painters had portrayed reality as a “harmonious and rationally penetrable whole”. In contrast, surrealists thought reality was “unknowable to the rational mind” and sought to establish “a new primacy. The world of dreams is the true world. The world we see is the false world.”

Remembering Frank Auerbach, one of the leading artists of his generation, who has died aged 93

Matthew Holman | The Art Newspaper | 12th November 2024

Auerbach was intense, perhaps a consequence of his tragic last-minute departure from Nazi Germany. He had just a few subjects – his favourite sitters and the urban activity around his London home. From quite early, his paintings showed a characteristic style – densely applied paint (“trowelled on”), distorted images that “connect to the materiality of the subject”, and a feeling of never being carefree. His “contribution to portraiture and landscape painting had no equal during his long lifetime“.

Restoration Reveals Famous 18th Century Master’s Hidden Self-Portrait

Tim Brinkhof | artnet news | 22nd October 2024

We usually associate Watteau with his fetes galantes –paintings of the well-to-do frolicking in lush gardens –that embody the rococo style. He also painted the Louvre’s “mysterious masterpiece”, the comic theatrical figure Pierrot. Its restoration is prompting new speculation, not just about whether it is by Watteau (it seems it is) but also whether the background figure in black is Watteau himself. Why did he paint it and what does it mean? Its many mysteries are elegantly set out in this video (10 min).

Discover Constable is a chance to see one of Britain’s most beloved paintings up close

Florence Hallett | iNews | 17th October 2024

Constable’s The Hay Wain is so beloved that it’s on British biscuit tins. Yet its cosy familiarity obscures the fact that it was “radical” for a landscape painting. With hindsight it looks “less like a landscape painting and more like an actual landscape”. That was Constable the “naturalist”. His preparatory studies were made outdoors, showing the landscape under the bright midday sun. Such choices were an “act of rebellion” and anticipated the imminent invention of photography.

An Indigenous Modernist Painter Finally Gets Her Due

Julie Schneider | Hyperallergic | 18th November 2024

What is the relationship between modern art and indigenous art? In the case of Sully, a self-taught Dakota artist, she simply combined them. Her “personality prints”, three panel works inspired by celebrities of her day – placed modernist geometric patterns next to Native imagery. They are not a synthesis of those aesthetics but certainly are a harmonious “layering”. Says a family member, “she was a Native person exploring modernism. [Her art is not] traditional, and it’s not an unfettered cosmopolitanism.”

Rembrandt’s Night Watch: Major restoration begins

Emma Saunders | bbc.com | 12th November 2024

Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, a face lift in effect, has started. It’s a big deal because the huge, almost 400-year-old painting is one of the crowning artistic achievements of the Dutch Golden Age. The actual restoration work comes after five years of planning. Work to date confirms that Rembrandt was painting a dawn scene (not nighttime) and that he used arsenic-laced pigments to enhance his whites and yellows. A video on the restoration is here and background on the painting is here.

Painting the town: Florence in 1504

Sarah Dunant | RA Magazine | 15th November 2024

A familiar tale but rarely told with such detail and panache. By 1500, Florence was struggling to meet the challenge of rival city states. Michelangelo’s statue of David had been a “stunning piece of civic propaganda … a symbol of a city defiant in the face of her enemies.” Michelangelo and da Vinci were both soon bid away by more powerful patrons, but not before they overlapped with the precocious Raphael. His early paintings show him learning quickly from them. Still, his work was “already his own”.

12th November 2024

How a single year in Florence changed art forever

Martin Gayford | The Spectator | 2nd November 2024

Renaissance art seems so distant that we can lose the drama surrounding its creation. Florence in 1504 is a case in point. Michelangelo and da Vinci “distained” each other. Then, a young Raphael arrived, learned from both and started winning commissions they probably wanted. Rivalries sharpened further. Da Vinci and Michelangelo, seeing “flaws” in each other’s work, tried to out-do the other while the observant Raphael produced his “harmonious synthesis”. How very contemporary. Background is here.

I ventured to Michael Heizer’s remote land art masterwork—and left transformed

William Van Meter | artnet news | 6th November 2024

To call this piece an appreciation would be an understatement. Located in the desert, Heizer’s monumental land art/sculpture City is “an oasis in the vastness.  It is its own ecosystem, an awe-inspiring, soul-cleansing, liberating, transcendental experience. There was an electric frisson that overtook me … a palpable feeling I got once before when visiting Pompeii. More than a monument, it delves into the ancient and the unknown. Profound.” A review of some other Heizer sculptures is here.

The drawings the Shakers got from God

Jackson Arn | The New Yorker | 7th October 2024

The Shakers led famously unadorned, disciplined lives. Their simple, elegant furniture is celebrated while their art – notably drawings – deserve greater attention. Made exclusively by women and inspired by spiritual visions, drawings were gifted to other communities. They were not intended for display, pride and ownership both being sinful. Contrasting with their severe lives, these drawings are “ravishing” and brimming with colour – somewhat akin to the godless outside world. If you have paywall problems, another review is here.

The Great Mughals review – dazzling decorous delights waft you to paradise

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 6th November 2024

The Mughals were a contradiction. They were violent, engaging in palace coups at home and military conquest abroad. Yet their courts were religiously tolerant and intellectually open, incorporating Central Asian, Persian and European influences. Immensely wealthy at their peak (about 1560 – 1660) their ravishing palaces were full of art, books and precious objects. Their floral patterning was widely influential. Their gardens were to die for. Which, eventually, they did. Images and background are here.

Looking at Art Will Never Be the Same Again

Francesca Billington | The Nation | 6th November 2024

Is it OK to take photos with your phone at a gallery? If we want to pay “rapt attention” to the art, perhaps not. An older idea, though, was that looking at art was “social spectatorship”, so texting and sharing images seems fine. A new book links the issue to how phones have reduced our attention span. Yet phones provide information quickly, becoming “a “prosthesis for viewing”. Is this now blaming phones for an old issue, namely whether expert opinion (however delivered) ends up telling people what to think about art.

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