The Easel

26th November 2024

San Francisco MoMA — Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Jessica Skwire Routhier | Antiques and the Arts | 18th November 2024

Because of her acclaimed portrait of Michelle Obama, one might assume Sherald is a portraitist. Mostly, it seems, she is not. Her “luminous figurative compositions” are usually done using models and they tell stories Sherald has imagined. Taking a lesson from social media, her pictures use detail and nuance to project a narrative – about black people and about American-ness. “Sherald’s subjects keep themselves to themselves … less concerned with how they are perceived than with their own imagination”.

Islamic art and the sumptuous Victorian designs of William Morris

Weronika Strzyżyńska | Hyphen | 11th November 2024

William Morris was a quintessentially English designer, and his wallpapers and fabrics celebrated the flora and fauna of the English countryside. Yet behind his designs was a profound influence from Islamic arts. He was an active collector of Middle Eastern carpets and decorative tiling, and their flower motifs and geometric patterns were reflected in his wallpaper designs. Said he, “Persia has become holy land, for there in the process of time our art was perfected”. An essay by a curator is here.

The Painted Protest

Dean Kissick | Harper's Magazine | 1st December 2024

An attempt to decipher the cacophony of contemporary art. A decade ago, the art world decided it was too frivolous. Identity, social issues, and inequality should instead be its focus, along with amplifying the voices of the marginalised. Now, the appearance of an artwork is “subordinate to the theory that purports to explain it.” However, “I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject”.

Giorgio Morandi: Time Suspended, part II

Lyle Rexer | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st November 2024

One critic suggests that no-one “has less to tell us about the 20th century than Morandi.” Working in his small Bologna apartment bedroom, he painted his bottles and vases with “a medieval attentiveness”. He showed them as mere geometric forms in an architecture. And yet they are irresistible as objects for contemplation. More than one writer has likened Morandi’s work to the great Zen painting Six Persimmons, described as “passion… congealed into a stupendous calm”.

Never-before-exhibited portrait by Caravaggio to go on public display

Staff | The History Blog | 23rd November 2024

A Caravaggio portrait, locked away in a secretive collection and unseen for decades, has gone on show in Florence. Completed early in Caravaggio’s career, it features an equally youngish Barberini when he was a rising star in the Vatican. Dramatic lighting and the subject’s expressive hand gestures give the work a “dynamic naturalism” unusual for that time. By the way, Barberini later became pope, patronised the arts, practised nepotism on a “vast” scale and beat up on Galileo. Background and images are here.

Should we open our hearts to Vanessa Bell?

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 18th November 2024

Some critics think Bell’s art deserves more acclaim. She picked up on early modernism, not just in painting but also in ceramics, furniture and illustration. From one perspective, “openness to experimentation” is a good thing. Yet it feeds the criticism that her work is derivative. “[She was influenced] by the post-impressionists. “Which ones?” you may be wondering. All of them! Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, [all have] an impact. In 1912 alone she attempted a dozen approaches …” 

The end of art critics

Pierre d’Alancaisez | The Critic | 14th November 2024

Art criticism is in crisis. Cultural pluralism has “turned discernment into a dirty word”. Artworks have become “props in predetermined political or theoretical arguments” which turns off readers. Social media is such that galleries want to be namechecked by influencers and don’t mind if a review is good or bad. But then, some hope. Because of the “flight from judgement”, the field “is full of opportunities. Audiences are yearning to understand what they’ve been looking at all this time.”Pierre d’Alancaisez

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”.

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