The Easel

10th December 2024

What the Notre Dame Restoration Says About France’s Past and its Future

Bradley Stephens | Design Art Magazine | 7th December 2024

Notre Dame cathedral’s restoration is “miraculous”. Luckily, key elements of the building survived the fire and a prior digital image facilitated restoration of this 19th century “reimagining of medievalism”. While traditionalists and modernisers battle over even small modernising details, workers have taken an “almost devotional” approach to the project.  One historian ascribes that to the building’s cultural status. Notre Dame is “not the most beautiful of our cathedrals. But it is the most admired”.

Tomas van Houtryve: ‘Photographing Notre Dame became an obsession’

Michael Naulin | Blind | 7th December 2024

Notre Dame was derelict until Victor Hugo, writing in the 1830’s, extolled its symbolic value. Thus rescued, it acquired a uniquely Parisian identity, something apparent to Houtryve as he documented the rebuild. “I felt the mystery of the building. For Victor Hugo, Gothic architecture was the pinnacle of public storytelling … every stone told a story. Like its builders and restorers, [my images] are part of a story of transmission … an intergenerational project.” His photo-essay for National Geographic is here.

Stop Hating on Pantone’s “Mocha Mousse” Color of the Year

Rhea Nayyar | Hyperallergic | 5th December 2024

Colour can be a serious topic but “colour of the year” – well, not so much. Pantone, the colour technology company, positions its 2025 colour, Mocha Mousse, thus: “it expresses a thoughtful indulgence … an unpretentious classic”. Keeping a straight face, an architecture publication promises that the colour “as an amuse-bouche accent wall [will] add a pop of sophisticated vibrancy”. Wow! The above writer, though, is on a different thought track.  Why do so many people look at brown and “liken it to poop”?

Art Institute of Chicago opens its first gallery devoted solely to Korean art

Stefano Esposito | Chicago Sun-Times | 5th November 2024

When Samsung’s chairman died in 2020 his “vast” art collection was donated to the nation. That donation, in part, has fuelled loans to a new Korean gallery in Chicago. Its opening show includes contemporary works, but the “showstoppers” are older pieces dating back to the 5th century BCE (discussed here). Besides Buddhist art, the ceramic works show the transition from earthy “buncheong” stoneware to Goryoe celadon and, later, refined white porcelain. Move over K-pop!

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review – an exhaustive and exhausting show

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 2nd December 2024

From the 1950’s artists viewed technology as a new frontier. Some work is “poignant”, with wobbly machines being “like metaphors for life”. Our growing understanding of perception paralleled the emergence of op art. Computers, though, have complicated things. When used to aid (imperfect) human creativity, they are fine but attempts at autonomous creativity fall flat. “When a machine takes control … the results become less interesting.  I left the exhibition feeling profoundly depressed.”

Total eclipse of the art?

Sibyl Ruth | The Critic | 6th December 2024

Should art ever be destroyed? This catchy question is not directed at woeful art (go ahead and throw it away) but more at the politicisation of good art. Politicisation is sometimes the handiwork of “iconoclastic experts” – woke curators – whose wall label texts are explicitly political. Then there are protests that take advantage of renowned (but apolitical) artworks. One writer suggests we show less “pious reverence” toward art. “Occasional destruction is the price we pay for art doing its job.”

3rd December 2024

Picasso: printmaker at the British Museum review – an eye-opener of a show in more ways than one

Melanie McDonough | The Standard | 6th November 2024

Picasso loved the print medium – in bursts. His print activity was dominated by two vaunted collections – the mid-career Vollard Suite and the huge 347 Suite done toward the end of his life. At well over 2000 works, printmaking was a major part of his oeuvre. It was a place to develop ideas (often inspired by classical sculpture) and express his erotic obsessions. And print offered many different techniques. He mastered all of them, with “insolent ease”.

Annibale Carracci, the greatest Old Master no one has heard of

William Poundstone | LACMA On Fire | 26th November 2024

Here’s a big claim – Carracci is “the most underappreciated” of the key painters in European art history. Why so? He developed a naturalism in his painting that preceded Caravaggio. He also was a forerunner in painting landscapes, ahead of the now more famous Poussin. Lastly, he developed illusionist techniques that became a characteristic of the Baroque. Lacking the radical cinematic quality of Caravaggio, he languished in the art market for decades. Not any more.

Trace Ed Hardy’s global influence on tattoo design, roots in San Francisco with this timeline

Ethan Gregory Dodge | San Francisco Chronicle | 29th November 2024

Sceptical about tattoos being art? Well, consider the career of prominent American tattooist Ed Hardy. After graduating from art school he switched to tattooing, drawn by its ”spectacularly transgressive” spirit. His appointment-only tattoo shop offered custom designs influenced by his long study of finely detailed, semi-abstract Japanese tattooing. Says one writer, Hardy’s lasting contribution was to take “tradition-bound Americana and transmute it into something more artistic”.

Stitched: Scotland’s Embroidered Art

Beth Williamson | Studio International | 18th November 2024

The economics of a community reflects in its art and especially so for textile embroidery. This was women’s work, requiring long hours to produce objects that sold for very little. Yet a wide network of women, including from “the peasantry”, had the skills to make intricate armchair coverings, bed hangings, tablecloths and cushions. Many pieces show exceptional individual creativity, using not just traditional textiles but also newer products from India. “An extraordinary exhibition”.

Tate’s finances are on the skids and I think I know why

JJ Charlesworth | The Spectator | 30th November 2024

Visitor numbers at many museums remain below pre-pandemic levels but British museums are lagging noticeably. Tate Britain, which holds the national collection of British art, is singled out for recrimination, due to its “social justice-tinted view of history”. “Mediocre paintings” are displayed because they make a point about colonialism or women, while “artistically significant” works stay in the storeroom. In its attempt to diversify its audience, there is a “ blindspot where the ‘national’ should be”.

The magic of Tirzah Garwood

Matthew Lyons | Engelsberg Ideas | 26th November 2024

Garwood married a renowned artist who died early in WW2. Her own death, soon after the war, propelled her “into an unearned oblivion”. A current London exhibition is her first in 70 years. After an initial foray into woodblock printing, she switched to painting, capturing a distinctive “English vernacular … dog shows, vegetable gardens, quiet domesticity”. Some works might seem “childlike”, but they are “without sentimentality. [This is] life itself hiding in plain sight. The more you look, the more astonishing it all is.”

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