The Easel

28th January 2025

Jean Tinguely

Veronica Simpson | Studio International | 11th November 2024

Tinguely was “stuck” in a painting career until discovering Calder‘s ideas about movement. That inspired a career of making mechanical assemblages that lacked any discernible purpose. Sometimes these machines used found objects – pots and pans, barbie dolls, petticoats. And often, they made noises – “clicking, whirring, grinding, rotating, clanging and rattling.” These works are pioneering, inventive, either with a serious point to make, or else “just a delightful prank”.

The Henri Cartier-Bresson of South Korea

E Tommy Kim | The New Yorker | 18th January 2025

When a city emerges from a ruinous war, where should a photographer aim his camera? Seoul in the late 1950’s was beset by deprivation and hardship. Rather than showing its devastation, Han Youngsoo chose to highlight the “minute, insignificant traces of life”. His images of working class life are unembellished, similar to Cartier-Bresson (in Paris) and Helen Leavitt (in New York). “His pictures tell us what it felt like to survive, and move on … They are portraits of chaos and dreams.” Images are here.

The birth of modernism in Brazil: ‘A young, ambitious nation trying to express itself’

Alastair Smart | Christie’s | 23rd January 2025

Modernist thinking, once thought exclusively European, was, at the start of the 20th century, also happening elsewhere. Brazilian artists, facing a conservative art establishment, engaged with Europe’s avante garde and began developing a modern visual identity. Given Brazil’s diversity, its art is complex, limiting its international profile. At least one critic dislikes this London survey of 10 major artists but even he concedes that they have given modernism “funk and fun”.

Once Upon a Time: Art Before the Internet

JJ Charlesworth | ArtReview | 25th January 2025

This show was overed in a pre-Xmas newsletter, but this piece better highlights changing attitudes to digital art. Since 1960, artists have shown a fascination for two main themes. Will technology be a “utopian enabler” of human communication? And will technology produce new aesthetic experiences? Notwithstanding mass computing, and now AI, the prevailing view seems to be that “machines can’t see like humans can”. A “revolutionary fusion of aesthetics, technology and society” doesn’t seem imminent.

Secret passageway through one of Italy’s most famous cityscapes opens to public for first time

Julia Buckley | CNN | 31st December 2024

Besides writing the first history of art, Giorgio Vasari designed Florence’s Vasari Corridor. Built in 1565 for the Medici’s, the exclusive passageway connects the Uffizi (formerly a palace) to government offices, crossing the Arno atop the Ponte Vecchio. Over centuries, it has amassed a large collection of portraits. Mussolini showed it to an admiring Hitler and Ponte Vecchio was the only Florentine bridge to survive WW2.

The architect and the artist

Leah Singer | Ursula | 25th January 2025

Attracted by Le Corbusier ambitious plans for Chandigarh, Nek Chand, a humble road inspector, joined the project. Soon after, he began secretly building a rock garden in a nearby forest. Over decades it accumulated thousands of concrete sculptures of people and animals, its acres of winding paths connecting a series of chambers that mimic a typical Punjab village. Its popularity now protects it from demolition and, together with the city, is regarded as a “vast urban experiment”.

Art sales slump

Michael Prodger | The Critic | 19th December 2024

Is the tide going out on fine art? Sales volumes have been flat-ish for some years, buoyed up by top-end works. Now,, art auction sales of the top four auction houses – the pinnacle of the market – totalled $4.7bn in 2024, down from $7.4bn in 2022. That’s a whopping fall, seemingly highlighting the folly of classifying fine art as a financial asset. “The demand for masterpieces remains strong”, purrs one auction executive. Admits another, the “price yardstick” of a masterpiece was $50m but is now merely $20m.

17th December 2024

HOLIDAYS

year’s most popular stories among Easel subscribers. After that, your long-suffering editor, who has been in book writing purdah for much of 2024, needs a break. The Easel will resume on Tuesday January 28, 2025.

If you enjoy reading The Easel, would you consider making a donation to support our work? I don’t bombard you with requests, accept advertising on the website, or monetise your personal data in any way. A donation to help cover running costs can be your gesture of appreciation.

Click here to make a donation on Patreon

How Digital Fabrication Changed Sculpture

Glenn Adamson | Art in America | 16th December 2024

An interesting discussion that, in some ways, gets its key points backwards. Computer-based design (notably AI) and production techniques are expanding sculpture’s possibilities for artists both rich and poor. In some cases, the creative contribution of the sculptor versus computer software is tangled, putting “artist and the machine … together in the black box”. At the start of the article, however, the shoe drops. “Impossible objects” are great but if they are not obviously human, they are not so interesting.

On Kawara, serial dater

Rowland Bagnall | Apollo | 5th December 2024

At the time of his death, Kawara would have put his age at 29,771 days. On quite a few of those days he made a text painting of the date. For over 30 years, he also sent occasional telegrams to friends saying “I am still alive”. And then there were the eleven years of daily postcards declaring “I got up”. Kawara was obsessed with the passing of time and “the slow ebbing away of life”. Differences in his “date” paintings are only minor but enough to remind us of the question “what are the traces we leave behind”?

Versailles: Science and Splendour, Science Museum: A masterclass in storytelling

Alastair Sooke | Yahoo news | 13th December 2024

Can a science exhibition be an exhibition of art?  France’s Louis XIV, the Sun King, surrounded himself with various scientific instruments that advertised his erudition and power, But are they any more than “vapid opulence”? Still, if not every item is artistic, at least the exhibition can boast the fabulous Breguet watch 160, made for Marie Antionette. With its intricate engineering and elaborate case, it is the ultimate combination of science and the decorative arts.

Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome at the National Gallery

James White | The Upcoming | 4th December 2024

When the Renaissance artists got bored with scientifically accurate perspective and proportion, they came up with mannerism – a “flaunting of style and distortion”. Parmigianino went all in on this and, at the tender age of 23, produced one of the style’s masterpieces. Hanging in London, it was regarded as a “mustardy-yellow monstrosity” until a 10 year restoration. Now, says one writer it is “one of the UK’s most mesmerising works of Renaissance art.”

Peter Schjeldahl’s Pleasure Principle

Zachary Fne | The Nation | 9th December 2024

Schjeldahl, a smoker, greeted his lung cancer diagnosis with the pithy comment “no surprise”. He wrote for a few more years, dispensing his “chatty authority”. His death marked the end of a whole approach to writing about art. Art, he said, was “a holiday of the spirit”. In his role as a critic, he “doted” on his readership and felt “somebody [shouldn’t] have to crawl over broken glass to get to art.” The role of the critic, in his view, was to be “an instrument for nudging you closer to an artwork.”

10 artworks that stole the show at L.A. museums in 2024

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 9th December 2024

What is there to learn from one critic’s list of hits from 2024? Not a lot perhaps, apart from highlighting some new names. On further inspection, though, the list is a reasonable summary of art world preoccupations. Identity is prominent (no surprise). Assertive, confident work by women artists is another. Technology, Indigenous art and Renaissance art all make an appearance. An equally arbitrary list of the “best” art shows in NY places its bets similarly.

Older links
Newer links