The Easel

25th February 2025

One of the hottest names in art has the talent of an old master

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 10th February 2025

A short review – hardly more than a memorandum – of Yiadom-Boyake’s latest show. All her paintings contain portraits of black people, “everyday city dwellers” at home, in a library or at a dance class. Some are glum, others happy so it’s difficult to find a narrative. Yiadom-Boyake seems to have an agenda, though, which is to “lift black portraiture. The privileged territory of the vulnerable inner life [familiar in white portraiture] is being claimed for the black face.”

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark review – visions of a vanished world

Sean O’Hagan | The Guardian | 2nd February 2025

Hujar gave few interviews, seldom exhibited his work and published just one monograph. Little wonder he has been called a “lesser predecessor to Mapplethorpe”. No longer. Hujar’s portraits of his downtown demimonde are now acclaimed for their composition and “deep intimacy” between photographer and subject. AIDS may have claimed Hujar and many of his circle, but this show reveals a “towering 20th century artist”.  An interview with the curator/biographer is here.

Wayne Thiebaud and the Art of Reinterpretation

Staff | Fine Art Museums San Francisco | 20th February 2025

One suspects that Thiebaud’s paintings of luscious cakes are more cerebral than they seem. This piece helps explain why. Believing that “art comes from art and nothing else”, he found inspiration in surprising places. His cakes, for example, are influenced by Morandi whose still lifes achieve a “sense of compression” of the image. He also admired the abstractionist Ellsworth Kelly – “[I try] to make a representational painting that has as much abstraction as seems to fit that particular mode of representation.”

When in Rome – see Franco Fontana

Soren Harbel | Substack | 12th January 2025

Many say that Fontana has “revolutionised” colour photography. Well, the same has been said about William Eggleston, the American photographer. Of course, they are doing different things. Eggleston used colour to convey meaning, especially in images of urban life. In Fontana’s images, though, colour “is the subject itself”. Planes of colour in a landscape, for example, strip away the three dimensionality of the image, leaving abstract shapes that become “part of an abstract drawing”.

Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde’ – Telling the Story of the Trailblazing Woman Who Championed Modern Art

Abigael Sidi | The Science Survey | 12th February 2025

Art dealers emerged in 1890’s Paris, eclipsing the conservative Salon. A few – Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard – are celebrated for supporting young modernists. So why not Berthe Weill?  She was the first to sell Picasso, the first to exhibit Matisse, Modigliani and Rivera, and ended up with a “veritable all-star team of avant-gardists”. What a prescient eye! Largely written out of the history of modernism, she is getting belated recognition with a New York show and a recent translation of her autobiography,

Capturing the Essence of Motion in Kaleidoscopic Color: A Review of ‘’Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930’ at the Guggenheim

Simone Ginsberg | The Science Survey | 24th February 2025

In the years prior to WW1, artists felt the age had a new energy. Some, like Léger, responded with images of “society-as-machine”. For Delaunay and others, the sense that “everything was happening all at once” was best expressed with colour and his favourite motif, the disk.  While this may have given the Orphist movement, as it was called, its signature idea, the resultant work was so diverse that it didn’t establish a firm footing. So, is Orphist art “meaningless abstraction? … This perception is not fully void of truth”.

The Joy in Painting

Andreas Schlaegel | Kunstkritikk | 12th February 2025

Between 1912 and 1924 Picabia produced influential dada and cubist works. After that, his paintings, as one critic puts it, lack “coherence of development or style”. Admits this writer, he became “a jet-setting transatlantic funny guy”. A Paris show promoting his post-war late work as “unique” thus faces an uphill battle. Much is made of how Picabia painted over old cavasses including for his “enigmatic” dot paintings. The sceptical view – there’s a “persistent immaturity [to] Picabia’s ‘mature’ work”.

18th February 2025

Linder’s trailblazing work at the Hayward Gallery

Pendle Harte | Absolutely | 5th February 2025

Dada, the art movement that responded to WW1 horrors with absurdism, found a peerless exponent in Linder. Emerging in punk era Liverpool, her photomontages deliver a lethal view on consumer culture and identity. Yes, feminist issues have moved on since the battles of the 1970’s. Yet her images are so potent, using such an economy of elements that they still resonate. Says she “I find that my old montages feel like prophecy. My idea of voluptuous, overblown lips suddenly [has] been normalised”

Noah Davis at the Barbican: long overdue, emotional and timely

Amah-Rose Abrams | Wallpaper | 7th February 2025

This “beautiful” retrospective speaks to unfulfilled potential. Davis died young, just as he found his painterly voice. Drawing on family photos and scenes from TV, he painted “impeccably composed” scenes of Black life. What sets them apart is their uncanny, “dream-like” quality. A man rides a unicorn. Figures, with blurry faces, are set in dreamy scenes. Yet his early death is omnipresent. Says one critic “Davis is forever a young artist on his way … when everything seemed possible.”

Screaming in the Streets

Lucie Elven | London Review of Books | 20th February 2025

A sympathetic review of Golden’s retrospective in Berlin, which features six of her renowned slideshows. They all touch on social issues such as drugs and AIDS and, despite constant re-editing, reflect the times in which they were initially made. They share a common core – autobiographically based statements about the human experience. Watching them, says the writer, is “hypnotic, thrilling, [Her friends don’t have jobs] of the 9 to 5 kind. Here, living is a spectacular form of work in itself”

Figures of the fool: from the Middle Ages to the Romantics

Marika Takanishi Knowles | The Burlington Magazine | 3rd February 2025

Art in the Middle Ages often included images of the fool. What did they mean? Around 1300, when art was essentially religious, the fool represented an absence of love for God. Later, fools were seen as buffoons and associated with the excesses of courtly life. By the mid 1500’s and Hieronymus Bosch, they had become an allegory for human imbecility. Only after that did they gain a darker association with mental illness. The linked piece sets this out in admirable detail, but a snappy review of the show is here.

Inside the Louvre Museum’s Breathtaking Debut Fashion Exhibition

Stephanie Sporn | Harpers Bazaar | 29th January 2025

Haute couture at the Louvre – and no, it’s not a fund raiser. Asserting that the museum’s vocation is “to present contemporary creation”, a curator asks why shouldn’t fashion be included? Couture masterworks have been paired with tapestries, furniture, silverware and armour, all displaying glorious craftsmanship. Some of the pairings have “uncanny” visual connections, especially where items in the Louvre inspired the particular design. For many fashion designers “the museum is the ultimate mood board”.

Revisiting Weegee in an epoch where image and illusion is king

Dalia Al-Dujaili | British Journal of Photography | 14th February 2025

Weegee made his name with dramatic, even lurid, images of New York crime scenes. Years later, he moved on to take celebrity portraits. He understood that images make events (and celebrities) newsworthy, and he thus was part of the spectacle creation process. Yet only his early work is acclaimed. This writer defends the later portraits as another way to demonstrate the power of images. Another critic demurs: while Weegee’s early work “pulses with life” his portraits were “puerile … a dead end”.

Donald Trump’s official portrait: The 17th Century painting that unlocks this mysterious image

Kelly Grovier | bbc.com | 21st January 2025

Whether you like or dislike Donald Trump, his official portrait is a startling visual image. Portraits of leaders (including Trump’s own portrait in 2016) usually communicate “openness and affability” and usually are forgettable. In contrast, this new image has a “piercing intensity of expression and … aggressiveness of gaze”. The “crepuscular light” and the subject’s “severe, asymmetrical squint” are chosen for maximum effect. “We really need a new word. “Trumpant” will do.”

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