The Easel

4th March 2025

How Art Deco Shaped 100 Years of Forward-Thinking Design

Caroline Roux | artnet news | 27th February 2025

Since its coming out party at a 1925 Paris exposition, art deco has proven remarkably influential. Its parentage was various, borrowing the modern feel of Bauhaus design while adding ornamentation and luxe materials. Discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 contributed both new motifs and the idea of repeating geometric shapes. Art deco’s features have been endlessly reworked, but its influence is evident whenever you see a room with elements that form a unified design.

Leigh Bowery, as Remembered by His Closest Friends and Collaborators

Hannah Lack | AnOther | 24th February 2025

Bowery was the “emperor” of London nightclubs in the 1980’s. Designer, performance artist but mostly an unclassifiable creative, his main creation was himself. Boy George described him as “modern art on legs”. Through Lucien Freud he started to gain the art world legitimacy he craved but then came an early death from AIDS. Bowery remains an enduring influence in fashion and on the dance floor. The last word is his – “dress as though your life depends on it, or don’t bother”.

The prince of Swedish nature

David Platzer | The New Criterion | 25th February 2025

As the biological sciences flourished in the 19th century, so did popular interest in wildlife. “Animal artists” responded as did newly emergent photography. Liljefors, Sweden’s “prince of animal artists” distinguished his work through exquisite composition. His flying swifts were set against a swathe of wildflowers with detail that photography could not match. But Liljefors, a hunter, was also a realist and his works showed the ‘kill or be killed’ aspect of nature. A “most exhilarating show”.

The Unending Sweetness of Painted Fruit

Amina Khan | ARTIC | 11th February 2025

A meditation on still life painting. Still lifes often featured game birds or fruit, items that for most were unattainable. Meat was expensive, perfect fruit rare and items like chillis unknown and exotic. Even though we now live amidst super abundance, we recognise in these paintings a message of impermanence, even precariousness. Things won’t always be this good. So, feed the eye with these luscious items now because “each one will eventually be transformed by a knife.”.

Goryeo Celadon: The Famed Ceramics of Medieval Korean Art

Daniella Romano | The Collector | 28th February 2025

During their long rule of Korea, the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392) heavily promoted celadon ceramics. The technique originated in China, but advanced further in Korean hands. Technical improvements such as the particular clay used, double glazing and kiln structure gave Korean celadon its distinctive jade colour. Just as important though, were conceptual changes such as inlay, a refined aesthetic and the use of floral patterns. The defining celadon piece is considered to be the maebeong shaped vase with high shoulders.

What Makes British Art ‘British’?

JJ Charlesworth | ArtReview | 20th February 2025

“Explaining” British art is complicated and as much a story about culture as about art. Over its long history it has been swayed by “invasion, migration and exchange”, as well as the “hatred of image making” during the Protestant Reformation. Local artists endured patrons with a long-standing preference for their continental European rivals. Once religious conflict subsided an authentically British art emerged around 1800 with the landscape painting of Constable and others.

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”.

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