The Easel

25th March 2025

Maybe the most important American artist you’ve never heard of

Sebastian Smee | Yahoo | 21st March 2025

Whitten began his art career when civil rights was a huge issue. Avoiding representational protest painting, he instead plunged into abstraction. What ensued were paintings of great variety – “carved, splattered, sprayed, scraped, hammered and excavated”. Sculptures and mosaics were treated similarly. Absent for most of his career was recognition of a remarkable talent for expressing “the dynamics of mourning and memory”. One work, says the writer, “emanates pulses of soul-ache”.

Tribute: Thomas Moser (1935–2025)

Izzy Kornblatt | Architectural Record | 9th March 2025

Few cabinetmakers reach a level where their products are thought of as works of art. Moser was one. A self-taught furniture designer and craftsman, his hand-built pieces celebrated American craft traditions with features like visible mortise-and-tenon joints. His designs were contemporary, yet their “unadorned functionalism“ owed a debt to 1920’s Bauhaus as well as 18th century Shaker designs. His acclaimed chairs were simple, elegant and strong, reflecting a life-long pursuit of “ultimate chairness”.

Edvard Munch Portraits review – smug, creepy and weird, but where’s the drama?

Adrian Searle | The Guardian | 12th March 2025

Think Munch, think Nordic angst? Pretty much, judging by a show of his portraits in London. Munch painted his wide circle of friends – artists, musicians, the well-to-do. They are an odd lot, “the smug, the arrogant, the faintly creepy”, captured with psychological acuity, sometimes in hallucinatory colour.  Some complain about the weak selection of works in this show. Why not include, asks one, the “wild portrait of the mistress who shot him”. Some people, it seems, can’t get enough angst.

A show of Chinese bronzes at the Met will help you think in centuries

Philip Kennicott | Yahoo | 22nd March 2025

During China’s Song dynasty (around 1100 CE), rediscovered Shang and Zhao dynasty bronzes from two millennia earlier sparked a revival of those styles. Art history regards the later bronzes as inferior. Is that view justified? Song dynasty casting techniques allowed more detailed, refined designs while contact with the Islamic world inspired new patterns and inlay. In other words, they were not just copies of an ancient past but innovative works in their own right. ”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Gustav Klimt’s mysterious African prince portrait

Gaby Reucher | DW.com | 21st March 2025

Finding a valuable painting can be perilous as well as profitable. An 1897 Klimt painting has been found that captures an important stylistic shift in his work. Great! Now, the complications. Lost in 1938 when the Nazi’s took power, it features an Ora (current-day Ghana) prince who was in colonial-era Vienna as part of what we would now call “a human zoo”. Ugh! There are multiple restitution claimants and an export permit is needed. Apparently, a brave (un-named) institution is lining up to buy.

Art Institute showcases ancient Roman sculptures in unprecedented ‘Myth and Marble’ exhibit

Kyle MacMillan | Chicago Sun-Times | 15th March 2025

Having dazzled in Rome and Paris, more sculptures from the fabled Torlonia Collection have hit Chicago. Without a common language across its empire, Rome projected its power visually. Sculptures – “imperial portraits” – appeared in public baths, libraries and amphitheatres, all proclaiming “stability and prosperity through dynastic succession”. Their “artistic audacity” gives them contemporary relevance: ‘we’re surrounded by media … in the Roman world, sculpture was the medium par excellence”.

Palazzo Barberini and Caravaggio. In the bedlam of the blockbuster exhibition of the year

Federico Giannini | Finestre sull' Arte | 16th March 2025

This show is an “unfailing, unmissable Caravaggio epiphany”, a verdict confirmed by surging crowds. Yet, there is also serious work afoot. Some paintings, such as one recently rediscovered in Spain, have contested authorship and scholars want to scrutinise them next to “noisily higher quality” works. Few new insights into Caravaggio emerge, just a furious, high stakes debate over what is genuine. One might decide it is a show for the specialists, as is this review.  Images and details on 12 paintings are here.

11th March 2025

The Monumental Calligraphy of Tong Yang-Tze

Lesley Ma | Perspectives | 28th February 2025

Traditional calligraphy, written with ink and brushes, is under threat from the ball point pen and the computer screen. Tong fears that its demise will mean a loss of “the roots of a culture”. That has motivated an artistic career focused on a painterly approach to calligraphy. She writes monumental scrolls using outsized characters and “energizes” the scroll by “magnifying the movement and dynamism of the lines.” Two scrolls on display in New York comprise the most important show of calligraphy in recent memory.

The Past is Never Past: Anselm Kiefer — Early Works at the Ashmolean

Jon Malysiak | Medium | 17th February 2025

Distinguished he may be but there is a relentlessness to Kiefer’s later work. His paintings tend toward huge – sometimes grandiose – and are “grindingly earnest” in how they confront German military history. Is there any room for art? His early work, currently on show, doesn’t seem much lighter. It is direct, dense and “oppressive”. But then, admits the writer, he felt drawn, not by their beauty but by “an almost reluctant respect”. They “do not offer comfort, but they do offer reflection”.

Ricardo Scofidio dies at 89

Daniel Jones Roche | The Architects Newspaper | 7th March 2025

Scofidio made innovative designs from early in his career, but his broader impact only emerged after co-founding Diller, Scofidio+Renfro in 1979. The firm (that included his wife) won public and cultural commissions, most notably the 2009 conversion of an abandoned train track into New York’s High Line park. His work on both sides of the Atlantic helped “reshape the museum landscape” and secured his reputation as a “seminal” architect who “altered the way people see museums”. An interview is here.

A philanthropist’s art collection that shows how Goya anticipated Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne

Mark Hudson | The Independant | 13th February 2025

Stellar collections of art have long drawn big crowds when they tour, especially if full of Impressionist paintings. The latest, a Swiss collection, has its share of star paintings yet the reviews are just a little ho-hum. Maybe that’s local one-upmanship (London’s Courtauld is bigger and better). More likely, Impressionism is simply over-exposed.  A Goya work, on its own, is “drop dead brilliant”. Yet, while the above writer is positive, another grouches that it is “a drearily grand exhibition”.

Nothing Lasts Forever: a long overdue retrospective on working-class Britain arrives in London

Diane Smyth | British Journal of Photography | 5th March 2025

Images of urban decay are sometimes called ‘ruin porn” and often feature grim images of poverty or class neglect. Not so from Mitchell who photographed northern England – particularly Leeds – in the 1970’s and later. His images show “utopian” social housing projects that end in failure (“dying buildings”) but also document those cities’ cohesive communities and the dignity of their residents. Mitchell is something of a “cult figure”, a “chaser of a disappearing world” with images that “exude warmth and empathy”.

Drawing is still flourishing. This exhibition proves it

Robert Chandler | Prospect | 5th March 2025

Not exactly a review and not exactly a personal narrative, this mostly is a declaration of faith in drawing. The “fundamental” art of drawing still flourishes, even though few institutions still teach it in depth. David Hockney points to its enduring appeal thus: “it helps you put your thoughts in order”. For other artists drawing is an aide during the ”hazardous way of getting to the depth of a memory”. And, in some cases, drawing is “the obstinate work of love without which [many] drawings might never be begun”.

Framing History: A Study of the Craftsmanship of Picture Frames

Marissa Lupkas | Art and Object | 7th March 2025

One might think the sole purpose of a frame is to protect the artwork. Not entirely – for most of art history frames have also performed real aesthetic work. Sometimes frames create a “border between the real and the imagined”. Sometimes they perform a decorative function. Perhaps most importantly, they can provide an “emotional and spiritual invitation” to the viewer to embrace the painted scene. But the golden rule remains: don’t compete with the painting.

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