The Easel

THE EASEL ESSAYS

Between machine and eye

LEE FRIEDLANDER New York City, 1969. gelatin silver print © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York This photograph is the kind of photograph you’d throw away. If you’re working with a digital camera, you would immediately delete it. It’s a disaster. Trash it and move on. There’s a big…

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A chance to be involved!

Dearest Easel Readers, Andrew (the editor and publisher of this fine publication) and I have decided to try a little experiment. For the first Easel issue of 2024, I will write an essay based on reader responses to the following categories, as well as any suggestions on your part for further categories. Think of it…

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Essay: Borromini – mystery man of the Baroque. Jed Perl and Deborah Rosenthal in conversation with Morgan Meis

The following is a discussion with Jed Perl and Deborah Rosenthal about a book they recently jointly produced called About Borromini. The book is published by MAB Books and is described thusly: “About Borromini unites two highly personal responses to the buildings of Francesco Borromini, the seventeenth-century Roman architect whose works are among the essential…

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Vermeer: objectivity, intimacy

Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep (c. 1656-7) Sometime probably in 1656 or 1657, Johannes Vermeer painted a painting that we now know as A Maid Asleep. I reference this painting because it hangs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I’ve looked at it many times. I have a relationship with this painting. I’ve…

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King Tut’s long, long afterlife

Fascination with the ancient Egyptians seems nigh inexhaustible. And why wouldn’t it be? There are all those pyramids, so pleasingly geometric against the stark and sandy landscape. In the pyramids, in those giant tombs, massive hoards of treasure. And at the very center of those hoards of gold and bejeweled items, mummies. How can one…

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Armor for contemporary living

There’s a woman standing against a white background. Doll make-up has been applied to her face, big round areas of red rouge on her cheeks, exaggerated mascara, the works. She’s bent over to her right but looking forward with a bemused expression. Perhaps this is because she is struggling under the weight of what I…

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Käthe Kollwitz’s kitsch

Betroffenheitskitsch. It is not an easy word to say. That’s because it is German and Germans love to make compound words. The core of the word is the adjective betroffen, which means ‘affected’, but also ‘concerned’, and even ‘shocked’ or ‘stricken’. Betroffenheit is the noun and can be translated as ‘shock’, ‘consternation’, ‘concern’. Finally, we…

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Goya: Bearing true witness

We have probably all seen images from Goya’s so-called Black Paintings whether we realize it or not. The image known as Saturn Devouring His Son (Goya did not title these works, the titles came from later art historians) is especially ubiquitous. The painting depicts the ancient Greek and Roman mythological story in which Saturn (Kronos…

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Three cheers for ‘irrelevant’ art

Morgan Meis (MM): Jed, your new book, Authority and Freedom*, has come out in the last few weeks. Congratulations! In it, right near the end, you give this lovely quote from WH Auden, from his poem about Yeats: For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making… That’s a nice strong…

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Paula Rego: Yes, With A Growl

There’s a painting entitled Celestina’s House (2000-1). I count at least twenty-two figures in the painting. That’s a rough count. A few of these figures are sitting around a table, presumably eating a meal, though the only food on the table is a lobster and crab, maybe still alive. In front of the table, several…

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Smudgy areas: the art of Berthe Morisot

The painting is known as Woman in Grey Reclining. It was painted in 1879. It depicts a woman in a lovely dress reclining on a couch. Does she have a white flower on the left strap of her dress? Maybe. Probably. We cannot be completely sure. That’s because much of the detail in the painting…

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Arthur Jafa’s Swing

Early in 2017, not long after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, an artist named Arthur Jafa screened a work of video art at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York City. The video was titled Love is the message, the message is death. It is about seven minutes long. It…

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The Empathy of John Singer Sargent’s Portraits

John Singer Sargent, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892) It was often the case in the late 19th century that if you wanted to add a little prestige to your life you had your portrait painted by a notable portrait painter. Or you had your family painted, or just your wife. This latter idea was the…

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Essay: Abnormal / Normal: the art of Cao Fei

There are two dead babies sitting in a medical pan inside a nondescript room. These babies face one another. Are they conjoined twins? There are tubes connected to the twin cadavers. A Chinese couple, a man and a woman, sit in chairs on either side of the babies. The tubes from the babies are connected…

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Alexander Calder in Public and Private

The two-volume biography of Alexander Calder, by Jed Perl, is an important art world event. Calder’s earlier career was covered in Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940 – and was the subject of an earlier discussion in The Easel between Jed Perl and Morgan Meis (here). Perl’s second volume – Calder: The…

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Schlock Sculpture

When you look at the work of an artist like Richard Serra, or better yet, stand next to a classic Serra piece, you begin to understand how important the physical problem of balance and uprightness is for contemporary sculpture. Take one such classic work, Fulcrum (1987). The work consists of five fifty-five-foot tall slabs of…

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A Cook’s tour of the 2019 Turner Prize(s)

The Turner Prize (inaugurated in 1984) has become arguably the most prominent art prize anywhere. No one is sure why this is the case. The prize, after all, is limited to artists who are British by birth or residency, and Britain is a relatively small place these days, all told. There are other notable prizes…

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Down through the layers: the paintings of Mark Bradford

For at least a decade now there’s been a buzz about Mark Bradford. People call him an exciting painter. Those two words, “exciting” and “painting,” don’t get put together very often, which is understandable. There is something about painting that promotes a reflective attitude. You look at a painting by standing your distance and contemplating.…

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Bauhaus: A Failed Utopia? (3)

This is the last of a three-essay exploration of the history of The Bauhaus in light of the 100 year anniversary of its founding. Previous essays can be found here and here. In the late 1950s, Marcel Breuer took on a commission to design a church in Minnesota. He was working with the engineer Pier…

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A new vision of nature

Today, we live in a world in which the natural environment is largely relegated to the periphery of our daily existence. Our engagement with it is largely virtual and mitigated through still and moving images. Even so, as the pace of life increases, the subtle changes in the natural environment, such as the blossoming flowers…

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Bauhaus: A Failed Utopia? (2)

This is the second of a three-essay exploration of the history of The Bauhaus in light of the 100 year anniversary of its founding. The first essay (Bauhaus: A Failed Utopia? The Manifesto) can be found here. Walter Gropius was fond of making claims about The Bauhaus like the following: “Our guiding principle was that…

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Bauhaus: A Failed Utopia?

2019 marks the 100 year anniversary of The Bauhaus. In honor of this anniversary, I will be publishing three essays exploring the history of The Bauhaus. This is the first. We’ll move more or less chronologically starting here with the early history of the school. The second essay will explore the middle period, as Bauhaus…

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For love or money? The merits of investing in art

In November 2017, in a packed auction room in New York, da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi sold for $US450m. That spectacular transaction says many things about our age. One of them, surely, is that at that moment the idea of art as an asset went mainstream. You don’t pay $US450m for wall decoration. Over the last…

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The Deceptions of Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand has become, in the last 25 years or so, one of the more important contemporary artists in the world. His work is collected by all the major museums and sold in prestigious galleries and at art fairs. Eminent critic and art historian Michael Fried, among others, has directed serious attention to his work.…

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Ancient or modern? The perplexing case of indigenous art

There’s an unexpectedly amusing passage in the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant is deliberating upon lofty issues like how and why we consider something beautiful. In the course of his complicated philosophical maneuverings he pauses to mention, by way of example, a number of pleasing designs to be found in nature.…

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EASEL ESSAY: Not just for “nerds”: vivid stories from the Old Masters

Why do we still pay attention to Old Masters paintings? There are a handful of famous names – Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Michelangelo – toward whom adulation seems obligatory. Yet, walking the galleries of a major museum, you quickly realize there are many others. With their ornate gilded frames and often perplexing subjects, why should their…

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Now you’re over the sticker shock, what about the art?

In 1500, Leonardo was an artist working for hire. One of his clients was Louis XII of France. The painting he had just completed was a portrait of Jesus Christ, quite possibly a commission from the French monarch. History does not record whether the completed work met with approval but, once painted, Salvator Mundi began…

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“How to See the World Properly”: An Interview About Jasper Johns

Roberta Bernstein is professor emeritus of art history at the University of Albany, State University of New York. She is also the author and director of the catalogue raisonné for Jasper Johns. Most recently, she co-curated (with Edith Devaney) a retrospective of Johns’s work at the Royal Art Museum in London entitled “Something Resembling Truth”…

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Jeff Koons: Or, Who’s Liberating Whom?

In 1988, Jeff Koons created the work of art known as Michael Jackson and Bubbles. It’s a life-sized porcelain sculpture–actually the largest handmade porcelain sculpture ever made. It depicts Michael Jackson leaning back on a field of flowers as he cradles his famous chimpanzee. Both the monkey and the man are clad in golden outfits.…

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Color is Meaning

It is said that the great Luxembourgish-American photographer Edward Steichen once took a thousand pictures of the same white teacup. This was in the days before digital photography, mind you, so the commitment of time and expense was considerable. Steichen photographed the teacup against different variations of white and black backgrounds. He was studying his…

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Night Swimmers

Nasreen Mohamedi untitled (1975) Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Rachel Spence, March 7, 2017    If you love art, the possibility of revelation is always present. In 2007, while I was living in Italy, I was rocked to my core when I came upon Antonello da Messina’s “L’Annunziata” in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo. A…

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EASEL ESSAY: Andrew Wyeth, his Critics, and Small Town Mud

The paintings are of simple things: drapes fluttering in the breeze, a young boy making his way down a hill and across a meadow, ten or fifteen leaves dying on the spindly branch of a tree in late autumn. These images are painted with care, often in tempera, sometimes in watercolor. The attention to detail…

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Nicole Eisenman and the Resurrection of Figuration

The contemporary painter Nicole Eisenman tells a rather moving story about winning a MacArthur “genius” grant in the late summer of 2015. She went to a quiet place and wept. Similar experiences have, no doubt, beset many MacArthur recipients. The grant is a crowning glory to an artist’s career, conveying recognition at the highest level…

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A LIFE OF “E”S

In the early 1950s Cy Twombly worked for the army as a cryptologist. That fact seems hugely significant since Twombly (who died on July 5th at 83 years old) was one of the more elusive artists of his generation. That is what the conventional wisdom says. In this case, the conventional wisdom is probably correct.…

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Bosch Mania

This year is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to…

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