The Easel

9th June 2020

Tate Modern anniversary: 20 years of wow

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 8th June 2020

Tate Modern is the world’s most visited modern art museum. Lacking the huge permanent art collection of MoMA, Tate has instead innovated with exhibitions that follow a theme rather than a chronology. Its 660ft Turbine Hall has reshaped thinking about the showing of art. Overall impact? MoMA has recently rehung its collection to de-emphasise chronology. And urban power stations are now viewed with a new sense of possibility.

How John Constable got masterpiece after masterpiece out of a tiny corner of rural Suffolk

Martin Gayford | The Spectator | 6th June 2020

The critic Robert Hughes said Constable was “the great example of the Englishness of English art”. Unlike his contemporary, Turner, Constable was a “stay-at-home”, painting local, seemingly unexceptional landscapes. He filled them with the familiar – “willows, old rotten planks, brickwork”. Like Monet with his water lilies, Constable found “how much interest the art, when in perfection, can give to the most ordinary subjects.’

What Was British Surrealism?

Thomas McMullan | Frieze | 27th February 2020

Surrealism was essentially a French movement. An attempt to show there is an equivalent distinct strand of thinking in English art seems to fall short. Still, the English have an interest in strange imaginings and the eerie – “the threshold between the garden and the woods the tamed and the wild … the violence beneath the politeness”. As the surrealists were fond of saying “surrealism has existed always and everywhere.”

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