The Easel

18th August 2020

The hidden toilet humour in a Titian masterpiece

Kelly Grovier | bbc.com | 14th August 2020

A London show of Titian’s late works has prompted a closer look at his celebrated Bacchus and Ariadne. Right in the middle of the painting is a caper flower, traditionally a remedy for flatulence. The plant points to Bacchus’s rear end, hinting at a second reason for his odd mid-air pose. Ariadne inelegantly grabs her posterior. Intended for display in a private room, the work is a “trope of whiffiness … a rude and rawdy whoopee-cushion for the eyes.”

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Visions of Power

Zadie Smith | The New Yorker | 10th August 2020

What would a civilization look like where “imperious” females ruled over subservient male drones? Ojih Odutola’s “magnificent” cycle of charcoal drawings, currently showing in London, provides an answer. Her women have the “muscular, dynamic allure of Greek warriors” and strike confident poses, while the males are featureless. Real life analogies abound, particularly the “mutual melancholy that pervades asymmetric relationships of power.” Images are here.

11th August 2020

Artist Cao Fei on Why We’re “Drifting in the Virtual World Without an Exit”

Bryan Grogan | Radii | 6th August 2020

Cao’s first solo show in a British public museum highlights the diversity of her output. Partly it reflects her curiosity, partly it comes from how rapidly the world is changing. Digitization has transformed jobs and fueled urbanization. People wonder what reality is, and where they belong. Says Cao “villages have transferred into skyscrapers. [We are in] an era full of crises. Panic and chaos may become our new normal”.

George IV: Art and Spectacle an exhibition at the Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace

Geoffrey Wheatcroft | Press Reader (NYRB) | 28th May 2020

King George IV gets awful press – “a bad husband, a bad father, a bad subject, a bad monarch”. Limited redemption comes from his “great, discerning” patronage of the arts. Whether in painting (Gainsborough, Stubbs), architecture (Soane), music or literature (Jane Austen), he facilitated “an astonishingly fecund moment in English cultural history … the last English monarch to leave London more handsome than he found it”.

Activist curators are sharpening the debate on restitution

Staff | The Economist | 8th August 2020

A topic that refuses to go away. The British Museum holds 900 (!) of the acclaimed bronze sculptures from Benin (now Nigeria). New scholarship casts further doubt on whether they were purchased legally. ‘Legal purchase’ has been the usual defense for holding onto colonial acquisitions. A fallback idea is the “world” museum, one place where everything is together, a concept characterised as “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”

Older links
Newer links