The Easel

22nd November 2021

Hogarth and Europe, Tate Britain, review: a show in paroxysms of embarrassment about its own subject

Alastair Sooke | The Telegraph | 1st November 2021

This show intended – pre-Brexit – to position Hogarth as a European. That view has now been soft-pedalled, though the point of the show seems unchanged – he was influenced by Continental social realist artists. By any measure, his satirical paintings of modern life packed a punch. Sadly, the “asinine” wokeness of the show’s wall labels gets up many noses. Was not Hogarth’s greatness that he held up a mirror to his times? Why mount “a sustained attack on the artist [you are] celebrating?” 

The overlooked masterpiece warning of a Cold War apocalypse

Daisy Dunn | bbc.com | 15th November 2021

A “magnificent” renovation gives London’s Courtauld Gallery the opportunity to display a key work by Kokoschka. He came of age in glamorous fin de siècle Vienna, but his art grew fearful about the modern age. In his Prometheus Triptych, Prometheus is a “symbol of intellectual arrogance”, reflecting Kokoschka’s anxiety about military technologies. He had learned, as a soldier in WW1, that playing with fire meant that “fingers would be burned “.

9th November 2021

Leon Kossoff’s Art of Darkness and Light

Michael Glover | Hyperallergic | 4th November 2021

An appreciation. Kossoff lived his adult life in the same part of North London. In contrast to the great English tradition of painting rural landscapes, his fascination lay with what was outside his suburban front door. London’s grimy vistas and overcast skies were his main subject and he captured them with a “slow turbulence” of paint. Kossoff painted many such works, likened by one critic to a man “making a map of locations where he can begin to search for himself”.

Late Constable, Royal Academy, London, review: sentimental or experimental? Both, actually

Hettie Judah | iNews | 1st December 2020

Some regard Constable as a “chocolate box artist”, conventional and well mannered. Undoubtedly, he helped advance the status of landscape painting. His fidelity to nature has its admirers, even if our times perhaps inclines toward the wilder imagination of his contemporary, JMW Turner. In late career, Constable’s style became looser, especially his oil sketches. They impress this critic: “For those of us brought up on a diet of Modernism these works are very appealing.”

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