The Easel

23rd November 2021

Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist review – Is the classic blockbuster exhibition in its death throes?

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 19th November 2021

This show “loses its way” somewhat – but how far wrong can you go exhibiting Dürer? Travel to Italy allowed him to share his exactitude and dark Germanic imagination. Italian artists in turn exposed him to Venice’s sensuality, colour and focus on classical beauty. Who influenced whom the most is moot. Travel ensured that Dürer entered “the bloodstream of European art”. What he learned, says one critic, included a new, modern idea  – the artist as a genius.

Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution at the V&A exhibition review – still inspiring wonder

Nancy Durrant | London Evening Standard | 18th November 2021

By the late 1890’s, Fabergé was the pre-eminent jeweller to the Romanov court. The “outrageously OTT” imperial eggs testify to his “gloriously creative vision” and a workshop that employed only “the brilliant”. Then came the horror of WW1 which made his objets de fantaisie “suddenly, utterly inappropriate”. Fabergé’s enterprise was finished off by the 1917 revolution, his legacy being those spectacular eggs – “ridiculous, yes, but exquisite, beautiful, magical”. Images are here.

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 “.

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