The Easel

1st July 2025

Anselm Kiefer takes on Van Gogh, with results both heroic and absurd

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 24th June 2025

It sounds a good idea – putting van Gogh alongside Kiefer, the German artist who is such an admirer. Parts of the show work –dour late van Gogh’s rhyme with Kiefer’s bleak landscapes. However, the Kiefer works, huge and sometimes bombastic, are shown up by the subtlety of the smaller van Goghs. And van Gogh did have sunny moments. Kiefer, in contrast, is solid “Teutonic angst”. But let’s make allowances. Van Gogh died in peaceful 1890; while Kiefer has painted with two wars weighing on him.

Yoshitomo Nara review: cutesy terrors swear, smoke, play guitar and burn down houses

Eddie Frankel | The Guardian | 9th June 2025

When this show was in Bilbao, it attracted the praise one might expect for a highly successful artist. Yet, there was a hesitation – perhaps Nara’s art is straightforward fun and lacks the “profound emotional depth” that some claim. Now it has opened in London, this writer has a view on thar. For years Nara has produced “cutesy kitsch with a vicious edge. I quite like it. [Yet} I’ve never encountered a show less in need of explanatory wall texts, or more resistant to artsy over-intellectualising.” Images are here.

Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse delve into art’s ‘uckiness’ at The Courtauld

Katie Tobin | Wallpaper | 22nd June 2025

A 1966 sculpture exhibition in New York featured work that was breaking away from minimalism for something more sensuous. It earned the title ‘eccentric abstraction’. That sensibility has endured and appears in a London show via works that focus on body parts and textures. Erotic it is not, with “bulging, drooping sculptures” and “various turdlike piles and unpleasant growths and cavities”. It’s more a confrontation with “bodiness” – the works are “very tempting to touch”. A video (4 min) is here.

24th June 2025

How Jenny Saville turns paint into flesh

Sarah Howgate | Apollo | 21st June 2025

Saville’s acclaimed works look like portraits except that she says they are actually paintings about the act of painting. She acknowledges the influence of compatriots Bacon and Freud but also abstractionists like de Kooning and Twombly. From them she draws “energy” but what she paints are fleshy, visceral, imperfect bodies that impart, says one writer, the “ungraspable but omnipresent realness of others”.  Amidst a string of 5-star reviews for Saville’s retrospective this writer says “she has the verve of a great artist”.

Historic portrait by ‘Britain’s Caravaggio’ bought for the nation

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 16th June 2025

London’s National Portrait Gallery says William Dobson was “the first great British painter”.  Few remember him today but that may change with the official purchase of his self-portrait. Painted around 1637, the work stands out amidst that era’s “stiff” portraits. It is fluent, with thickly applied paint and “oozing romantic self-absorption”, giving it  an“un-English” psychological mood. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, we have a native Caravaggio”. The gushing official announcement is here.

Antoine Watteau’s studies in elegance

Kirsten Tambling | Apollo | 20th June 2025

When we think Watteau, we think of paintings of aristocratic frivolity. He was slow, it seems, to pick up his painting brushes but, when it came to drawing, he was “almost obsessive”. He drew constantly, with some images eventually appearing in his paintings. Yet Watteau’s repeated alteration of his drawings is evidence that he saw them as artworks in their own right. His skill in focusing on a figure “gives many of his drawings an almost cinematic quality, which he never fully reproduced in paint.”

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