The Easel

23rd July 2024

Old Master Encore

James Gardner | The Magazine Antiques | 7th June 2024

Lethière dodged the worst of the French Revolution, reached the pinnacle of the French art establishment, but is now mostly forgotten. A neoclassical painter, he created huge paintings that addressed conventional classical themes of love and death. One critic thinks he shows “occasional stodginess”. So why attempt a resurrection? Is it because, as someone born into slavery, Lethière suits our identity-obsessed times? Muses the writer, perhaps his real achievement was just proximity to the ruling elite.

16th July 2024

Jean Hélion goes against the grain

Itzhak Goldberg | Le Journal des Arts.fr | 15th April 2024

Language barriers deprive artists outside the Anglo-sphere – like Hélion – of due recognition. An early advocate of geometric abstraction in Paris, he helped introduce it to the US but then shifted to figuration. The critics thought his surrealism-influenced arrangements of figures “incongruous” and called his nudes “insipid”. Yet his final works of Paris street scenes are “climactic achievements”. Says a curator “The more we look at Hélion, the more his work seems immense,” Images are here. (Google translate)

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