The Easel

1st October 2024

Monet and London review: This will never happen again – don’t miss it

Florence Hallett | iNews | 26th September 2024

These days London’s air is clean but Monet’s affection for the city formed when it was dirty. In three separate visits, he painted the “delicious” winter fogs that, when combined with the “billowing filth” of industry, produced irresistibly beautiful light, His studies of central London and the Thames were finished back in Giverny and “clearly relate” to his famous waterlilies. These paintings are “a revelation beyond exaggeration” and a testament to the “elastic nature of [Monet’s] mind”.

Michael Craig-Martin review – sorry, but these lamps and filing cabinets just aren’t that interesting

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 17th September 2024

The tradition of “object-art“ goes back at least to Magritte and his pipe that was “not a pipe”. Craig-Martin started there in 1973 with a glass of water that, he said, represented an oak tree. For decades, though, he has produced cheerfully coloured line drawings of everyday objects. “Perfectly pretty, and perfectly vacant” says one critic. The writer agrees. “If things are just things, how interesting can they be? It’s more like the dry irony of someone who’s forgotten what he’s being ironic about”.

24th September 2024

Van Gogh in Provence: ‘There was both a growing mastery in his work and a growing deliberation over what went into it’

Cornelia Homburg | Christie’s | 11th September 2024

Yet more van Gogh! London’s National Gallery is marking its 200th birthday with a show of 61 works, covering the artist’s two years in the south of France. Wanting to create “the art of the future”, he decided that colour would be his hallmark. Sadly, pigment deterioration now dulls many of his choices. Still, what remains is a “comet trail of splendour”. Says one writer, “How much light can you pack into a painting? How much love, despair, hope, anxiety? In the case of Vincent Van Gogh, the answer is: infinite.”

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