The Easel

4th February 2020

From the ‘Unknown Lady’ to Beyoncé, 500 years of pregnancy portraits

Art about motherhood is common. However, until very recently there has been reticence about pregnancy. Why? Pregnancy denotes female sexual activity which has been “hugely problematic” for some. And then there is the view that when pregnant, women do not ‘look their best’. And then there is the spectre of miscarriage or death. Even with modern medicine, “the pregnancy portrait is the space “where death and life intersect.”

28th January 2020

On Having No Skin: Nan Goldin’s Sirens

Goldin’s new video works are about addiction and memory. Photography, she has said, is her way of remembering. Her new work is characteristically candid – blurry self portraits, scattered pill bottles, images of friends, dead and alive. Besides documenting “where all the time went” there also perhaps is a bigger point: “What a person is looking for in addiction … is totally sane, totally desirable, totally human”.

Hogarth: Place and Progress. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Hogarth was not a moralising scold. His celebrated narratives depicted London street life but not in a way that made poverty itself a moral failing. Having invented the (highly remunerative) concept of a narrative series, he documented life in this great city, without judgment. As one critic notes, “Charles Dickens is Hogarth’s only rival as a chronicler of London”.

Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years is a portrait of the artist as priapic provocateur

Since winning the Turner Prize, Perry has delighted in promoting himself as Britain’s leading transvestite potter. Pottery’s “nice domestic associations” contrast sharply with his commentary on sexuality, class and gender. All of which he delivers without earnestness. “Decorativeness, sensuousness, laughter, joy, vibrancy, vitality, they are just as important [as] all that misery-making, pseudo-political, woke bollocks.”