The Easel

9th July 2019

Neo Rauch at the Drawing Center

One writer puzzles about Rauch’s works thus “We wonder why the characters are doing what they are doing, and they do not seem to know either”. Sometimes they wear clothing from other eras. The Leipzig of his childhood might be relevant. Just don’t look to Rauch for guidance – painting, for him, is “walking into a fog”. Besides, he “hates painters who think of themselves as philosophers.”

How posters became art

The role of posters is to persuade. They were perhaps the defining form of mass communication in Belle Époque Paris. Since then they have become more, a street view of culture. Not all critics approve – Susan Sontag described posters as “emotional and moral tourism.” That’s severe. There is something to be said for their democratic nature that tells “a story of collective consciousness”.

2nd July 2019

Lubaina Himid’s colorful paintings explore the influence of the African diaspora

Himid has the voice of an activist. She charges that Britain’s “selective version of the past” erases black people. To make that point with her art, she has drawn on the work of satirists like William Hogarth. Himid often puts her figures in formal groupings, in the style of eighteenth century paintings. Satire, she says, helps with the “task of taking apart old ways of holding on to power.”