The Easel

3rd September 2019

Richard Serra Is Carrying the Weight of the World

Deborah Soloman | The New York Times | 29th August 2019

A critic has suggested that Serra’s minimalist sculptures work primarily via anxiety – the worry of being crushed. If it’s not his “lighter” plate steel works causing the anxiety, it’s his immense forged steel blocks. Serra himself doesn’t seem to connect with this reaction – “deal with the work in and of itself and its inherent properties”, he suggests. True to his word, he notes “this is my heaviest show ever”.

Roy DeCarava in New York: A Jazz Photographer in Subject and Technique

Michael Irwin | Ocula | 30th August 2019

The African American Gordon Parks was famous for his documentary photography. Roy DeCarava was different, adopting an artistic approach. His spontaneous images of 1950’s Harlem are distinguished by a “painterly aesthetic” and a sympathetic eye for his subjects, “[casting] loose the norms of preparation, clarity, and stark black-and-white contrasts”. Images are here.

27th August 2019

Interview with Mary Schmidt Campbell, author of An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden

Joe Maita | JerryJazzMusician | 9th March 2019

It took Bearden ages to find his métier. Straight out of art school – and perhaps influenced by his mentor George Grosz – he painted figurative works. A post-war shift to abstraction was poorly received, insufficiently abstract for New York, insufficiently black for his own community.  A friend suggested photographing the collages that Bearden had made as a side project. They were an instant hit. America’s “foremost collagist” had arrived.

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