The Easel

29th October 2019

Inside LA icon Betye Saar’s Laurel Canyon studio

Matt Stromberg | C Magazine | 24th October 2019

Joseph Cornell made his acclaimed assemblages from junk shop stuff. On seeing this work, Saar determined to do the same. In 1969 she made Black Girl’s Window, various images arranged inside an old window frame. A window frame? “That’s the protection for what’s inside.” Besides bringing her national attention, this work now seems a career signpost, “rescuing the black female figure from her destiny of abasement.”

August Sander’s Life Studies

Alex Halberstadt | MoMA Magazine | 23rd October 2019

Sander embarked on a 40 year photography project inspired by the daft theory that facial features predict character. His portraits of thousands of everyday Germans didn’t prove the theory. They do reveal Sander was an immensely insightful portraitist whose images “provoke feeling” and “humanize history”. They have profoundly influenced 20th century photography. Images are here and background video here.

Dissident Modernism Meets Peak Philanthropy at the New MoMA

William Smith | Art in America | 25th October 2019

Course correction. MoMA has conceded that it cannot present the tumult of modern art as a tidy process. Some think this long overdue change deserves no more than “a really slow clap and a really long eye roll.” A more generous take is that MoMA’s rehang of its collection achieves “an elegant but limited cosmopolitanism”. Perhaps more fresh thinking awaits. New MoMA ads state: “Make space for the new mistakes.”

22nd October 2019

MoMA’s Art Treasure, No Longer Buried

Roberta Smith | The New York Times | 17th October 2019

Reviews of the “new” MoMA are numerous and positive. Its much enlarged building is slick, a bit like an Apple store. Art by old white males is less dominant. Critically, MoMA has discarded its view of art history as an inevitable, cumulating sequence of art movements in London, Paris and New York. Great art, it now thinks, happens everywhere. “The museum could be on its way to its second round of greatness.”

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