The Easel

23rd February 2021

The self as cipher: Salman Toor’s narrative paintings

New artists like Toor can struggle for recognition if (older) critics can’t describe a context for their work. This essay is a good example of how it can be done. The rise of “autobiography and memoir [in art] has likely been encouraged by social media. The “self” is formed through social constructs of gender, sexuality, and race. Being perceived by someone can be both liberating—to see an idea of you through someone else—but also really narrowing and debilitating.”

Why the Art World Is Embracing Craft

A 1969 survey show on American crafts “rebooted” respect for the handmade. A similar survey show, with new names, (review) has opened in celebration of that earlier event. It comes when craft is resurgent, especially in ceramics and fibre art. One piece of beadwork “communicates a nearly religious quality—a quality of wonder. Handwork provides a firm anchor … it gives us something to believe in. Art needs craft, and badly”

16th February 2021

Irving Penn: Photographism @Pace

From quite early, Penn showed that commercial photography could merge into art. Clearly, his early training to be a painter shaped his modernist aesthetic. But what magic did he bring to photography? An ability to balance “allurement with revulsion”? The graphic quality of many of his images? Perhaps the timelessness of his images reflects the lessons he derived from great painting and sculpture – “simplicity, rigor, wit, elegance”.

When the Painting Has Really Begun

Between the fireworks of a newly launched artist and the insights of the veteran is the “amorphous phase” of mid-career. The two artists reviewed have approached it differently. One has changed her style and then, after a decade or so, changed back. Another has been more consistent to her impulsive abstract style. Both approaches have worked because mid-career has brought “a deeper vulnerability [and] in that vulnerability is strength.”