The Easel

8th June 2021

David Smith: Follow My Path

Phyllis Tuchman | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st June 2021

Iron and steel are quintessentially modern materials and Smith was the master of their use in sculpture. His works tended to be modest rather than monumental, and often were painted to achieve a desired effect. Welded steel can seem old hat, now that assemblages predominate. That doesn’t diminish Smith’s development of 20th century modernism, something he achieved with nothing more than “manual labour, grit and a bit of magic”.

Martin Wong’s Tender, Gritty Cityscapes Helped Me Appreciate My Hometown

Lisa Wong Macabasco | Artsy | 25th May 2021

Wong’s favourite colour, it seems, was brown – the colour of the brick buildings in his Lower East Side locale. Self-taught, he developed a documentary style and focused on his local community. The highly detailed buildings were but a backdrop against which to “glorify that which often gets passed over”. His community was a hybrid, one that “crosses racial boundaries and challenges gender stereotypes … a community simultaneously real and imagined.”

“Alice Neel: People Come First” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 1st June 2021

A show covered previously, but this review couldn’t be more different. Neel was a “second tier” talent with a “meanness of spirit”. Striving to communicate immediacy, her portraits instead can come across as “blunt” and “superficial”. The character of her sitters is unexplored, making them seem like “butterflies in a curio cabinet” and the works “peculiarly neutral”. She was “a painter endowed with a cruel and unlovely gift.”

1st June 2021

More than four decades into her trailblazing career, Lorraine O’Grady finally has the world’s attention

Jillian Steinhauer | Vulture | 2nd March 2021

O’Grady must be quite a talent – trained in economics, then a writer, photographer and a conceptual artist. At 86, after a career as a “gate crasher”, an outsider, she is getting a first retrospective. It shows a career expressing an “unshakable sense of self”. Her fascination with performance and with binaries – male/female, black/white, insider/outsider – have allowed her to “find out who I was and to make it clear to everyone else what that meant.” 

Two Paths for Erotic Sculpture

Sophie Madeline Dess | The New Republic | 18th June 2021

Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke entered the art world in the 1960’s when minimalism was under challenge. In different ways they sought to break away from its “rigid, inorganic geometric forms”. Both used unconventional materials – latex, fiberglass, plastics – to achieve a more organic and textured aesthetic. Critics point to the eroticism of their work but is it any more noteworthy than the “phallo-centricism” of their male contemporaries? More images are here.

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