The Easel

15th February 2022

Huey, Dewey, and Louis XV

James Gardner | The Magazine Antiques | 7th February 2022

Walt Disney returned from WW1 with a new-found love – European art history. Its aesthetics infuse his films – German Romanticism in Snow White (1937), French Rococo lightheartedness in Beauty and the Beast (1991), gothic castles galore. Disney’s plundering of European culture is shrugged off as yet more of the “theft that animates art history”. Anyway, the end product was uniquely Disney – “populist and fun and … almost impishly irreverent.” A video (13 min) is here.

8th February 2022

Is acclaimed sculptor Charles Ray losing his magic touch?

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 2nd February 2022

Ray has had earned many accolades for his sculpture, including a current retrospective. It features the kind of work that has brought acclaim – “conceptually teasing” hyper-real tractors, cars, reclining nudes, done in a variety of materials and immaculately finished. Except, there is a “disjunction between intention and effect … what is horribly unclear is why we should care. Many pieces, for all their shininess, look as lifeless as ash”. Images are here.

Florine Stettheimer: A Biography

Johanna Fateman | 4Columns | 28th January 2022

Although she exhibited regularly, Stettheimer never joined a gallery and resisted selling her work. Little wonder the art world forgot her. A biography is evidence of renewed interest. Her theatrical style, perhaps sparked by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, was seen by some as flippant. A closer examination reveals her work as complex, full of a “cagey kind of politics” that is expressed through “murmured satire”. Says the writer “a quintessentially modern artist”. Images are here.

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