The Easel

15th November 2022

Hollow City

Jackson Arn | The Baffler | 2nd November 2022

The Whitney’s Hopper exhibition is different, it claims, because it highlights his focus on New York. Hopper’s paintings, though, are not exactly strong evidence. Where are the New York crowds, or New York’s looming skyscrapers? Are we back to Hopper’s theme of “quiet desperation”? Perhaps not – his New Yorkers don’t seem miserable but instead, seem to just “sit and wait”.  If Hopper’s pictures have a mood of despair, they also carry a “twinge of hope”. In this particular city, things can change.

8th November 2022

Alex Katz’s Massive Guggenheim Retrospective Is the Season’s Biggest Disappointment

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 2nd November 2022

Some critics have misgivings about Katz. Reviewing his 1986 retrospective, one disapproved of the “prettiness” of his art and claimed that he lacked a sense of the “weight, pathos and energy of the human body”. Decades on, Katz hasn’t shaken off the doubters. Granted, the deadpan, Pop-inspired aesthetic he brought to his early portraits was innovative. Further, some think his paintings of social gatherings are “astute”. For this writer, though, Katz’s art, once “edgy, has calcified and grown stale”.

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre

Julia Curl | Hyperallergic | 2nd November 2022

After a long-running retrospective of the Bechers work, a postscript. Their hugely influential photography of industrial structures is sometimes criticized for being “aloof, impersonal”. How can it be impersonal when their work is so “immediately identifiable?” Their images reveal not just “an elemental beauty of geometry” but also the “human individuality” of these structures.  “Google “black and white industrial photograph” and nothing even remotely similar appears.”

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