The Easel

14th February 2023

Richard Avedon’s Overwhelming Murals

Vince Aletti | The New Yorker | 23rd January 2023

By the late 1960’s Avedon was running out of creative puff and looking for new inspiration. He launched into a series of huge group portraits of those he thought culturally influential. More interesting than the inevitable Warhol images are the dynamics between his subjects. Said Avedon “a portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.”

7th February 2023

Philip Pearlstein Painted the Naked Truth

Samantha Baskind | Smithsonian Magazine | 9th January 2023

Abstract expressionism in post-war New York indoctrinated the art world that the picture is a flat plane, without depth. Pearlstein’s realist paintings – with illusionistic depth – which he began in the 1960’s, thus came as a shock. Often, he painted nudes, seeing the body as “a kind of complex still-life object”. These were works concerned with form and perspective. And that is the calling card of realism, a style that Pearlstein revitalized in American art. A video (27 min) is here.

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