The Easel

22nd September 2020

The radical quilting of Rosie Lee Tompkins

Roberta Smith | The New York Times | 26th June 2020

A collector stumbled across Tompkins’ quilts at a Berkeley flea market. After decades of collecting her work he bequeathed his collection in 2018 to a museum. The writer’s glee at this first show is palpable. “I left in a state of shock. The sheer joy of her best quilts cannot be overstated. They come at us with the force and sophistication of so-called high art … with the power of painting. Tompkins seems to have been an artist of singular greatness.”

A museum plans to auction a crucial Jackson Pollock painting. It’s inexcusable

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 14th September 2020

The deaccessioning debate grows ever more acrimonious. One curator, citing the imminent sale of a prized Jackson Pollock, declares it “an institutional and social betrayal of lasting impact”. But some museums are in financial crisis. Others question the sense of keeping rarely exhibited works when their sale could fund the acquisition of more diverse contemporary works. Fumes the writer, “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”.

Jacob Lawrence, Peering Through History’s Cracks

Yinka Elujoba | The New York Times | 17th September 2020

For some painters a single canvas just isn’t enough. An early series of 60 paintings about African American migration to the North made Lawrence’s name. A later series, reunited for the first time in a half century, describes the early history of the American republic. Lawrence’s “punchy modernist vignettes” tell an “integrationist history … and will come to be seen as a juggernaut among American historical documents”.

15th September 2020

Where’s Betsy?

Michael Woods | The New Criterion | 10th September 2020

Short, but intriguing. The widow of American painter Andrew Wyeth died earlier this year. She had been a major presence in his life. – Wyeth told his biographer “Betsy galvanized me … she made me see more clearly what I wanted.” So why did she feature so rarely in his works and, on those rare occasions, seem “absent emotionally”? “Maybe Betsy hated sitting for her husband … [or perhaps] he needed to escape Betsy … the “director,” as she called herself.”

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