The Easel

26th January 2021

The Gloopy Glory of Frank Auerbach’s Portraits

A ‘national treasure in Britain, Auerbach gets few shows in New York. Given one though, critics there are wowed. One ponders the show’s “almost heroic dimension”, a reflection of Auerbach’s “obsession with the painterly stroke”. This writer marvels at the intense, condensed Auerbach gaze: A portrait of the artist’s wife “appears to be just a dense knot of thick golden strokes. You looked at someone for a whole year and saw … this?”

Blockbuster Bloat

When do we reach too much of a good thing? In 1980, Cindy Sherman launched her acclaimed performative photographs Untitled Film Stills. Are her new works just repeating the same ideas? Sherman has been “dulled by decades of A-list indulgence. As pictures have gotten smaller and nimbler, [her] art has gotten bulkier and slower, not to mention pricier. Sherman has become beholden to big-spender audiences who expect the same joke year after year.”

5th January 2021

Interiors: hello from the living room

Interiors are a genre with enduring appeal. Images of a simple room with sparse adornments offer “the chaste harmony of geometry “. More often, we get entangled in a painting’s “psychology”. When everything is as it should be, do we infer a sense of security. When things seem a little odd, is it normal messiness or evidence of a crime? And, especially when darkness falls, “looking out or looking in … is charged with voyeurism.” More images are here.