The Easel

6th April 2021

Feminist art historians get Artemisia Gentileschi wrong

Jacob Willer | The Critic | 6th December 2020

Los Angeles’ Getty, which can afford whatever it pleases, has purchased a newly discovered Gentileschi. Gentileschi’s celebrity is so recent that her oeuvre is “a mess”, with attribution of key works still in dispute. Is the ‘frenetic” enthusiasm just because her assertive female protagonists appeal in our #metoo moment? “All this exaggeration … is truly a shame because Artemisia’s talent was real”. The Getty collection now boasts two oil paintings by female artists!

30th March 2021

Alice Neel, Painter of the People

Billy Anania | Jacobin | 25th March 2021

Neel didn’t fit her times – a communist in capitalist New York, a feminist before the era of women’s rights, a figurative painter when abstraction was ascendant. Recognition was slow to arrive. Now her paintings, with their bold colours and frank depiction of people, have one critic calling her the “greatest American portraitist of the century”. Her portraits were not exercises in flattery but a “redefinition of how the human condition appears in art.”

The Frick on Madison finally lets you see Fragonard up close

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 18th March 2021

Fragonard, one of the Rococo’s leading artists, found fame with images of flirtatious, gambolling aristocrats. The Progress of Love is a classic, “pinks, powder blues, blooming fruit trees, bouquets of flowers”. Interpersonal dynamics are hinted at– “she’s warm … he seems clueless”. In the real world, though, the American Revolution was putting aristocratic Europe under pressure. “Only Fragonard’s extraordinary touch, lustrous colour … kept the wolf of reality at bay”.

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