The Easel

20th July 2021

Jennifer Packer and Hans Ulrich Obrist discuss the meaning and method of painting today

Hans Ulrich Obrist | Cultured | 14th June 2021

With a highly praised show in London, Packer seems a star in the making. In an artist interview that works better than most, she reflects on the Old Masters and her portraiture which has been described as “startlingly intimate”. “I saw Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas where he’s strung upside down, and I was thinking about Titian painting this body and deciding how much care to give to Marsyas. I feel the same way: the idea of painting as an exercise in tenderness.”

Have you heard of Nikolai Astrup?

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 19th July 2021

Astrup is apparently more popular in his native Norway than Munch! He painted Nordic landscapes with lashings of colour, “generalized forms” with details on top. What elevates his work is its intensity and drama, something the writer ascribes to Astrup’s self-doubt. Astrup’s hometown popularity is thus not due to “sentimental nationalism”. And his obscurity elsewhere is testimony to an artist caught in the “obscure eddies of the art-historical mainstream”.

Moving a Masterpiece, One Panel at a Time

Jonathan Curiel | SFWeekly | 25th June 2021

Wealthy Americans in the 1930’s sought out Rivera’s famous murals. He was the obvious choice to produce a gigantic work for a 1940 exposition in San Francisco. The mural has been in an obscure location for decades but, heroically, has been moved to a major museum for the next few years. To modern eyes, its advocacy of American – Mexican unity seems naïve. Even so, his abilities as a large-scale painter cannot be doubted. A video (12 min) is here.

13th July 2021

William Gedney’s Timelessly Intimate Photographs of San Francisco in the 1960s

Rebecca Bengal | Aperture | 29th June 2021

Gedney didn’t lack for recognition in his day – prestigious fellowships, a solo show at New York’s MoMA, admiring friends – yet his photography is now little known. Perhaps a lack of self-promotion explains why he didn’t publish any of the photo books he had put together. Now they are being published, what do they show? “Many of his photos are a hymn to an age he knows to be transient, full of ambiguities, freighted with a fascinating immaturity”.

Photo story

Richard B Woodward | The New Criterion | 15th June 2021

An archive piece. Having been given a camera as a child, Eugene Smith was “famous at twenty and a legend at forty”. Inspired by a crusading humanism, he used “Rembrandt lighting” to take some of the century’s most famous images.  His photo-essays were even more highly acclaimed. In contrast to his heroic reputation, Smith was in reality a loner, an obsessive perfectionist, almost impossible to work with. Said a contemporary “he’s crazy, but he’s great.”

10 things to know about Milton Avery

Staff | Christie’s | 17th May 2021

Avery was far too good an artist to be forgotten but not good enough to be great. He adored Matisse and was adored in turn by Rothko who found inspiration in Avery’s exquisite sense of colour. Though he helped inspire colour field paintings in the 1960’s, Avery was committed to figuration. And his figures are just not that communicative – “ideograms” says one critic. Once abstraction took off, it made his representational work look old hat. He was eclipsed.

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