The Easel

10th August 2021

The epic style of Kerry James Marshall

Calvin Tomkins | The New Yorker | 9th August 2021

This beautifully written profile has an epic quality, reflecting the writer’s belief that Marshall is “a great artist, a virtuoso”. His works, “figurative but not realistic”, carry an historical narrative but with a contemporary feel. Cumulatively, they express Marshall’s grand theme – “there has always been more to the Black experience in America than oppression … Black lives have been and can be rewarding, diverse, and full of joy.”

Luchita Hurtado’s Spiritual Modernism

Max Pearl | The Nation | 4th August 2021

A profile of Hurtado who died last year. She painted prolifically for 70 years until getting her first solo gallery show in 2016 and first museum show in 2019. While absorbing influences from surrealism and abstraction, her work consistently explored the themes of “motherhood, the oneness of all things”.  Such themes were unfashionable in late 20th century art, but recognition finally arrived, especially via her late self-portraits. An interview with Hurtado is here.

Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “A Wild Note of Longing” — Mysterious to the Point of Holy

Franklin Einspruch | The arts fuse | 6th August 2021

As the Impressionists were conquering all, Americans were feeling a bit provincial. Among them, only Ryder could possibly be considered modernist. Was he the visionary modernist his contemporaries claimed? He stood out from the documentary style landscapists of his day with his awareness of surface texture and “brooding spirituality”. Undoubtedly, he was influential. But perhaps that is all – he successfully broke with the old without defining the new.

3rd August 2021

The Second Act of Andrew Forge

John Yau | Hyperallergic | 13th July 2021

Forge painted figurative work, unhappily. Mid-career, he moved to the US and abruptly adopted abstraction. Painting just tiny dots and dashes he created luminous fields of colour, “like looking into a storm of confetti”. These are not abstract expressionism’s random gestures but careful decisions about colour and placement. Indeed, perhaps they aren’t really abstractions, rather “an in-between state, neither dissipating nor coalescing into an image or shape.”

Rolling Sculpture: on the Automobile’s Aesthetics

Juliet Kinchin | MOMA | 14th July 2021

Do cars belong in a contemporary art collection? As far back as 1951, New York’s MOMA recognized them as “rolling sculptures”. Of course, cars have greatly influenced popular culture. They appear as toys, are ever-present in mass entertainment and in online games. They are also a preferred symbol of status. Roads are a key part of the urban aesthetic. “More than any other single thing the automobile has changed our common view of the world”.

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