The Easel

29th March 2022

Thomas Struth on four decades of art: ‘I know more, I see more, and I suffer more’

A New York show of Struth’s photography poses the question – why is his work so engrossing? For decades he has photographed mind-boggling scientific equipment, family portraits, empty streets and crowded museums. Some images are huge – metres long – and full of detail, hinting at some big but undefined issue. That is exactly Struth’s intent – “to address something which has a larger scale, a larger value, than the specific details or locations shown”.

22nd March 2022

Egypt & Africa at The Met

An exhibition of African art and older Egyptian art bristles with tensions. Were Egyptian culture and much later sub-Saharan African cultures part of one unified civilisation? Should colonial plunder be restituted? No wonder the critics disagree wildly. The show “fails” on visual and historical terms, says one. Another describes it as a group of “displaced masterpieces”. A third says “beautiful”. There is a consensus of sorts, though, that art from sub-Saharan Africa has “head-turning, eye-locking beauty”.

“Picasso: Painting the Blue Period”

Apparently there is more to know about Picasso! From 1900, he was deciding his career direction and the Blue Period works show these deliberations. A nude seems to reflect Rodin. His Blue Room is linked to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Portrayals of women in poverty owe something to Spanish religious works, Mary Magdalene figures “trying to reach out past suffering and toward redemption.” By 1904, Picasso had come to peace with these torments and moved on.