The Easel

25th October 2022

One Man’s Trash

An ode to Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture, located east of Los Angeles. He was a social worker with a low-ish profile art career, who retired to the desert to make sculptures using salvaged materials. Dozens of works sit out in the open and “reveal themselves as if in some fever dream, their range and ambition astonishing.” A 2015 retrospective led one critic to describe Purifoy as “the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years.”

Art and advertising collide in ‘Objects of Desire’

In 1970, serious art photography had to be black and white, in an 8×10 format. Meanwhile, commercial photographers like Irving Penn were having a wild time working in colour. Eventually, artists began working with ads, manipulating them to create new meaning, while commercial photographers were picking up some of the aesthetics of art photography. It’s an obvious marriage, says one writer: “what is art without manipulation? What is advertising photography without seduction?

18th October 2022

The Waning Years of Edward Hopper

By his late 60’s, Hopper – “the virtuoso of American solitude” – was being showered with accolades. His art, though, wasn’t exactly celebratory. He was conscious of the passing of time and his own “inevitable slow fade”. Ideas for new paintings were becoming scarce and even the profusion of awards did little to lift his mood. A friend visited while he was painting an image of a sunlit but empty room and asked the aging artist “what he was after in that picture. Hopper shot back. “I’m after ME!”

Why Art Was Such a Powerful Tool for England’s Tudor Monarchs

With a tenuous claim to the English crown, the volatile Tudors needed to boost themselves. Art was one way to do it and they spent grandly on paintings, tapestries, precious objects, anything that emphasised power and entitlement to rule. Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII are classic images of kingly virility. Elizabeth I tried to convey power by emphasising ageless beauty. “Elizabethan art isn’t naive. It’s not provincial. It’s the result of conscious choices.”

Diane Arbus was accused of exploiting ‘freaks’. We misunderstood her art

Arbus was not a big name until a 1972 posthumous retrospective unleashed a fierce debate about her work. A re-creation of that show, on its 50th anniversary, again stirs the pot. Arbus said she celebrated “differentness”, but some accused her of voyeurism or of exploiting her subjects. That criticism now seems silly. “What artist isn’t interested in the gaps between … our private selves and the selves we present in public. Arbus was simply one of the first to recognize the camera’s unique way of revealing them”.

The irresistible cool of Bernice Bing

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has long focused on its collection of ancient Asian works. Only now is it holding its first show of a contemporary Asian American female painter. Bing’s story began with a turbulent childhood in post war California, followed by an adult life as part of an ignored minority and a nearly invisible career as an abstract artist. Her “cohesive” works indicate she was able to “reconcile the separations in her selfhood”, but so late in life that she left a “fragile legacy”.