The Easel

28th November 2023

Botticelli Drawings offers visitors a new look at an Old Master

Staff | Christie’s | 8th November 2023

Paintings such as The Birth of Venus make Botticelli one of the great humanist painters of the Renaissance. His drawings get less attention because they are few and fragile. Yet it seems that drawing – especially of the figure – was “central” to all his works. It was where he worked out “new ideals of male and female beauty … how to convincingly model the face.” And that matters because, as one writer puts it,  “the face is the central focus of Western painting, and its central challenge.”

Larry Fink, photographer of the American Society, dies at 82

Miss Rosen | Blind | 26th November 2023

Fink’s mother, a partygoer, raised him as a communist. What endured from that upbringing was a non-hierarchical view of the world. Early photography of families drawn from hardscrabble America was notable, but greater acclaim came as a celebrity photographer. His images of the famous partying showed a knack for revealing portraits that tell a story. He observed “you wouldn’t think of fashion as a world full of violence, but it is … the violence of obsolescence”. More images are here.

21st November 2023

Marie Laurencin

Johanna Fateman | 4Columns | 17th November 2023

Laurencin was friends with the young Picasso but had no intention of following his cubist lead. Instead, she developed a world of female harmony, “diaphanous female figures in a blue-rose-gray palette”, engaged in flirtation. Notably, there were no men. To modern eyes, such images are code for gay relationships. Some might think her works too pretty but “when you’re feeling sick of great men, a dose of Laurencin is at least a sweeter kind of poison.”

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