The Easel

5th December 2023

The DMA presents a must-see retrospective of groundbreaking Mexican artist Abraham Ángel

Eve Hill-Agnus | Dmagazine | 5th October 2023

Are Rivera and Kahlo the sum total of post-revolution Mexican art? It seems not. A decade after the 1910 revolution, Mexican art was trying to articulate a modern national identity. A country boy who then moved to Mexico City, Ángel produced just 24 paintings yet is now acclaimed as an important voice of that generation. Ángel’s unusually assured portraits are a contemporary answer to that question of identity. Says a curator “he should be seen as important as Rivera, Orozco, or Kahlo.” Images are here.

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.

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