The Easel

6th February 2024

Remembering Pope.L (1955–2023) 

Courtney Willis Blair and others | Frieze | 19th January 2024

William Pope.L tried writing before deciding to find a more direct way of impacting culture. He certainly did that! His “The Great White Way” saw him crawl the length of Broadway in New York dressed in a Superman costume with a skateboard strapped on his back. A landmark example of performance art, it led one museum to characterise him as “a consummate agitator and humourist”. Pope.L observed “it’s kind of uplifting – crawling. If you’ve never tried it, you should”. He also admitted “I did not enjoy crawling”.

Robert Crumb: from American counterculture to the French countryside

Ingrid Luquet-Gad | Art Basel | 26th January 2024

Crumb grouches that the art world is “oblivious to the graphic arts”. In the next breath, he admits that he and others have “turned comics into “fine art””. His drawings are weird and offensive, yet they appeal, One writer puts this down to how they “capture the id of America — in all its decadence, hypocrisy and lecherousness”. Crumb’s success doesn’t seem to have made him an optimist. “Comics are hard work for very little reward. This harsh reality does help to keep the medium authentic”.

Her brilliant photos of the Depression made history. Did they twist it?

Kriston Capps | The Washington Post | 31st January 2024

Lange’s 1936 photo of a mother and her children, Migrant Worker, is perhaps the defining image of the Depression. Does it matter that the woman’s story didn’t fit Lange’s Depression narrative? She had trained in commercial portraiture where she learned the importance of lighting and telling details like hand gestures. Her Depression-era work went beyond portraiture into photojournalism. meaning she wanted images to tell a particular story. Inevitably, when trying to tell the national story, “facts drift over time”.

30th January 2024

Stéphane Mandelbaum

Johanna Fateman | 4Columns | 26th January 2024

Mandelbaum was an outsider. He died an outsider too, shot having just committed an art burglary. In his short life he produced hundreds of portraits of the Brussels demimonde. Everyone looks tired, “swollen cheeks, greasy hair … The line between victim and oppressor, innocent and guilty, gets hopelessly blurred.” There is a churn of ideas – shifting identity, war guilt, self-doubt – that is ultimately “transfixing, bewildering”. The curator agrees; “This stuff is beyond edgy,” A bio piece is here.

Tiffany’s abstract window

Karen Azoulay | Maharam | 10th January 2024

In his studio, Louis Tiffany produced a variety of stained glass objects, often with Art Nouveau styling. For his own apartment, though, he installed a unique leaded-glass window. The window’s asymmetrical pattern partly reflected his interest in North African textiles. More obviously, though, the central S curve gives it a distinctly abstract feel. This was “shockingly modern” for 1880 and pre-dated the full emergence of abstraction in painting by decades. It perfectly expressed Tiffany’s ambition to “paint with glass.” 

How “Unnamed Figures” at the American Folk Art Museum Challenges Dominant Narratives of American History

Karla Méndez | Elephant | 4th January 2024

Portraits are intended to flatter, to elevate. They can tell other stories too. In the case of 18th century American folk art they reveal Black erasure. In some cases, the absence is literal but other times Black figures are simply placed in the shadows. Focusing on the “there but not there” tendency reveals new historical narratives: Black contributors to nation building; the presence of slavery in the north; successful Black property owners – in other words, a more complete American history.

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