The Easel

13th February 2024

Elephants, Gods, and Kings of India Claim a Corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

AR Hoffman | The New York Sun | 8th February 2024

Hodgkin, the acclaimed abstract British artist, assembled a world class collection of Indian court paintings. Specialists delight in their portrayal of the subtleties of Indian life in the Mughal court, painted around the same time Vermeer was active. They are products of “one of the world’s great pictorial traditions”. And for non-specialist viewers? Well, there are the elephants. They are spectacular, “painted with the nuances that Europeans applied to ladies and landscapes”. Images are here.

Between Risk and Control: How Mark Rothko Discovered His Signature Style

Adam Greenhalgh | Literary Hub | 7th February 2024

A Washington show has renewed interest in Rothko’s watercolours that preceded his colour field works in oils. Although having an “obvious facility” with this medium, these early works hint at his future abstractions – faces are reduced to blank masks while background details are “more confident”. In one show where he included both watercolours and oils, the former received greater praise. Rothko, though, had his sights set on oils and, for the next decade, exhibited nothing else.

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”.

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