The Easel

16th July 2024

Bill Viola, artist and navigator, left a world drenched in beauty

Phillip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 13th July 2024

Viola saw earlier than most the artistic potential of video. Starting as an audiovisual assistant, he pioneered the development of video art, doing more than anyone to bring it into the cultural mainstream. He was especially interested in Old Masters works and their themes of life, death, love and spiritualism. Among his favoured techniques was slowing footage down to emphasise the passing of time. “Time and the unfolding of awareness is the real subject of a lot of old master paintings”, he said,

‘Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures’: Humanity and Otherworldliness in the Artist’s Late Work

Daniel Felsenthal | The Village Voice | 17th June 2024

If minimalism was all about the impersonal, pristine object, post-minimalism was an attempt to re-introduce emotional expressiveness. Using materials like latex and fibreglass, Hesse was a star of the movement. In one work, rubberised canvas was used to create “ghostly wrinkled bedsheets”. Other works “bear the curves, asymmetries, and blemishes of flesh, even if they aren’t figurative”. Sadly, her materials have become brittle and are now falling apart. As Hesse said, “life does not last, art does not last.”

Arts and Sciences

Roberta J Olsen | The Magazine Antiques | 8th July 2024

Famous in ornithology, Audubon should also be regarded as America’s first great watercolourist. Self-taught, he reputedly was immune from the influence of other artists. A comparison of his work against Rembrandt and (particularly) the French artist Oudry, suggests otherwise. Yet he went further, showing the drama of movement amidst “the fierce beauty of the natural world.” Says the author, Audubon was “a nineteenth-century American Leonardo da Vinci, who married art and science.”

How Images Make the Objects We Desire Seem Irresistible

Jesse Dorris | Aperture | 18th June 2024

Product photography first appeared in catalogues in the mid-1800’s. Those early images, compositionally influenced by the still life genre, exploited the “truth claim” of photographs. In 1920’s Paris, product photos expanded the “visual language” of modernism. And, by the 1940’s, the distinction between product photography and fine art photography had blurred completely. After more than a century of change, though, the challenge is still “what makes you pay attention?” Images are here.

9th July 2024

Janet Sobel

Natilee Harren | Artforum | 15th June 2024

Art history knows Sobel as a “Brooklyn housewife” who was the marginalised inventor of drip painting. What should be her true status?  She was influenced by surrealism, just like Pollock and Rothko, but transformed those ideas into abstract expressionism’s foundational ‘all-over’ concept, sometimes accomplished using the drip painting technique. Misogyny and a move away from New York thwarted her progress. “History is not just a game of firsts. Innovation must be coupled with endurance.”

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