The Easel

27th August 2024

ESSAY: The ancient art of Keith Haring

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 27th August 2024

Haring’s spectacular rise from rural Pennsylvania to art stardom in New York is well known. What is less understood, says Contributing Editor Morgan Meis, is what exactly he achieved. Some art critics at the time thought his work “simplistic” or populist. One called him a master of “witty illustration”. Haring himself seems not to have cared much either way.

Haring thought his street drawings enjoyed some kind of protection because the images were “a form of primitive code.  We’re talking about art as it is connected to ancient things like cult worship, ritual, magic. If Keith Haring’s art is good, it is good because it somehow mobilized the popular imagery of its time in order to create images that feel ancient … the sacred imagery of New York City.”

When Art Talks Back: Jonathan Lethem on Graffiti As Visual and Written Expression

Jonathan Lethem | Literary Hub | 26th August 2024

Purely by chance, a companion piece to the Essay above – an appreciation of graffiti as a city’s dialogue with itself. “This devotional, graphomaniac, filibustering dimension of graffiti haunts me. It suggests tagging as a version of call-and-response, within a city whose cacophony of advertising, decay, and squabbling vernacular voices begs reply. Maybe it’s all a form of prayer—prayer to exist.”

How Pacita Abad Wove a Multicultural Tapestry of Humanity

Elisa Carollo | Observer | 20th August 2024

One review notes Abad’s limited representation in major museums, presumably reflecting the usual bias against women artists. A big New York retrospective hints at change. Hers was a peripatetic career and her signature quilted paintings, once dismissed as decorative, are now seen as cosmopolitan. Variously depicting aquatic worlds, social-realist scenes of refugees and tribal masks, she created a “freewheeling artistic environment”. Asked about her artistic contribution in America, Abad said “colour”.

20th August 2024

The Fury and Failings of a Nicole Eisenman Survey

Debra Brehmer | Hyperallergic | 31st July 2024

The positive but not effusive reviews of Eisenman’s show when in London, are repeated now it is in Chicago. Noting the jumble of ideas and styles, the writer complains that Eisenman’s paintings “never quite resolve”. A more positive view is that Eisenman’s varied styles reveal her to be a “connoisseur of textures and coloured patterns”. In the last decade, she has become “very, very good” at articulating “an expanded repertoire of how to feel alive and… the possibilities of who we might be”.

The Neue Galerie Pays Homage to Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Mother of German Expressionism

Sandra Bertrand | Highbrow Magazine | 6th August 2024

Modersohn-Becker, prodigiously talented, spent her early career moving between a restrictive marriage in Bremen and artistic freedom in Paris. She died young, soon after childbirth. Two things make her story distinctive. First, her many self-portraits are now seen as boldly modern and done in a style that anticipates expressionism. Secondly, her early death leaves the perpetual question, “what if”.

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