The Easel

29th October 2024

How Emmet Gowin Defines Intimacy in Photography

Rebecca Bengal | Aperture | 18th October 2024

Photography takes inspiration literally from anywhere in life. Gowin is renowned for his images of intimacy. Early in his career, this meant observing his wife’s extended family. Casual family snaps they are not. They are formally elegant compositions that speak to “the close bond shared between relatives”. So, how does he pick a key moment? “[It] is just wherever the family occurs, the awareness of how we fit into the places around us. Anything worthwhile is, in a way, something you’ll never see again.”

For a Master of Brutalist Provocations, a Modest Museum Appraisal

Kriston Capps | Bloomberg | 6th October 2024

Architects face the dual challenge of aesthetics and utility. Starting with innovative house designs in 1950’s Florida, Paul Rudolph went on to challenge the glass towers of International Modernism. However, the public never warmed to his brutalist megastructures that expressed his idea of a “return to the primal texture of caves”. Their users, it seems, didn’t like them much either. By the early 1970’s his celebrity had faded. Rudolph’s great ideas, says the writer, are now “framed by whispers of failure”.

The Cross-Pollination Between Prints and Textiles Yields Abundance

Julie Schneider | Hyperallergic | 29th October 2024

Printing and textiles have swapped technologies back to at least 1455 when Gutenberg used textile stamping techniques in his new printing press. By the 1600’s “dressed prints” emerged, prints that had patterned fabrics sewn onto them. The boundary between paper and fabric is now even less distinct. Fabric-like patterns are printed on paper and then embroidered with stitching, making an object that “could be seen as a quilt itself, a print of a quilt, or a collage”.  Images are here.

Toward Joy

Aruna D’Souza | 4Columns | 25th October 2024

To mark its 200th birthday, Brooklyn Museum has re-hung its American collection. That’s brave because, in choosing how to show its art, it must decide what stories it wants to tell. Navigating between our current discontents is tricky – gender and racial equity, environmentalism, colonialism all vie for attention, so the re-hang ends up being an “institutional critique”. Portraits of rich white males still appear, perhaps to mollify the traditionalists. “Some things are better left in storage”.

22nd October 2024

The Met’s Siena Renaissance Show Is a Masterpiece

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 18th October 2024

Siena, being in the north, was influenced by art from both western Europe and Florence. Around 1300, its artists started to meld Byzantine figuration and proto-Renaissance naturalism. It was a “rupture in world art”, producing devotional art that was elegant, had narrative detail and emotional intensity. For a moment, the city approached its Tuscan rival Florence as an art centre. The Black Death reached Siena in 1348, halving its population and wiping out many illustrious artists. Florence prevailed. A “rapturous” show.

Great American Dreamer

Alastair Sooke | The World of Interiors | 17th October 2024

Wesselmann was among the earliest Pop artists yet never got as much credit. He didn’t see himself as part of Pop, although his paintings and collages (some almost big enough to be installations) riff on American culture. Perhaps their air of “imperial [American] self-confidence” no longer resonates. Charges that his Great American Nudes series are sexist (rebutted here) have perhaps taken a toll. So, is Wesselmann’s art a “celebration or critique” of America? He gets the benefit of the doubt … just.

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