The Easel

25th February 2025

Wayne Thiebaud and the Art of Reinterpretation

Staff | Fine Art Museums San Francisco | 20th February 2025

One suspects that Thiebaud’s paintings of luscious cakes are more cerebral than they seem. This piece helps explain why. Believing that “art comes from art and nothing else”, he found inspiration in surprising places. His cakes, for example, are influenced by Morandi whose still lifes achieve a “sense of compression” of the image. He also admired the abstractionist Ellsworth Kelly – “[I try] to make a representational painting that has as much abstraction as seems to fit that particular mode of representation.”

Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde’ – Telling the Story of the Trailblazing Woman Who Championed Modern Art

Abigael Sidi | The Science Survey | 12th February 2025

Art dealers emerged in 1890’s Paris, eclipsing the conservative Salon. A few – Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard – are celebrated for supporting young modernists. So why not Berthe Weill?  She was the first to sell Picasso, the first to exhibit Matisse, Modigliani and Rivera, and ended up with a “veritable all-star team of avant-gardists”. What a prescient eye! Largely written out of the history of modernism, she is getting belated recognition with a New York show and a recent translation of her autobiography,

Capturing the Essence of Motion in Kaleidoscopic Color: A Review of ‘’Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930’ at the Guggenheim

Simone Ginsberg | The Science Survey | 24th February 2025

In the years prior to WW1, artists felt the age had a new energy. Some, like Léger, responded with images of “society-as-machine”. For Delaunay and others, the sense that “everything was happening all at once” was best expressed with colour and his favourite motif, the disk.  While this may have given the Orphist movement, as it was called, its signature idea, the resultant work was so diverse that it didn’t establish a firm footing. So, is Orphist art “meaningless abstraction? … This perception is not fully void of truth”.

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