The Easel

25th March 2025

Maybe the most important American artist you’ve never heard of

Sebastian Smee | Yahoo | 21st March 2025

Whitten began his art career when civil rights was a huge issue. Avoiding representational protest painting, he instead plunged into abstraction. What ensued were paintings of great variety – “carved, splattered, sprayed, scraped, hammered and excavated”. Sculptures and mosaics were treated similarly. Absent for most of his career was recognition of a remarkable talent for expressing “the dynamics of mourning and memory”. One work, says the writer, “emanates pulses of soul-ache”.

Tribute: Thomas Moser (1935–2025)

Izzy Kornblatt | Architectural Record | 9th March 2025

Few cabinetmakers reach a level where their products are thought of as works of art. Moser was one. A self-taught furniture designer and craftsman, his hand-built pieces celebrated American craft traditions with features like visible mortise-and-tenon joints. His designs were contemporary, yet their “unadorned functionalism“ owed a debt to 1920’s Bauhaus as well as 18th century Shaker designs. His acclaimed chairs were simple, elegant and strong, reflecting a life-long pursuit of “ultimate chairness”.

A show of Chinese bronzes at the Met will help you think in centuries

Philip Kennicott | Yahoo | 22nd March 2025

During China’s Song dynasty (around 1100 CE), rediscovered Shang and Zhao dynasty bronzes from two millennia earlier sparked a revival of those styles. Art history regards the later bronzes as inferior. Is that view justified? Song dynasty casting techniques allowed more detailed, refined designs while contact with the Islamic world inspired new patterns and inlay. In other words, they were not just copies of an ancient past but innovative works in their own right. ”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Art Institute showcases ancient Roman sculptures in unprecedented ‘Myth and Marble’ exhibit

Kyle MacMillan | Chicago Sun-Times | 15th March 2025

Having dazzled in Rome and Paris, more sculptures from the fabled Torlonia Collection have hit Chicago. Without a common language across its empire, Rome projected its power visually. Sculptures – “imperial portraits” – appeared in public baths, libraries and amphitheatres, all proclaiming “stability and prosperity through dynastic succession”. Their “artistic audacity” gives them contemporary relevance: ‘we’re surrounded by media … in the Roman world, sculpture was the medium par excellence”.

11th March 2025

The Monumental Calligraphy of Tong Yang-Tze

Lesley Ma | Perspectives | 28th February 2025

Traditional calligraphy, written with ink and brushes, is under threat from the ball point pen and the computer screen. Tong fears that its demise will mean a loss of “the roots of a culture”. That has motivated an artistic career focused on a painterly approach to calligraphy. She writes monumental scrolls using outsized characters and “energizes” the scroll by “magnifying the movement and dynamism of the lines.” Two scrolls on display in New York comprise the most important show of calligraphy in recent memory.

Ricardo Scofidio dies at 89

Daniel Jones Roche | The Architects Newspaper | 7th March 2025

Scofidio made innovative designs from early in his career, but his broader impact only emerged after co-founding Diller, Scofidio+Renfro in 1979. The firm (that included his wife) won public and cultural commissions, most notably the 2009 conversion of an abandoned train track into New York’s High Line park. His work on both sides of the Atlantic helped “reshape the museum landscape” and secured his reputation as a “seminal” architect who “altered the way people see museums”. An interview is here.

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