Air April 2019

Critique
APRIL 2019 : ISSUE 95
Art
AIR
or an artist who was described
“Fin his lifetime as the World’s
Greatest Living Painter – that was
the billing for his London exhibition in
1908 – it’s interesting the way Joaquín
Sorolla has fallen off the radar,” posits
Melanie McDonagh in Evening Standard.
Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light shows
at the National Gallery in London until
7 July. “Insanely popular in his day, to
the extent that New Yorkers queued in
heavy snow to view his large and florid
paintings, he is almost forgotten in
ours. Or at least he might be, if not for
his virtuoso effects and his singular
reputation as the master of Spanish
sunlight,” says Laura Cumming, for
The Guardian. “It is hardly possible to
stand before these enormous canvases,
thick with paint, without feeling at least
something of their appeal, a combination
of the obvious and comfortable relish in
their making, and the irreducible beauty
of sunlight itself.” He,“ends up being
neither rigidly traditional nor particularly
forward-thinking, neither exceptional
nor awful, and in the process he gets
a bit lost. He’s not a great painter,
but he is a good one, with some great
Sewing the Sail, 1896, by Joaquín Sorolla. Oil on canvas, 222 × 300 cm. Galleria Internazionale
d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice 2018 © Photo Archive - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
moments. Hey, we can’t all be Monets.
Some of us have to be Sorollas,” quips
Eddy Frankel in Time Out London.
“Heads up: this is a difficult show,”
cautions Time Out’s Chris Waywell of the
Don McCullin review, at Tate Britain. “It
documents in crisp detail some of the
most shameful aspects of humanity
over the last 60-odd years... A lot of
the images here were commissioned
by newspapers and magazines to show
their readers those shameful aspects
of humanity, and were never meant to
be coolly appraised in a big art gallery:
they were meant to be spattered with
the cornflakes you’d just choked over.”
Here “Is the camera that took a bullet
instead of its owner.... Here is the
American soldier, traumatised, staring
back. Here are the villagers, displaced.
Here are the living and here are the dead.
Here are things I prefer not to describe,”
says a torn Adrian Searle in The
Guardian. “The veteran photographer’s
images of war, poverty and atrocity
shines light on the unconscionable. It’s
almost overwhelming.” Laura Cumming
says it amounts to, “A moral position
with regard to the world in which we
live: no human suffering must be
ignored, all the horrors must be told.”
“Few photographers have obtained the
mythic stature of Robert Mapplethorpe,”
say Time Out New York of Implicit
Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now shows at
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
until 10 July. “This two-part
retrospective that marks the 30 th
anniversary of his death.” Over time,
“Perceptions [of his work] have radically
changed,” explains Charlotte Jansen
for British Journal of Photography.
“Between the 1990s and the mid
2000s, his open themes were deemed
“unfashionably sincere”, as Vince Aletti
reports in Artforum... The question that
hangs over the contemporary audience
is to what extent we are now conditioned
to self-censor – something that is
harder to perceive and dismantle.” He
was, “Far too ambitious to pursue a
medium that had so little respect in
the art world... [Yet] with a camera, he
discovered he could shape his world
into visions of startling beauty... His
photographs are less scandalous
now, but still striking,” enthuses The
Economist, in its Prospero column.
26