The Easel

4th November 2025

In the Shadow of Ruth Asawa

Lisa Yin Zhang | Hyperallergic | 17th October 2025

It seems this show will be as big a hit in New York as it was in San Francisco. Asawa’s early work was diverse – drawings, watercolours, folded paper, ceramics – but on a visit to Mexico she learned looped wire basketry. Her iconic sculptures soon emerged, in a wide variety of shapes that seemed “inside and outside at the same time”. Later, she tied bundles of wires to make fractal-like arrangements. Once thought “domestic” Asawa’s work “seems to make [the] continuity between all things tangible”.

L.S. Lowry’s ‘Coming Out of School’: Painting His Own Gray World

Willard Spiegelman | msn.com | 2nd November 2025

For a long time, Lowry was considered “just” a local painter. His focus was not on some major international art movement but on England’s industrial north. “Coming Out of School” (1927) is one such work, an imagined after-school scene in a grey town with “a sky full of clouds, or smoke from the industrial factory”. It’s a very local scene. One writer links his admiration to the genuine interest Lowry showed in what people do. “I have no idea why that should be so moving.”

The Louvre’s Jacques-Louis David Retrospective Offers a Fresh Perspective on the French Master

Sarah Belmont | ARTnews | 8th October 2025

David lived in interesting times – the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration. These politics animate his art, and he used his art as a political tool. Not surprisingly, Caravaggio’s dramatic style was a major influence. Nowhere is this clearer than in his The Death of Marat, an iconic image of the Revolution. Marat suffered ill-health in life but in David’s rendering of his death, he is exalted as a martyr. Not just a personal elegy to a friend, David’s work is also “potent propaganda”.

Juliana Halpert Rates the Los Angeles Art Scene’s Tricks and Treats So Far This Fall

Juliana Halpert | Cultured | 15th October 2025

Made in LA is the seventh biennial celebration of art in that city. After spending a year choosing artists to feature, the curators decided not to have a unifying theme. Various critics mention a few artist they think deserve more recognition, but the whole thing seems flat. The curators “assembled a biennial so meatless that I’m wondering whether it’s even worth biting into. ‘Made in L.A.’ needs active curation like a novel needs a protagonist.”

Framing in museums

Peter Schade | The Burlington Magazine | 1st November 2025

Artists have views about the type of frame that best suits an individual work. They often create with that frame in mind. Sadly, their preferences are frequently overridden. The Medici’s wanted uniform frames. French collectors chose frames to suit their interior decoration. Over many decades, London’s National Gallery has painstakingly re-framed about half its collection. Says the writer, “An appropriate frame is like a perfectly fitted dress or a well-tailored suit.”  Multiple images of frames are here.

28th October 2025

How a polka-dotted pumpkin became the world’s most coveted art installation

Kelsey Ables | Yahoo | 27th October 2025

In praise of Kusama’s pumpkins. They first appeared in her paintings as a teenager and later in the 1990’s as sculptures. Now they are spreading around the globe. Their attraction to museums is obvious – immensely popular, non-controversial and having an authentic connection to the artist’s aesthetic. Her dotting emerged from childhood hallucinations while the “generous unpretentiousness” of the pumpkin is a kind of “self-portrait” for Kusama who cannot “[conform] to social standards”.

Meet the Gods and Goddesses in the Met’s ‘Divine Egypt’

William Van Meter | artnet news | 16th October 2025

A major New York show spotlights Egyptian deities that carry stories just as wonderful as Tut or Cleopatra. Amun-Re, king of the gods, governed creation, life and re-birth. Falcon-headed Horus was god of the sky. The sky goddess Nut swallowed the sun each night and gave birth to it each dawn. And then there was Osiris, the chief god of the underworld. His domain wasn’t really about death, but about transition to the afterlife, about: “overcoming death [and] living forever”.

Dismantled or Not, Confederate Monuments Still Have Power. This New Landmark Exhibition Grapples With It.

Cat Dawson | Cultured | 23rd October 2025

Public statues that celebrate Confederacy leaders and white supremacist values have recently been removed in some US cities. A selection has gone on display in Los Angeles. Once placed at eye level in an art space, their “malignancy dissolves” and their scale “feels goofy and graceless”. The curator admits “it’s a very strange show … [decontextualising] takes away some of that power to harm”. Another writer calls it “thrilling … Nothing like it has ever been done before.”

5 Things to Know about the Friendship of Manet and Morisot

Staff | Fine Art Museums San Francisco | 9th October 2025

So, were the 19th century artists Manet and Morisot romantically linked? Probably not, although he painted her many times, they collected each other’s works and there is some suggestive correspondence. More consequentially, Morisot was far more than Manet’s student or muse. She embraced Impressionism early; later, his style also loosened.  She followed his idea of figures on a balcony while his work of a woman before a mirror closely resembled hers. Perhaps, says a writer, the key dynamic was “mutual regard”.

Fra Angelico

Ben Street | Gagosian Quarterly | 20th August 2025

Art history has viewed Angelico as an inspired cleric but separate from the art world. Yet he helped pioneer the new ideas that came to define Renaissance painting. His figures did not float in space but were positioned architecturally. They were not portrayed with “stylized perfection” but shown as people with personality and emotions.  Angelico’s work thus had an ability to communicate the here and now. Says one writer “both profoundly sacred but also staggeringly beautiful”. Images are here.

One painting at a time: ‘The Third of May 1808’ by Francisco Goya

Simon Tolkein | Prospect | 14th October 2025

An homage to Goya’s great work, The Third of May 1808. The Peninsula War, where Spain ousted the French occupiers, was brutal. Most artists would have shown an idealised version of events. Not Goya, who painted war as an act of “unmitigated cruelty”. Killers and victims were shown in close proximity to amp up the emotional impact. Dramatic lighting increased it further. The victim’s spread-arm gesture excites “our pity and our terror.” It’s little surprise that many claim this is the first modern painting.

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