The Easel

12th May 2026

Georg Baselitz, the German painter who turned postwar art upside down, dies at 88

Maria Martinez | Reuters | 1st May 2026

Baselitz was a provocative but consequential artist. Resisting the pull of 1950’s abstraction, he focused on the human form, using a style reminiscent of pre-war German Expressionism. It amplified his controversial focus on the “destroyed landscape… people [and] society” of post-war Germany. He often used the disorienting technique of painting figures upside-down. Late in life he opined that women “don’t paint very well”. The idea of “looking toward the future” is nonsense, he said. “Simply going backwards is better”.

Cecily Brown: ‘Painting happens very quickly; often I don’t know if it’s working’

Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 21st March 2026

After art school, Brown left London for New York where she hoped she would fit in. Two decades later she is back for her first major solo show. Her “landscapes-as-abstractions” are both commercially appealing and critically acclaimed. Gestural amalgams of “flesh and pastoral” don’t carry a message other than her appreciation of painting. For some critics her work can be “inert” but not this writer. Brown wants to show “convulsive beauty [and] has magnificently achieved it … a triumphant homecoming”.

First Impressions of a Venice Biennale Torn Apart by the Present

Ben Davis | Artnet | 6th May 2026

The Venice Biennale is so big that generalisations are unavoidable. One writer points out that multiple controversies create the impression that the event is “on the verge of collapsing”. The linked piece, however, finds “plenty to like” with an awareness of the backlash against identity themes and a move toward the “craft-adjacent, ritual-inspired idiom that defines what matters now in global art. [The Biennale] makes visible the further collapse of Western cultural authority.”

Henry Moore at Kew: Monumental Nature

Sarah Tucker | The Arbuturian | 9th May 2026

Can a garden become part of an artwork?  The sculptor Henry Moore saw sculpture as “an art of the open air” and this show places thirty of his large modernist works amidst the Victorian splendour of London’s Kew Gardens. While not an obvious pairing the result, says this writer, is “unexpectedly profound”. Amidst Kew’s ancient trees, not only do Moore’s works become “elemental” but the trees begin to look “anatomical … nature keeps quietly demonstrating [sculpture-like] forms nearby. Magnificent.”

The fierce life of Louise Bourgeois

Laura Cumming | The Observer | 14th January 2026

Louise Bourgeois’ “psychological artwork” was clearly autobiographical. Does a new biography, benefitting from access to her diaries, cast new light on this “raging genius”? Not much. Her troubled family life gave rise to well-known obsessions – “sexuality, her relationship to her parents, her sense of isolation” – that drove her creativity. Yet the biography is “too timid” and skirts many issues that might illuminate her art. That’s a pity because, as Bourgeois’ herself noted “sculpture is the body. My body is the sculpture.”

Recasting the monument for divided times

Oliver Basciano | Art Basel | 10th April 2026

Removing Confederacy statues in the US – and colonial-era statues elsewhere – pinpointed some difficult questions. Should these figures be judged by today’s standards or the standards of their day? “Retain and explain” is now a common approach as is the placement of more relatable figures. Yet controversy continues. The latest experiment will be a work in London’s Trafalgar Square showing an “everyperson” Black woman. Asks one sculptor about such works, “Why are they so controversial?”

Silver is Dead: Long Live Silver

Ulysses Dietz | The Magazine Antiques | 5th May 2026

An ode to the fading appeal of silver. Silver’s widespread cachet came not just from its use as cash but also because it is pretty, malleable and durable. The cultural connection it once enjoyed has now “clearly weakened”. A major factor, it seems, is that few of us have servants to polish silver pieces when they tarnish. Further, in our eating out culture, the custom of afternoon tea (using the silver service) has declined. What is left is silver as a prized design material and as the carrier of stories from the past.

5th May 2026

Spanish Baroque Painter Zurbarán: Essential Meditative Moments at the National Gallery

Lorenzo Belenguer | Medium | 4th May 2026

Zurbarán painted when Spain was militantly religious, so many of his works went to religious orders in and around prosperous Seville. Often painted against nearly black backgrounds, his images are austere yet compellingly real, full of drama, emotion and beauty. The way he conjures up form and volume brings his figures to life while his still lifes mesmerise with their accuracy and the way they present the spectacle of life. Says one critic “Oh my … in painting after painting we encounter genius”.

Ettore Sottsass: Italy’s king of anti-design

Martin Holman | The Florentine | 29th April 2026

The Bauhaus dictum that ‘form follows function’ was de-throned in 1981 by the Memphis Design group. It’s co-founder, Sottsass, had used his architecture training to produce designs in ceramics, furniture and then (with Olivetti) typewriters. In each area he pursued the idea that design should not just be functional but also speak to human emotions. That meant radical designs, bright colours and inexpensive materials. With the iconoclastic Memphis, he “rewrote the language of industrial design”.

Francis Bacon: Reinventing realism

Sebastian Smee | Gagosian Quarterly | 10th May 2026

A backgrounder on three late Bacon paintings. Toward the end of his life Bacon lived for a decade in Paris finding its atmosphere “lighter” than London. That resonated with an awareness as he aged that “nine-tenths of everything is inessential.“ At the same time he was trying to simplify his art while still capturing the grandeur of form in Michelangelo’s nudes. Most of all, Bacon sought the same intensity he saw in Ingres’ portraits, “to combine beauty with that same level of urgency.”

Art: my part in its downfall

Pierre d’Alancaisez | The Critic | 15th May 2026

A mea culpa from an art dealer turned art critic. As a twenty-something in optimistic London, the writer was a “faithful adherent” of contemporary art and started a for-profit gallery that focused on “peripheral” Left politics. Over a decade or more, art world discourse started to emphasis identity and “wokeness” and he slowly fell out of step. Now a critic, he thinks art is in “catastrophic decline”. Somewhere in all of this is a sense of his regret, but about what? Perhaps it is that too much political art forgets to be artistic.

The Bard Graduate Center Mounts the First U.S. Exhibition of Viollet-le-Duc’s Expansive Drawing Practice

Patrick Templeton | Architectural Record | 5th February 2026

The 2019 fire at Notre Dame cathedral drew attention to Viollet-le-Duc, the architect responsible for its 1864 restoration. Praised for rescuing national treasures such as the cathedral and the medieval town of Carcassonne, a later generation accused him of “defiguring” those same structures. Wanting to re-create the “halcyon past”, his buildings were what one writer calls “exercises in inauthenticity”. Ironically, his original drawings assisted in Notre Dame’s restoration including his controversial spire.

Unfinished magic

David Platzer | The New Criterion | 30th April 2026

A show comparing the sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin is, says one writer, a “conversation across the centuries.”. Michelangelo wanted to show both anatomy and how it was animated by the human spirit. Rodin concurred and inspired by Michelangelo, discarded the academic style of his day in favour of “fleshy naturalism”.  That included leaving parts of a sculpture incomplete, conveying a sense that the work was imperfect and “in flux”, qualities that are catnip for twentieth century viewers.

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