The Easel

20th October 2026

New Show, Same Lichtenstein

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 16th October 2026

Lichtenstein changed art by re-creating images drawn from comic books and advertising. His use of these images was, he explained, “not to reproduce it … I do it in order to recompose it”. His anticipation of industrially produced imagery (think AI) reflected what one writer calls “a singular human perception that rivalled Cézanne’s”. While acknowledging his enormous influence this writer says Lichtenstein feels too familiar – “new relevance does not necessarily produce new revelation”.

W̶o̶m̶a̶n̶ Painter: Revelations Rethinks And Retellings – National Museum Norway

Joanna Moorhead | Artlyst | 12th October 2026

Women have been so thoroughly written out of art history that a survey of Renaissance-era female artists is full of revelations. Their work was commonly attributed to male artists. Once corrected, the achievements of artists such as Clara Peeters is suddenly obvious. Another revelation is the Italian artist Fontana whose erotic works were just as daring as those of male artists. Says one writer “interest in historic women artists has grown from a whisper to a roar.”

Art’s Generations

Kirsten Burke | Los Angeles Review of Books | 16th October 2026

We “hunger” over Vermeer. Why should someone who painted in the mid-1600’s now be seen as “a touchstone for the experience of modernity”? He has inspired artists, writers and filmmakers perhaps because in his paintings ”he withholds so relentlessly”.  An example of that is his luminous figures who “decline to acknowledge the viewer”. It is difficult to get inside Vermeer’s mindset because his works are “irreducible … whose every fragment seems to contain the key to his whole world”.

Issy Wood: Self-Portraits review – suffocatingly revealing works from the ultimate zillennial painter

Eddy Frankel | The Guardian | 16th October 2026

Wood, a young artist and “market darling” has a small selection of her works on show at London’s Portrait Gallery. They are all self-portraits and are characteristically “tense”, large format, tightly cropped compositions of her face. In some she wears a mask, presenting the complexity of “contemporary identity”. Her art, says the writer, is that of “the bored, the medicated, the perpetually online, the depressed overachiever … she’s not just good, she’s quietly important.”

National Gallery’s new exhibit embraces the cold with art depicting winter’s impact across cultures

Kate Taylor | The Globe and Mail | 2nd January 2026

Canadians are world experts on winter. How does their chilly environment express itself in their art? Indigenous Canadian art gives winter a spiritual quality including, recently, through the use of Indigenous iconography. Harris, a Group of Seven artist, depicted snowy landscapes in a somewhat more abstract way compared to “naturalist Scandinavian styles”. Works in an Impressionist style regularly depict a harsher wintery light than artists like Monet. “A vast, ambitious show”.

Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer’ at High Museum of Art

Kristin Nord | Antiques and the Arts | 24th March 2026

A previous show of Noguchi lights and tables was dismissed by one critic as “clever but harmless”. A new, more expansive show positions him differently – as someone who combined sculpture, architecture, landscape, and civic projects into a single practice. His definition of sculpture, for instance, included some of what we now call design. For him, collaboration and “in-betweenness” were natural ways to work, something institutional narratives miss. “Noguchi’s work feels uncannily contemporary”.

13th October 2026

Four Art Critics Walk Into a Bar… and Debate the Met’s Pollock-Krasner Retrospective

Julia Bryan-Wilson Jarrett Earnest Johanna Fateman David Rimanelli | Cultured | 7th October 2026

Fascinating. The many agendas surrounding these artists – marriage, relative abilities, self-sacrifice – give this show sizzle. Krasner’s work stalled in the 1940’s so she focused on promoting Pollock. His works in that period dominate. After the early 1950’s, he hit a dry patch. Following his death, Krasner’s works show a “magnificent grace”, and she emerges from this show much enhanced. One critic observes “without Krasner, we don’t have Pollock. [And yet] the one thing they do together [a collage] is terrible”

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing, Barbican review- painting at its most joyously intelligent

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 10th October 2026

It’s hard to get a feel for Ryman’s singular white paintings because reproductions usually miss their subtleties. Yet the subtleties are there, such as “a glossy, almost perfect white haunted by a memory of green”. Variation in the density and texture of the paint and the framing materials were also Ryman specialties. For one critic, such minute effects are “dry and boring”. Ryman explained that he used white because it helped “make things visible”. Don’t try to analyse, he advised, “the essence of all painting is feeling”.

Timeless Tintoretto review – the Italian artist who brought Heaven down to Earth

Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 16th September 2026

Even in his day, Tintoretto was revered. A contemporary called him “the most formidable mind painting has ever known.” Venice born and bred he trained with Titian. Whereas Titian painted with “stately grace”, Tintoretto wanted drama – hasty brushstrokes, “bold” colours, contorted bodies, dramatic light effects. These attributes proved influential among later artists. His brushstrokes “energise the entire surface in ways that Joan Mitchell or Jackson Pollock would certainly recognise.”

The bravest modern artist — he dares to paint Jesus

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 5th October 2026

Described as a “brutalist-realist“, Howson’s early work included Glasgow “bovver boys” with bulging neck muscles. That subject matter reflected the social tensions of post-Thatcher Britain. Following a turn toward religion, he now frequently paints “uncool” images of Jesus. The writer admits the exhibition is “tangibly discomforting” with images that make you feel “you are being splattered with Jesus’s sweat”. So, what’s the attraction? “Its strikingly original …boy, can he draw”.

Game of chance

Richard Johnstone | Inside Story | 6th October 2026

A lament. Magnum photo agency built its reputation with street photography that captured moments of stillness – “micro dramas”- in the modern city. Such images had a clear relationship with real events. Now, though, scrolling through constantly renewing images is a new way of looking.  Does the still image still exert any authority? Is photographer skill or technology now the critical factor? Can Magnum still rely on us resisting “alternative worlds that are seductive, overwhelming, uncanny”?

The Art World’s Obsession With Apples, Revolutionized by Paul Cézanne

Ella Goodstein | The Science Survey | 14th August 2026

Cezanne revered apples – he made nearly 300 paintings of them. While living in Paris he captured their irregular details but on moving to Provence he rendered them more spherical. Sometimes taking 100 sessions to finish a still life, his apples began to look like “colours enclosed by a line”. One writer suggests his real objective was to represent “presence, not illusion. [His apples] are so weighted with pictorial decision … they seem twice as solid as real fruit”.

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