The Easel

24th March 2026

Charles Jencks’ garden of cosmic speculation translates science into shared experience

Claire Brodka | Designboom | 23rd March 2026

Jencks, a landscape architect, said that a garden should offer “a narrative”. His Garden of Cosmic Speculation, located in Scotland and designed with his wife Maggie Keswick, certainly does that. Spread across 17 hectares, its mounds, paths and lakes are metaphors for “spirals, fractals, and the principles of cosmology”. A reviewer admits that, three decades after its inception, its features are still “almost impossible to explain or describe”. Says one  writer “one of Europe’s most important landscaped gardens”.

Leica hawk

Robin Muir | The World of Interiors | 7th March 2026

Why isn’t Helen Levitt more widely known? Street photography emerged fully in the post war period but Levitt, with her lyrical images of New York neighbourhoods, was an earlier “pathfinder”. Similarly, she turned to colour photography ahead of more famous names like Eggleston. Her preference was for the emotional over the descriptive or the political. Her most famous images remain those of New York neighbourhoods, rather than the glamour of uptown. Said she “I can feel what people feel.”

Paris Rediscovers its Poetic Eye: Robert Doisneau Returns Home

Brian Byrd | Hot Mirror | 2nd December 2025

Together with superb compositional skills, Doisneau used whimsy and irony to build his reputation. Having picturesque Paris as a backdrop also helped. Working as a freelance commercial photographer he and Cartier- Bresson pioneered photojournalism and a humanist approach to photography. His street image, The Kiss, made him famous, exemplified the contrast between bourgeois decorum and the romantic energy of youth and reflected his view that ordinary life deserves the most careful attention.

Art market analysis: The 2026 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report

Ornela Ramasauskaite | artxchange | 18th March 2026

Here’s a surprise – an analysis of the Art Basel / UBS report that is candid. After declining in each of the last two years the market in 2025 (after adjusting for inflation) stood still. With US tariffs inhibiting international trading, the market is shifting toward local buyers. There, the ecosystem is contracting and shifting toward larger galleries while small galleries are struggling to survive. Says one dealer “art dealing feels more like gambling than doing business”.

What Do We Really Think of the New New Museum?

Hrag Vartanian et al | Hyperallergic | 18th March 2026

New York’s New Museum has long been seen as scrappy and risk-taking, the city’s anti-MoMA. With its just-opened extension, is it gentrifying? Some of the opening show gets a bashing, because it is “tethered to Western European Modernist ideas of art”. Curatorial experimentation is largely absent. As one writer observed about an earlier expansion of the institution, “architecture is deterministic. A more corporate [building] envelope means a more corporate approach in general”.

On Color Fidelity

William Geffert et al | Metmuseum Perspectives | 11th March 2026

Why do the colours of online images vary so wildly? This rather technical piece will more than satisfy your thirst for an explanation. In the film era, variations in film stock produced significant colour variations. Once digital photography arrived in the 1990’s colour checking could be done by the photographer on their device. Best practice technology now combines image and depth information – a 2D version of 3D. Progress, but still not quite enough to cope with the subtle interplay of light on the surface of an artwork.

Tudor Courtiers Exchanged Portrait Miniatures as Love Tokens. Centuries Later, New Research Is Unlocking the Secrets of These Intimate Artworks

Elizabeth Goldring | Smithsonian Magazine | 9th March 2026

Tudor England retains an allure, in part because of the iconic images we have of its colourful characters. Among the most valued such images in their day were miniature portraits, displayed in jewellery or contained in lockets and worn next to the skin. Nicholas Hilliard was among the most acclaimed miniaturists, typically using watercolour on vellum. This art form lasted for centuries until the advent of photography. The linked piece discusses recent discoveries and a survey of the art form is here.

17th March 2026

Catherine Opie Documenting Marginalised Voices NPG

Miranda Carroll | Artlyst | 9th March 2026

Admits Opie, “I had such a hard time fitting into the world as a girl”. That interest in identity has carried through into her art career that features photographic portraits of herself and friends, including some in the “leather and dyke scene”.  She is not trying to sensationalize or promote a “radical lifestyle”. Instead, she wants to represent, in a “painterly” way, a group who, she argues, are rarely seen in historical portraiture. “Doesn’t everyone have the right to actually be acknowledged in this world?

Beatriz González at the Barbican: brilliantly coded art that evaded the secret police

Jennifer Higgie | Financial Times | 3rd March 2026

Although she didn’t see herself as a “political” artist, González did want viewers of her work to “feel assaulted”. Her paintings have a declarative style – graphic forms in vivid colours that reimagine media images. Despite their pop aesthetic, they are not optimistic works as they often address Colombia’s drug violence, state brutality and the disappearing of people. By the late 1990’s González’ work started using glowing blues, deep purples, the colours of sorrow. “I am all the [bereaved] mothers together”.

The People’s Treasures: Sharing Korea’s Cultural Heritage

Yeonsoo Chee | Art Institute Chicago | 10th March 2026

Korea’s Lee family, who founded Samsung, assembled an art collection so vast that it outshone the national collection. Much has now been transferred to public ownership and selected pieces are on show in Chicago. The oldest pieces are essentially Buddhist art, made for religious purposes. Later work – notably celadon ceramics – from the Josean dynasty (1392 – 1910) reflect Confucian beliefs. After the fall of the Josean dynasty, contemporary art has emerged in response to Western ideas. A video is here.

‘Negatives are photographic truths’: the collector who fled Russia with a haul of second world war images

Kate Connoly | The Guardian | 14th March 2026

Bondar, a Ukrainian photographer, sees war photography in especially broad terms. Besides including the work of professional photographers, it contains many images taken by less heralded photographers. Not having been manipulated, these represent a “collective memory” of terrible events. His WW2 images, assembled over more than a decade, are often conspicuous for their humanity, a “counterpoint” to conventional narratives of wartime heroism. Bondar’s website is here.

David Hockney review: The iPad paintings underwhelm but it’s hard not to be cheered by this show

Melanie McDonough | The Standard | 12th March 2026

Hockney has described the approaching exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry in London as “madness”. At the same time, he has produced a homage to that famous work, a 90m digital work that celebrates the seasons around his Normandy house. One critic calls this work of rolling fields, trees and paths “the masterwork of Hockney’s old age”. Others lament that such iPad images, with their “jolly colours” don’t have “painterly” qualities. “He’s forfeited the materialism of actual paint, that most valuable, tangible element of the process”.

Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse review – this magnificent nag deserves a longer canter

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 11th March 2026

Why is this George Stubbs show so small, given that he was “as good as Constable?” It consists of just two of his greatest equine portraits, works that may be unsurpassed in the genre of animal portraits. His renown rests not just on anatomical fidelity but also his desire to show an animal’s “soul”. Stubbs was a product of humane Enlightenment thinking. His outlook, speculates the writer, was shaped by growing up amidst “the sight of human oppression in Liverpool, a slaving port.”

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