The Easel

27th October 2026

Salman Toor’s Men in the City

Sean Burns | Frieze | 30th September 2026

Toor’s first exhibition in London is attracting rave reviews that will only add to a soaring reputation. Pakistani-born, he mainly paints “narrative” portraits and group figure compositions that explore the struggle to achieve “a sense of belonging, both culturally and emotionally.” Painted in “velvety” oils, they clearly reference Old Master works, of which Toor is an avid student. Says one critic, “He can do everything. … one of the most sought-after painters of his generation.”

Sunil Gupta’s candid camera

Michael Delgado | Apollo | 12th September 2026

New York’s Stonewell gay riots in 1969 were liberating for Gupta, allowing him to identify freely as a gay photographer. It was a period that involved “cruising with a camera” producing a mix of candid street photography and posed scenes. Returning to India and its “depressing” restrictions on gays, he recorded how gay men discreetly “revealed themselves”. Now somewhat less preoccupied with identity, Gupta seems pleased he can turn his lens to “a study of life”. Images are here.

Peter Max, psychedelic pop art icon of the 1960’s, dead at 88

Nancy Dillon | Rolling Stone | 16th September 2026

Max came to fame in the 1960’s with “trippy” flower power poster art. This reflected his uncanny awareness of contemporary aesthetics, supplemented occasionally by ideas taken from other designers. Even though the art world did not warm to him, his designs on jumbo jets, postage stamps and sporting events ensured enduring cultural relevance. His great ability, says one writer, was “individual expression at corporate scale … a true American art form”.

The Story Behind Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting, “Nighthawks”

Louis Shadwick | Literary Hub | 26th October 2026

An appreciation. Nighthawks, one of Hopper’s great city images, was painted just weeks before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour. He resisted interpretations that it was about loneliness, feeling that limited the “oceanic emotional world” that it depicted. This was a period of anxiety about the war, and the work was expressing a “poignantly American resilience”. It “emanates that heroic sense of isolation [denoting] something exceptional about the American condition”.

Europe’s Living Rooms

Staff | Magnum Photos | 5th October 2026

Strictly speaking, the linked piece is less an analysis of an artwork than simply a celebration. A group of photographers set out to document communal venues that foster social interactions. At a time of anxiety about the impact of social media and the online world on communities, here is a set of quietly reassuring images to be enjoyed.

Frick Collection Puts Spotlight on Siena’s Renaissance Role with Rare Bronze Sculpture Exhibition

Rena Gross | Frieze | 14th October 2026

Siena has long been overshadowed by glorious Florence. Renewed appreciation of early Renaissance Sienese painting is occurring and it is happening in sculpture too. Sienese sculptors focused heavily on bronze, even though it was more expensive than marble. Donatello and Vecchietta were widely influential, including on a later Michelangelo. They wanted their bronze works to have more “physical and emotional reality. [This was] a golden age of bronze sculpture”.

It’s brave to admire Renoir because he’s almost a cancelled artist these days

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 19th October 2026

A recent review of the Renoir show now in London gave a positive take on this artist. It seems only fair to hear the other side. This show is a “cocky” attempt to position the artist positively – that he was “uncouth but truthful”. His early work has “spectacular painterly qualities”, his quick hands capturing the sway of dancing couples and “the rush of love”. But the show stops at 1885, when Renoir still has decades of life left. It’s a wise decision – “Renoir the fierce misogynist is held back from the fray”.

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”.

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