The Easel

7th July 2026

Frida Kahlo: Tate Mistakes the Icon for the Artist

Emily Steer | Frieze | 26th June 2026

A writer comments that Kahlo has been “flattened” by mythologizing. Her self-portraits were psychologically revealing and varied, leading to multiple interpretations – her connections with surrealism and with Mexican culture, her challenge to gender expectations. But, with relatively few of her paintings in a London show, which interpretation best captures Kahlo? Forget her iconic images, her true legacy are the works that communicate the “bold examination of the self,” A backgrounder is here.

James Turrell’s 100th Skyspace

Hannah Ashdown | The Plum Edit | 27th June 2026

Turrell has created many “skyspaces” but a new one in Denmark is his most ambitious. At 40m wide, 16m high and with a 6m oculus, it’s big. Inside the dome monochromatic lights change colour, creating sensory saturation that, because of the way our eyes work, seems to change the colour of the sky.  Special programmes at sunrise and sunset enhance the light effects of those moments. Light, says Turrell “is not something that reveals but is itself the revelation”. A video is here

Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: From Scandal to Icon

Cristina Chan | SFMOMA | 30th March 2026

Fauvism lasted just three years and started with a summer holiday at the Mediterranean. Responding to that region’s bright vistas, Matisse and Derain created works awash with colour. No new art theory inspired this, simply the idea of divorcing colour from observable reality.  The exuberant work caused an uproar at the 1905 Paris Salon, establishing Matisse’s art career and inducing Braque and others to join in. Barely two years later Braque lost interest, favouring instead an even wilder quest – cubism.

Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50

John Elderfield | Princeton University Art Museum | 5th March 2026

De Kooning was classically trained but living in New York alongside abstractionists like Pollock, his “personal vocabulary” changed. Some works that started as figurative ended up abstract; others went the other way. Leading up to his first solo show in 1948, a mature style was emerging – abstract shapes, made with his characteristic bold and heavy brushstrokes yet carefully assembled. A few years later the ever restless de Kooning started his semi-figurative “Women” series.  Pollock shouted “betrayal”.

The unsung artists of Spain’s Golden Age

Cath Pound | Engelsberg Ideas | 9th June 2026

The Hispanic Society boasts a roll call of great Spanish artists who influenced European aesthetics. El Greco wanted a role at the Hapsburg court, but his distorted figures didn’t win favour. Noticing this, a young Velazquez stuck to a naturalist approach and prospered. Other artists of merit emerged from the American colonies but Velazquez, Zurbarán, Ribera and Murillo outshone them all. They created images of power, spirituality and theatrical intensity to match Spain’s immense power.

Waldmüller: Landscapes – a cool Alpine antidote to London heatwaves

Lucy Davies | Financial Times | 3rd July 2026

Why is Waldmüller, prominent in 19th century Austria, being given a London show? Noted in his day for landscapes and portraits (he painted Beethoven) he fell out with the art establishment over his rejection of “academic” landscape painting. Did his realist landscape painting “awaken” possibilities later seized on by the Impressionists? Unlikely – they knew nothing of him. His radical landscapes were an important idea but, not being in the right place at the right time, came to nothing.

30th June 2026

America 250: The Essential Paintings of Our Nation

Judith Dobrzynski | Judithdobrynski.com | 26th June 2026

Next week, on July 4, the US celebrates its 250th anniversary. As one might expect of a diverse nation, there is a pluriverse of celebrations. Multiple shows (some listed here) focus on the anniversary itself. Washington’s National Gallery has a show on what it means to be American. The linked piece highlights 25 “essential paintings” that touch on the spirit of 1776, westward expansion, industrial might, socioeconomic strife and automobile love. It’s an optimistic list for a celebratory moment.

Adored Image

Marina Warner | London Review of Books | 9th June 2026

A profile of the British artist Celia Paul. Much of Paul’s art portrays her mother and sisters in intense, focused images that offer little other than the subject. They seem to reflect Paul’s disciplined personality and ascetic work habits. Indeed, are they portraits or rather a kind of self-portraiture –the “depth and mystery” she finds in her subjects becoming a form of self-exploration? Paul’s most recent work has a lighter mood, indicating “she holds to the value of what she chose and the way she has continued to live”.

MC Escher, the wizard of weirdness who inspired Pink Floyd — and me

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 25th June 2026

How do we classify Escher’s work? He started out with architectural and townscape drawings until, in 1936, he visited the Alhambra. That changed everything, starting a life-long interest in tessellated patterns and visual parados. Despite his popularity the fine art world remained indifferent, seeing his work as more mathematical than lyrical. Maybe so, but he had his own way of seeing – “Escher didn’t just think outside the envelope, he could not accept the existence of envelopes”.

How Gabriele Stötzer Defied the Stasi

Kim Cordova | Frieze | 3rd June 2026

Life as a defiant artist in East Germany got so tough that Stötzer drew on “furniture, dishes and wallpaper so that I could feel that I existed”. She documented state surveillance methods, portraying them as “artistic”. Her art – mainly drawings, photographs and sculptures – is belatedly being recognised as an extended study of individuality amidst the “web of observation between surveillant, subject and state”. East German art, says a writer, hasn’t disappeared, it is “a part of our collective memory”.

Raphael and Antiquity

Ingrid Rowland | Perspectives | 16th June 2026

When Raphael arrived in 1508, Rome was a fraction of its former self, huddled among ancient ruins. Pope Julius had started restoring the city’s primacy and in Raphael he found the artist to express that ambition. But why Raphael?  His aesthetic was elegant and humanist, not an obvious fit with Julius, a hot-tempered soldier-Pope. Yet Raphael offered art that recognised Rome’s ancient legacy and could articulate, through the graceful harmony of his images, that the inheritor of that legacy was the Pope.

In Porto, airbrushing the Gehry legend

Christopher Hawthorne | Punch List | 26th June 2026

A mere six months after his death Gehry is being honoured in a retrospective. The show seems to reveal a tussle over how his legacy will be defined. He hoped to be remembered as much as an intuitive sculptor as an architect. Is that how he was?  In fact, he used design software extensively and his best designs were “attuned to both human scale and the civic fabric”. His reputation emerged from relatively modest projects, while [later] controversial projects “periodically exposed the limits of Gehry’s huge talent”.

The World’s First AI Art Museum Has a Strange Way of Honoring the Rainforest

Louis Bury | Art in America | 23rd June 2026

Anadol, a prominent AI artist, has opened the “world’s first AI museum”. Visitors register their biometric data so the show is personalised to them, even down to customised scents. Yet the digital pyrotechnics leave the reviewer unimpressed. The show’s “inaugural exhibition wants to have things both ways—a full-speed-ahead future that also mourns what’s being left behind. Its awkward compromises beget tepid innovations upon stale cultural products”.

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