The Easel

17th June 2025

Drawing Out Twombly

Dean Rader | LA Review of Books | 5th June 2025

A deep dive into Twombly’s enigmatic art. He polarises opinions, some thinking him a great 20th century artist. Others call some works “a fiasco”. Nothing seems to divide opinion more than his “blackboard” paintings that feature “white looping script, swirls and scribbles”. These works “inhabit a space at the edge of writing and painting” and accommodate competing interpretations. One writer calls them immortal.  “I admire that conviction [but] might have said just the opposite: This is mortality.”

Pioneering Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron at the Morgan

Staff | Fine books and collections | 19th May 2025

The first photographers were preoccupied with image accuracy. Not Cameron. When given a camera in 1863, she understood that it was “an instrument of imagination and emotion”. Embracing a style of “spontaneous intimacy” she used effects like motion blur and soft focus, making her the preferred portraitist of artists and scientists. Her work profiles the intellectually ambitious Victorian age and makes her, says one writer, “one the world’s top ten photographers of all time”. An in-depth piece is here.

Should Science Save Modern Art?

Luba Ostashevsky | Nautilus | 16th June 2025

Van Gogh and Munch are but two artists whose works are steadily deteriorating. Conservationists now deploy hi-tech materials science to stabilise some of these works. But what if the artist welcomed deterioration?  The Minimalists in particular used newly available materials like fiberglass, plastic, and latex rubber aware that they may not last. Eva Hesse, for one, valued this transience. “Eva was a pioneer who put deterioration into art. [Her art has] run its course.”

Steamy scenes in urban underworlds were Edward Burra’s great subject—now they’re coming to Tate Britain

Florence Hallett | The Art Newspaper | 30th May 2025

Blessed with family wealth but cursed with ill-health Burra was an eccentric. When he started painting in the 1920’s, abstract work in oils was all the rage. He was the odd man out, preferring watercolours and painteing the “louche underbelly of city life”. They are satirical, resonating somewhat with George Grosz’s works about Weimar Germany. Says one writer, “one of the most overlooked artists of the 20th century”.

A return to Diane Arbus’s New York

Joanna Solotaroff | Vogue | 11th June 2025

A show of Arbus’ photography claims to be the largest ever. Does it tell us more about what gives her “insightful, evasive, disquieting” images their power?  One writer suggests that the background details in her portraits tell as much as their subjects. Perhaps it is that her images were not manipulated – they were “just a record of something that was”. Yet another writer perhaps comes closer: “Unusual subjects ,,, subtly uncanny poses … every portrait is its own primordial encounter with otherness.”

Lost Masterpiece Found in Beirut Explosion: Art Damage Fully Restored and Set for Getty Debut

Luje David | culture.org

The 2020 Beirut explosion claimed many lives and damaged the city’s historic Sursock Palace. Found amidst the rubble was “just another old painting”. It turned out to be by Gentileschi and is now resplendent after a three-year restoration. Its subject, Hercules and Omphale, is characteristic of the artist, with Omphale portrayed as a powerful woman who has enslaved Hercules. Painted in Naples around 1630, it effectively rebuts the view that Gentileschi’s painting was in decline in that period.

10th June 2025

At the Yale Center for British Art, Tracey Emin’s Brutally Intimate Works Demand a Reckoning

Dian Parker | Observer | 7th June 2025

Tracy Emin, the British artist, sure has an ability to divide opinion. A US show displays her large paintings that address personal experiences – abortion, her romantic life, femininity. It’s an “emotional broil … in your face confrontational”. One critic is left unmoved by the “sketchy compositions of splattered reds and female undercarriage. Emin has long seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to make art about anything but herself. Her art production has long outpaced her institutional acceptance.”

The flying Dutchman

Dana Gordon | The New Criterion | 3rd June 2025

De Kooning and Pollock were the two artists who established abstract expressionism. De Kooning, with his exacting training in drawing, never entirely relinquished figuration. His acclaimed “Women” series, for example, is a mix of abstraction and “ghosts of figures”. In addition he was, says one writer, an “enchanting colourist”. His reputation has suffered for decades but with figure painting now resurgent, he is back in vogue. “A timely show [and] a revelation”.

Hilma af Klint’s Botanical Drawings Probe Spiritualism and the Unknown

Annikka Olsen | Artnet | 15th May 2025

Hilma Af Klint’s large abstract paintings of geometric and organic shapes were inspired by her spiritual beliefs. In mid-career, she found another source of inspiration – seasonal flora. These watercolours on paper have the intricacy of scientific illustrations but placed next to each plant was a pictogram. Her objective was to compile a kind of botanical atlas that showed the spiritual character of each plant. A “jewel box exhibition … a seemingly growing resonance with contemporary audiences.”

Cartier: Jeweler of Kings, King of Jewelers

Jeannine Falino | The Magazine Antiques | 9th June 2025

In the pecking order of the decorative arts, the look-at-me jewellery of Cartier is hard to beat. A London show of its pieces, drawn from aristocratic collections and Cartier’s archives, is “astonishing”. It profiles many aesthetic trends and tells cultural stories such as the Indian maharajahs bringing their ancestral jewellery to Cartier for re-setting. Yet it’s hard to resist the view that although exquisite, this is bling, made irresistible by the marriage of celebrity and great wealth.  Images are here.

Roberto Longhi: the tastemaker with a penetrating style

Martin Holman | The Florentine | 5th June 2025

Longhi, along with Berenson, is a foundational figure of modern art history. Before him, Italian art largely meant the Renaissance in 15th century Florence. Longhi thought it was more. He highlighted della Francesca, not a Florentine; broke centuries of silence about Caravaggio and 17th century Italian art; and promoted a young Morandi. On top of that, he was a stylish writer. Longhi’s wife, Anna Banti, besides contributing to his writing, revived interest in Artemisia Gentileschi.

Asian painters were ‘othered’ in Paris a century ago. Now, the art world is taking note

Oscar Holland | CNN | 1st June 2025

We like to think of of 1920’s Paris as the place where great European talents invented modern art. That’s only part of the story. The city also hosted hundreds of Asian artists. They faced the usual challenges – money, a network, critical acceptance – plus more complex issues around how to relate to modernist ideas. If they embraced modernism, would they still be “Asian” artists?  Mostly they were met with indifference. Now, rapidly rising prices at auction serve as a reminder of their achievements.

Beyond Grosz

James Panero | The New Criterion | 1st May 2025

Germany’s Expressionist movement used shrill colours and bold forms to convey the anxieties of urban life. But defeat in war, a failed monarchy and a failed Weimar republic yielded tumult and a view that expressionism was “overly aesthetic”. Artists like Beckmann, Dix and others responded with “New Objectivity” art that was technically more traditional, yet pitiless and brutal.  Soon to be called degenerate, it portrayed a Germany losing its collective mind. “It is impossible not to see a ticking alarm clock”.

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