The Easel

7th April 2026

How a humble print store in Cannes helped write modern art history

Natja Igney | Rivierabuzz | 18th March 2026

Printmakers doesn’t get many accolades. Galerie Maeght is an exception, having for decades produced lithographs and books by a who’s who of 20th century art. From the gallery’s origins in 1946, printmaking was a primary focus, a “laboratory” that produced ideas. Giacometti, for example, saw prints not as illustrations of his sculptures but as “siblings”. Further, such prints are “extraordinarily refined” and a way of making art – “collaborative, experimental, craft-rooted, unhurried – that has largely disappeared”.

‘New Humans’ and the Strange End of Contemporary Art as We Know It

Ben Davis | artnet news | 19th March 2026

The New Museum’s post-renovation show frames our current moment as one of “existential questioning”. Are we being replaced by algorithms or robots? Will our future be better with yet more technology or perhaps less? Many writers wonder what forms the new art will take but this sort of questioning surely isn’t new. It’s exactly what modernism was about. This writer offers up his description of the new art to come – “works that uniquely activate your sense of being a body in physical space with others”.

In the garden of the surreal

Rachael Garrahan | Ursula | 20th March 2026

Dismissed by Coco Chanel as “that Italian artist who’s making clothes”, Schiaparelli was “one of the most dazzlingly inventive designers of the 20th century”. She had a “comet-like” rise to fashion fame in 1930’s Paris with clothes that were “witty, not just pretty”. Later artistic collaborations – Giacometti, Cocteau, Schlumberger and most frequently Dali – made her an avant-garde figure,  “prescient” according to one writer.. However, as tastes changed after WW2, both surrealism and her business foundered.

How much can we learn from the Shakers today? Many artists and designers are trying to find out

Alexander Luckman | The Architect's Newpaper | 18th February 2026

As a religious group the Shakers have nearly gone, but their material culture still looms large. Seeing work as a kind of prayer, they brought a religious sensibility to everything they made. Tools, clothing and most famously furniture, all display meticulous craftsmanship. Most have an austere design but not all. A plain looking sewing box has a “gorgeous inlaid lid”, exuberant artistry meant only for the user. The Shakers belief in simple durability is, says one writer, significant “for this era of egregious glut and waste”.

Get the kettle’s on

Holly Black | The World of Interiors | 29th March 2026

In an era when public museums are becoming huge, Kettle’s Yard is the “anti-museum”. Created by a former curator and comprising four amalgamated cottages, the founding vision was to create a space with “a lived-in beauty”. Small in scale, it makes use of natural light and does not use wall labels. Its art, mostly modernist, is shown in a domestic setting, “alongside fastidiously placed ceramics, wildflowers, feathers and pebbles.” One smitten writer calls it “one of the great oases of culture”.

In Defense of Pet Portraiture as a Worthy Art Form

Morgan Day | Literary Hub | 24th March 2026

A polemic. Confession – your editor is neither a dog person nor even a pet person. Many others are. Apart from the horse portraitist George Stubbs, few artists focus on animals. Dogs are part of a “larger system” and creatures we should be “thinking with”. So why think of pet portraiture as “low art”? It is a way to study interspecies relations, something we should do to better understand the “more-than-human” world. Our concept of the “environment” is “bloodless, flat-footed”. Pet portraiture is the opposite.

1st April 2026

Raphael at the Met, Review: A Must-See Show the ‘Greatest Influencer’

Alex Greenberger | MSN | 26th April 2026

Critics don’t really review this show, they simply murmur reverences After apprenticing in Urbino and an uneventful stay in Florence, Raphael found fame in Papal Rome. His paintings, alongside drawings, tapestries and architecture, had “remarkable narrative force” and conveyed “an earthbound humanity that was [previously] missing”. Says the curator, he was fully the equal of Leonardo and Michelangelo.. Vasari, writing in 1550, said “nature created [Raphael] as a gift to the world”. Sounds about right.

Painter Hurvin Anderson’s blend of memory and history is mesmerising at Tate Britain

Hannah Silver | Wallpaper | 25th April 2026

Anderson was born and raised in the English Midlands. Yet his “absolutely beautiful” paintings speak loudly of the experience of his family who emigrated from the Caribbean. He has painted barbershops repeatedly, places where Black men and women can “speak freely”. And then, ever-present in small details, are memories of the Caribbean. How do all these elements fit together? Says Anderson, its “being in one place but thinking about another,”

Start Here: 5 things to know about Michaelina Wautier

Staff | Royal Academy | 5th April 2026

The clamour around Wautier is building and building. She came from a well-off family, likely had a good  training in art, never married but shared a house with her artist brother near Brussels and died around 1689. She mastered an unusually wide range of genres, displaying both ambition and immense skill. Having been re-discovered only in the last decade, one writer anticipates more revelations. Seeing her work hung beside Rubens in a London show, another writer concludes, “Wautier is a giant”. A backgrounder is here.

Matisse, 1941-1954 review – hit after glorious hit in a show of life-enhancing genius

Eddie Frankel | The Guardian | 24th April 2026

How much is not known about Matisse? A little, it seems. This show covers his “late” works, from 1941 to his death in 1954, and overturns the conventional view that by then his art was in decline. In fact, he produced three artistic “revolutions”. He simplified his images, especially in his drawings. He also pioneered “cut-out” works. Finally, he produced “spiritual” works in stained glass. Being about Matisse, the show is naturally “a dizzying, joyous celebration of colour, form, line, light”. A podcast is here.

The great imagination of John Vanbrugh

Guy Stagg | Engelsberg Ideas | 26th April 2026

Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, two of Europe’s grandest country houses, were both designed by Vanbrugh. Castle Howard, built around 1702, introduced a flamboyance and cheerful disregard for classical proportions that set the style for English baroque architecture. These buildings employ a “careful choreography of visual effects”, giving them a “messy vitality” admired by modern architects. Above all, they demonstrate that ‘buildings can be theatre’.

More stories