The Easel

17th February 2026

Lucian Freud The Curator’s Egg National Portrait Gallery

John K Grande | Artlyst | 13th February 2026

Lucien Freud is box office gold, at least in Britain. Why not raid his archives to show rarely seen drawings? Some critics think this is a marvellous idea, one citing Freud’s “instinct for the essential, the indelicate, the confrontational”. Other critics seem less convinced. If the drawings are so good, why pad out the show with famous paintings? Says the writer, the show is “a strange mix of great and insignificant”. Another is even sharper: “ Freud did churn out a lot of nonsense as well as his nuggets of greatness.”

The AI Slop of Pierre Huyghe

Annika Meier | Status Update | 24th January 2026

To date, debate about the implications of AI for art has mostly been hypothetical. Huyghe, a major artist, has just released a 50-minute big budget film using AI, which offers a real example. The reviews are not pretty. One writer notes there are “undeniably powerful images” before admitting that “the work risks boredom”. The linked piece calls its focus on a female figure without a face “misogynistic” and then quotes another critic thus: “with the greatest possible effort, [Huyghe] produces absolute emptiness.”

Zip it

Hal Foster | London Review of Books | 5th February 2026

All the abstract expressionists really BELIEVED. Newman, though, took it to extremes, becoming “pontificating and narcissistic”. Ouch! Inspired by primitivism, he painted canvasses with a vertical “zip” bisecting a flat coloured plane, hoping to convey “the exaltation of its making”. In fact, similar zips had been used by the Russian constructivists a half century earlier. Newman, like his AbEx pals, acted like the proprietor of “a sacred enigma, whose authority must exceed that of all others”.

The Bedazzling, Wild Designs of Modernism’s Forgotten Genius

Michael Kimmelman | Breaking One | 4th February 2026

Architects are now supposed to be multi-disciplinary collaborators rather than isolated creatives. If true, that makes Goff thoroughly modern. Mid-century America saw him as a polymath and a visionary, yet he is now little remembered. What marked him out were his daring designs and use of everyday materials and objects. He designed a church in the oilfields, for example, with a roof structure made from surplus oil pipes. Said one critic “the most provocative manifestation of American architectural genius”.

Seurat and the sea – Courtauld Gallery

Diana Bentley | MSN | 16th February 2026

Seurat’s ‘pointillist’ dotting was a great insight into painting technique. It is not well suited to turbulent or dramatic scenes but is perfect for seascapes, which comprise half of his small output. These images perfectly capture sea haze which appears on still summer days. But there’s more. Such works are calm but also slightly eerie. Perhaps with so little little visual action and few people, our focus returns to Seurat’s depiction of light. Given the intricacy of his technique perhaps that’s exactly what he wanted.

Eugène Atget, Readymade Icon

Julia Curl | Hyperallergic | 30th January 2026

As Paris modernised, Atget had the idea of photographing the old cluttered parts of the city.  It turned into a 30-year project. He didn’t think of himself as an artist, describing his images merely as “documents”. They were utilitarian is style, notably views of buildings taken around dawn when the streets were empty. Somehow those quiet images felt unsettling. Few of his photographs were printed in his lifetime but Atget is now regarded as a “precursor of modern photography”.

“Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” Goes on View At The Frick Collection

Celia McGee | Galerie | 10th February 2026

When Gainsborough moved to Bath, his studio was next door to an upmarket health spa where he could observe the latest fashions. Those fashions can now be seen to have reflected important social changes. Britain’s wealth accumulation in the later 1700’s was immense, due to slavery, plantations, banking and factories. A new middle class wanted what the aristocracy had, including beautiful clothes and flattering Gainsborough portraits. It seems he tired of all the “upward striving”, calling it “the curs’d Face Business”.

10th February 2026

Henri Rousseau’s wild dreams

Michael Prodger | Engelsberg Ideas | 2nd January 2026

The strange case of Rousseau. He desperately wanted to be am. artist and managed to exhibit alongside professional artists. Yet his work was “clumsy and maladroit” with stilted figures, skewed perspective and “dogs out of scale”. His jungle paintings, though intended to be realistic, have a dreamlike quality and seem to contain a narrative. Those qualities appealed to the surrealists who promoted his work. Whether his shortcomings were deliberate or simply a lack of capability is still debated.

Prisoner of war

Alice Inggs | The World of Interiors | 6th February 2026

McCullin, for decades a war photographer, brought defining images of 20th century conflicts to British breakfast tables. As he tells it, that career was harrowing and, at times, left him feeling he had been “stealing from people’s lives by taking their images”. Nowadays he takes moody landscape images of Somerset and serene studies of Roman sculptures. These are arresting images but, observes one writer, “it is in proximity to devastation and death that McCullin’s work feels most alive.”

German Expressionist Gabriele Münter Finally Gets Her Moment in the Spotlight

Katie White | artnet news | 4th November 2025

Before the drama of her painting career, Münter tried photography while visiting the American south. Returning to her native Munich she began painting and was caught up in the tumult of modernism sweeping Europe. She and Kandinsky founded the legendary expressionist “Blue Rider” group. Her vibrant colors and simplified forms exemplified their belief in colour as a language of emotion. Once a leading inter-war artist, Münter has since been relegated to merely Kandinsky’s lover.

The private lives of Gwen John

Laura Cumming | The Observer | 7th February 2026

A former lover of Rodin, John’s biography is well known. A large retrospective casts her in a different light. Her many interior studies, showing silent women in small, silent rooms, hint at her real interest – inner experience. Her subjects are often dressed in blue, are seated and appear lost in thought. Are these portraits or, rather, studies of the state of introspection? John described herself as “a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies.” One writer says, “a great modern artist”.

No longer the best advert for good art

Pierre d’Alancaisez | The Critic | 5th February 2026

Is contemporary art “stuck”? If so, is that because artists can’t imagine the future or because they are held back by “legacy cultural institutions”? Such issues are an unintended highlight of a survey at London’s pioneering Saatchi gallery. Saatchi saw its role as encouraging “a reckless, speculative” production of art. Not much of the art that resulted was great, but the approach put an intense focus on the “now”. In contrast, art in 2026 is weighed down with culture war arguments about the past  A video (5 min) is here.

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