The Easel

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’.

24th March 2026

Charles Jencks’ garden of cosmic speculation translates science into shared experience

Claire Brodka | Designboom | 23rd March 2026

Jencks, a landscape architect, said that a garden should offer “a narrative”. His Garden of Cosmic Speculation, located in Scotland and designed with his wife Maggie Keswick, certainly does that. Spread across 17 hectares, its mounds, paths and lakes are metaphors for “spirals, fractals, and the principles of cosmology”. A reviewer admits that, three decades after its inception, its features are still “almost impossible to explain or describe”. Says one  writer “one of Europe’s most important landscaped gardens”.

Leica hawk

Robin Muir | The World of Interiors | 7th March 2026

Why isn’t Helen Levitt more widely known? Street photography emerged fully in the post war period but Levitt, with her lyrical images of New York neighbourhoods, was an earlier “pathfinder”. Similarly, she turned to colour photography ahead of more famous names like Eggleston. Her preference was for the emotional over the descriptive or the political. Her most famous images remain those of New York neighbourhoods, rather than the glamour of uptown. Said she “I can feel what people feel.”

Paris Rediscovers its Poetic Eye: Robert Doisneau Returns Home

Brian Byrd | Hot Mirror | 2nd December 2025

Together with superb compositional skills, Doisneau used whimsy and irony to build his reputation. Having picturesque Paris as a backdrop also helped. Working as a freelance commercial photographer he and Cartier- Bresson pioneered photojournalism and a humanist approach to photography. His street image, The Kiss, made him famous, exemplified the contrast between bourgeois decorum and the romantic energy of youth and reflected his view that ordinary life deserves the most careful attention.

Art market analysis: The 2026 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report

Ornela Ramasauskaite | artxchange | 18th March 2026

Here’s a surprise – an analysis of the Art Basel / UBS report that is candid. After declining in each of the last two years the market in 2025 (after adjusting for inflation) stood still. With US tariffs inhibiting international trading, the market is shifting toward local buyers. There, the ecosystem is contracting and shifting toward larger galleries while small galleries are struggling to survive. Says one dealer “art dealing feels more like gambling than doing business”.

What Do We Really Think of the New New Museum?

Hrag Vartanian et al | Hyperallergic | 18th March 2026

New York’s New Museum has long been seen as scrappy and risk-taking, the city’s anti-MoMA. With its just-opened extension, is it gentrifying? Some of the opening show gets a bashing, because it is “tethered to Western European Modernist ideas of art”. Curatorial experimentation is largely absent. As one writer observed about an earlier expansion of the institution, “architecture is deterministic. A more corporate [building] envelope means a more corporate approach in general”.

On Color Fidelity

William Geffert et al | Metmuseum Perspectives | 11th March 2026

Why do the colours of online images vary so wildly? This rather technical piece will more than satisfy your thirst for an explanation. In the film era, variations in film stock produced significant colour variations. Once digital photography arrived in the 1990’s colour checking could be done by the photographer on their device. Best practice technology now combines image and depth information – a 2D version of 3D. Progress, but still not quite enough to cope with the subtle interplay of light on the surface of an artwork.

Tudor Courtiers Exchanged Portrait Miniatures as Love Tokens. Centuries Later, New Research Is Unlocking the Secrets of These Intimate Artworks

Elizabeth Goldring | Smithsonian Magazine | 9th March 2026

Tudor England retains an allure, in part because of the iconic images we have of its colourful characters. Among the most valued such images in their day were miniature portraits, displayed in jewellery or contained in lockets and worn next to the skin. Nicholas Hilliard was among the most acclaimed miniaturists, typically using watercolour on vellum. This art form lasted for centuries until the advent of photography. The linked piece discusses recent discoveries and a survey of the art form is here.

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