The Easel

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”.

23rd June 2026

Anish Kapoor disorientates, delights and disturbs at the Hayward Gallery

Hannah Silver | Wallpaper | 16th June 2026

Kapoor likes his art big – think Chicago’s highly reflective “Bean” sculpture – and his new London show follows suit. One installation appears alarmingly like guts and there’s a monumental, “mysterious” upside-down mountain. Some objects are coated with non-reflective black that creates “a space full of what doesn’t exist”. This is vintage Kapoor, messing around with our perceptions. Says he, “Apollinaire’s notion was to take the viewers to the edge and push them over – and that remains fundamental.”

JR’s inflatable cave across the pont neuf is now open in Paris

Kat Barandy | Designboom | 15th June 2026

The artist JR has created an installation artwork covering Paris’s Pont Neuf. This is not a duplicate of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping but rather a printed fabric mountain range within which is a 120m inflated fabric tunnel. A soundscape, scented air and mobile-based “experiences” give the tunnel a cave-like environment meant to evoke both fears of darkness and feelings of shelter. Says JR “I designed [it] as an experience where fullness and emptiness exist in balance”. An interview is here.

Did we all get Orientalism wrong?

Ariella Budick | Financial Times | 20th June 2026

Orientalist art, painted by Europeans, has been scorned as colonialist fantasy. That’s true, but this type of art was just part of a complex two-way exchange between cultures. An acclaimed portrait by the French artist Gérôme portrays an Ottoman soldier with great respect. And Hamdi, the Ottoman artist, borrowed his theatrical stagings and architectural renderings straight from Paris. There was “a much richer and more human concoction than postcolonial polemics would suggest.“

The art of the unfinished masterpiece

Daniel Rey | Prospect | 9th June 2026

During the recent papal visit to the forever-incomplete Sagrada Família, much attention was paid to the likely completion date (2034, maybe). Don’t rush, suggests this writer; the church is an example of the “unfinished masterpiece”. Some Michelangelo paintings, Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, Mozart’s Requiem all belong in this category. The Pope himself seemed to perceive a spiritual quality in incompleteness, saying “it bears witness to a desire; it does not signify a shortcoming”.

What’s the Matter With Museums?

Daniel Grant | Observer | 19th June 2026

Can more art become too much art? It might if it requires a new museum. The US has about 35,000 museums, a number that has doubled since 1990. Local communities are now opposing new projects – especially so-called “vanity projects” – citing an absence of any public facilities, loss of public space or absorption of scarce public funds. Says one consultant “I’ve never known a community that was asking for a bigger museum. But many donors and collectors do,”

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