The Easel

4th August 2026

Betye Saar, influential assemblage artist who ‘liberated’ Aunt Jemima, dies at 99

Carolina Miranda | LA Times | 27th July 2026

Saar leapt into fine art on seeing an exhibition of assemblages by Joseph Cornell. Soon enough she was scouring garage sales for objects with “a certain energy” that she could use in her shoe box sized assemblages. Often, they addressed political themes, most famously those where she included (and ridiculed) Black mammy figures that represented “Black female servitude”. Said she,” I like to think I recycled those images from negative to positive”. Images of some key works are here.

A rare and sublime collection of Shimizu Uichi’s work is presented on his centenary

Emma Crichton-Miller | The Design Edit | 9th June 2026

Shimizu, a Japanese ceramicist and Living National Treasure, was a “supreme technician” of glaze chemistry. Iron-rich glazes behave unpredictably when fired. The finest examples are miracles of artist and kiln and have a tradition separate from general ceramics. Unlike the wabi-sabi aesthetic of rustic Japanese ceramics, Shimizu’s pursued a modern style of great restraint where the glaze was his primary interest. But, it seems, he was not after perfection. If a piece is perfect, it “can lose its sense of life”.

The Many Lives of Frederic Edwin Church

Benjamin Moser | Hyperallergic | 15th July 2026

Church was America’s first art star, a virtuoso of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. His reputation rested partly on landscapes painted in remote places like the Andes which carried “intimations of the sublime”. More memorably, though, he painted America, even as it struggled to shake off its “colonial origins”. His work told stories about parts of America many had never seen. Says his biographer, Church was “not just a great painter of America — he’s a great American painter”.

The Summer Belongs to Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz | Aperture | 8th July 2026

Meyerowitz switched to full-time photography in 1962 and spent about a decade working on the streets of New York. In 1972 he took a break from the city and, armed with an old large format camera, spent a summer in Cape Cod. With its “luminous” colour images of late afternoon and twilight the resulting book, Cape Light, is regarded as a classic work of colour photography. It has been re-issued to mark 50 years since its publication.

No cherry blossom here — women show a different side of Japan

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 27th July 2026

Japan’s most famous photographer are all men. Female photographers have had to battle for attention. Their work, the subject of a large show, is ”grittily different from the cherry blossom dreams”. Some unflattering male behaviours are recorded but there is little evidence of a consistent “female” style. Says the curator, highlighting these artists makes “the history of photography more truthful. … they also expand our understanding of Japan itself.”

How art invented humanity

JF Mantel | Aeon | 11th July 2026

An interesting take on the topic ‘what is art?’. One type of art is represented by drawings of observable things – like bison on the cave walls of Lascaux. Only after millennia of expressing themselves through symbols and figures, did detailed human images emerge. This signalled another kind of art, the “exploration of those borderlands where the human ends and something else begins. Art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it [brought] forth a world.”

Gagosian exits locations in Basel and London’s Burlington Arcade

Tim Schneider | The Art Newspaper | 31st July 2026

After the mid-year art auctions, some market observers suggested a rebound in confidence following several years of subdued results. Others are less sure, though, pointing to large “estate” sales that had boosted turnover. Now, Gagosian has announced it is closing two of its galleries, joining two other large galleries which have also recently trimmed their real estate. Some will see this as confirmation that the boom times are gone, feeding anxieties that younger collectors just aren’t into fine art.

28th July 2026

Heart of darkness

Alexander Adams | The Critic | 24th April 2026

After winning a Salon prize in 1849 Courbet set about disrupting the art establishment. That meant painting the realities of everyday life, being respectful of the labouring classes and painting erotica. It gave him a reputation as “a bucolic thug from the [provinces] trampling all over the classical tradition”. We still care about him because, across his wide-ranging work, he blazed the path away from Romanticism toward what, just a few decades later, became modern art.

Marcel Duchamp, Reactionary? A MoMA Retrospective Exposes The Radical Artist’s Bourgeois Yearnings

Jonathon Keats | Forbes | 11th May 2026

Amidst the hoopla around the Duchamp retrospective in New York, a fiercely contrarian view. Duchamp’s “singular” contribution to art history was the “readymade” – quotidian items that he declared to be art. While they challenged the establishment’s narrow definition of could be considered art, readymades didn’t really change anything. Duchamp merely created a new set of things for museums to collect, things that he himself was only too happy to supply.

Flora Indica unearths botanical drawings. They were lost to colonialism for two centuries

Almin Khatoon | The Print | 9th March 2026

As the East India Company expanded in 19th century India, it funded local artists to document unknown plants. Huge quantities of this botanical art went back to Britain in the search for plants with commercial potential. This art was often intricate and displayed a “compositional sensibility rooted in [Indian] traditions”. In a long “bureaucratic afterlife” back in Britain the work fell into obscurity. Botanical classification became a “system of forgetting“. A review of a related book is here.

Where the Light Falls

Clare Bucknell | Harper's Magazine | 17th June 2026

Vermeer is known to us “only through crumbs and scraps”. A biography sets out the known facts. There wasn’t much money in his family, he moved in with the in-laws after getting married and he had a loyal and supportive local patron. What can we learn from his works? Do his famous interiors contain clues about a religious affiliation? Was he merely showing private relationships, sometimes with a whiff of eroticism? Ever elusive, “Vermeer’s work is ambiguous, self-sufficient, intractable, ineffable.”

Their art was whimsical, elegant, ‘scandalous,’ and colorful. It was also revolutionary.

Cathryn J Prince | Forward | 27th July 2026

The Wiener Werkstätte opened in 1903 with grand ambitions and produced sleek modernist objects (jewellery, tableware, fashions, ceramics) using expensive materials. It was highly influential – think the Bauhaus and minimalism. Art history gives most credit for this to the male founders but in fact female designers and artisans were major contributors. They helped “shape modernity” and women’s roles and capabilities in that emerging world. Says one critic, “gender is a very vital subject.“. Images are here.

More stories