The Easel

6th October 2026

Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, two potters united by a shared ambition

Glenn Adamson | Financial Times | 16th September 2026

Bernard Leach initially dominated postwar British ceramics with rustic brown pots. Rie, an emigre from Germany, offered a refined, modernist alternative. When Hans Coper turned up on Rie’s doorstep looking for a job, one of ceramics great partnerships was formed. They were in some ways opposites – she used colourful glazes and precise designs while he was “a sculptor at heart” and used a stark, restricted palette. Together, “they wanted to make work that would require no explication, no context.” Images are here.

Magritte: This Is Still Not a Pipe review – brilliance and trash from the surrealist who sent up Freud

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 23rd September 2026

Magritte was no ordinary modernist, nor for that matter, an ordinary surrealist. Uninterested in surrealism’s dream culture (think Dali) he was attracted to the slippery connection between words and images. His deadpan, matter-of-fact style only made his paintings more confounding – most famously his painting of a pipe that declares “this is not a pipe”. Sometimes, to annoy people, he would “paint like a clumsy moron. Magritte was too intelligent to respect anything, least of all art.”

The Bayeux Tapestry

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 28th September 2026

Another take on the Bayeaux Tapestry and the surprises it offers modern (English) eyes. So often reproduced in school history books it reveals itself, when seen in the flesh, to be an artwork, “a monster of outrageous medieval inventiveness”. It is also unexpectedly modern. Needle and thread when used skilfully, yields surprising characterisations – “of happiness to subservience to anger. Nowhere do we see standardisation or lazy repetition. [An artwork] that feels as if it has finally and belatedly come home.”

How the French Riviera shaped modern art

Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 26th September 2026

World War Two “killed” the Riviera as a state of mind, but before that it was for many an artistic Arcadia. Lured south to escape “the authority of Paris”, artists responded to the bright sunny climate with startling new art. Matisse and Cezanne best illustrate this, painting colours not from life but from their minds – “pink flesh, dark blue sea, light blue sky”. An exhibition of these works re-creates that mindset … an intoxicating story of painting as pure visual joy”. Images are here.

No, Renoir isn’t kitsch nonsense. See the National Gallery’s five-star smash

Alastair Sooke | AOL | 30th September 2026

Renoir has acquired a few haters, based on syrupy late career works and his porn-y nudes. This reviewer pushes back. His earlier work – his “glory years” – richly described working-class Montmartre and pushed the boundaries of depicting transient light. Impressively, some of his most joyous renditions of life’s fleeting pleasures were completed after being drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Says one critic, Renoir was “an artistic innovator and painter of the first rank”.

Cloud Spotting with John Constable and Alfred Stieglitz

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 25th September 2026

In 1821 Constable did something unusual – he made studies of the sunset, with the land below treated as a secondary feature. He made many such “skying” works and thought the sky in a landscape painting was “the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment”.  Photography promised an ability to capture the sky with even greater immediacy, but the technology took a long time to meet that challenge. Only with Stieglitz’s cloud studies in the 1920’s did photography start to capture “the ethereal realm above our heads”.

29th September 2026

Arthur Jafa, King of Pop

Stephanie Wambugu | Hyperallergic | 25th September 2026

Jafa’s diverse art, such as the video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) has had a significant cultural impact. A large survey show illustrates the themes of his work, notably the beauty of Black culture and the persistence of racial violence against Black communities. But does it give a clearer vision of this important American artist? He has an intuitive grasp of “memes” but not all of his works are clear. “It’s a charming, playful, and rich homage, but does anyone get it? 

Pope.L’s pleasing refusal to be interpreted

Zachary Fne | The New Yorker | 10th August 2026

Pope.L’s performances included crawling along Manhattan streets and sitting for days on a raised toilet eating the Wall Street Journal. Were such deeds deranged or a lucid advocacy for those in his family who were homeless? His drawings are equally elliptical. This writer disagrees with critics who want to group his graphics and performances as a coherent whole. “Pope.L couldn’t care less about crafting an image or a brand. His work thrives on the incoherence of his own restless curiosity.”

The 2026 Turner Prize Show Is Grim—but the Strongest in Years

Eddy Frankel | Artnet | 24th September 2026

The Turner Prize is one of the art world’s most closely watched events. The themes of the four shortlisted artists are grim – climate apocalypse and political discord. As with so much contemporary art, opinions divide on how best to expresses the zeitgeist. For example, one work that references “global oil” is seen as either “amazingly sinister” or “belonging to an undergraduate sketchbook”. Although the writer has no idea who will win the prize, he observes that “sometimes the grimmest of times produces the best art”.

John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton review – a vibrant biography of the pioneering critic

Xan Brooks | The Guardian | 10th August 2026

An especially eloquent review of the biography of John Berger, the politically engaged British cultural critic who changed how we see art. He opposed the “great man” theory of art, arguing instead that viewers need to be aware art is produced for a marketplace. It is thus a “manifestation of art and politics. We never look at just one thing he said.” We are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. “There is no single version of a story.”

Velázquez’s Rediscovered Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares Joins the Getty Museum’s Collection

Staff | Finestre sull' Arte | 24th September 2026

Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon both rated Velazquez as just about the greatest artist ever. Only 120 of his paintings are known (the Prado holds “more works than God”) so the “rediscovery” of a lost work is a big deal. The new work is a court portrait of Count Duke of Olivares, a powerful Spanish statesman. It is, says a curator, “a great example of Velazquez’s ability to capture the subject’s personality directly from life”. It has been purchased by Getty, reputedly the world’s richest museum.

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