The Easel

3rd March 2026

Rose Wylie Memories Relived and Shared

Sue Hubbard | Artlyst | 26th February 2026

Wylie emerged, middle-aged, from motherhood full of ambition for her art. Now 91, she has built an international reputation with work that is an irreverent mish mash of the high and low brow. This includes a “splodgy red elephant, a blue frog and a yellow omelette”, all featuring bright colours and thick brushstrokes. It takes “dedication to paint this badly – if by badly one means creating images that are simplified to their essence”. Says one writer “a stunning, life-affirming exhibition”. Images are here

Jasper Johns: between the clock and the bed

Alison McDonald | Gagosian Quarterly | 6th February 2026

An interview with an obvious commercial slant, but interesting, nonetheless. When Johns started making “crosshatch” paintings in 1972, they were abruptly different from his previous work. These “fraught and fidgety” patterns bore no relation to pop art but neither did they have the emotional drama of artists such as Pollock and Rothko. Some speculated that he was referencing Picasso and Munch. Mostly though, they showed that Johns “didn’t just know how to paint, he knew how to make a painting do more.”

Tracey Emin’s A Second Life at the Tate Modern: beyond the YBA heyday, the artist sings anew

Dora Davies-Evitt | tatler | 26th February 2026

Emin has lived life to excess and then, well, “overshared”. This leads some critics to see weaknesses in a “vast” survey. One suggests, for example, that Emin’s sculptures are not great and her neons belong in hotel foyers. This writer disagrees. Emin takes “the thing [worth saying] and drags it into the public – sex, shame, trauma, abortion – made digestible through aesthetic force and relatability (that messy, unmade bed) … her art is attractive for its lack of euphemism and varnish.”

Can the Louvre still be saved?

Hanno Rauterberg | Die Zeit | 25th February 2026

News from the Louvre is horrendous – theft, water leaks, ticket fraud and worker unrest. Some of these problems are old news but with 8.7m visitors a year have not seemed urgent. Such complacency had led to an alleged focus on prestige projects rather than essential but mundane maintenance. Says the (German) writer, the result is something “not atypical for France, a crude mixture of overconfidence and self-neglect. We can consider ourselves lucky if [the Louvre] doesn’t suffer total collapse.” 

Art after Ovid

David McAllister | Prospect | 10th February 2026

Written 2000 years ago Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic tale of change and transformation. A Rijksmuseum show makes the case that it has become “intrinsic to the western canon”. In the tale of Apollo and Daphne, Bernini sculpted Daphne transforming into a tree. Lustful Jupiter was painted by Michelangelo as a swan. Rodin sculpted Pygmalion falling in love with his own sculpture. All illustrate that we do not control change and “nothing is permanently central”.

Rare Basquiat Drawings Go On View in Denmark

Caroline Roux | Galerie | 3rd February 2026

Basquiat’s ‘head’ drawings are an anomaly. Done early in his career, they are finished works, yet he chose not to exhibit them. His usual plethora of cultural references and textural fragments are absent while lines weave around these figures suggesting “extraordinary psychological strain”. Says the curator, “they are not portraits [but] live in an interpretational zone”. The broader view of Basquiat’s work has been influenced by perceptions that his estate has been managed to emphasise  mythology over artistry.

The Resurging Relevance of The School of London Painters

Sebastian Smee | Sotheby's | 27th February 2026

An appreciation. Once someone suggested the moniker “school of London”, it stuck. What does it mean? It wasn’t a group like the Impressionists who shared an identifiable style and preference for working outdoors. Yet Freud, Bacon, Kitaj and Auerbach shared friendships, a preference for oil paint and a modern approach to the figure. Rivalry doubtless was also at play. Collectively they breathed new life into the “grand figurative tradition” and showing how “paint could amplify experience”.

24th February 2026

Yoko Ono’s Art Is an Exercise in Hope

Debra Brehmer | Hyperallergic | 20th January 2026

Ono is one of the world’s “most generous artists,” says the writer, because she incorporates the viewer into her work. By the mid 1960’s she was well known in the art avant garde through works such as Cut Piece (1964) where audiences snipped pieces from her dress. Compared to her work after meeting John Lennon, the early work seems “more radical … collaboration diminished [her] female brazenness”. Says one writer “That tension—between doing and thinking—is where Ono’s art lives.”

The Worst Show of 2025

Travis Diehl | Spike Art Magazine | 31st December 2025

When Johnson’s show opened at the Guggenheim, a critic wondered whether his work was “activism or just décor”. Those doubts persist. Johnson is “just okay” as an artist – so how did he get this prestigious retrospective? Perhaps it’s because his “post-black” work is “citation heavy”, meaning that evaluation of his art is deflected into discussions of “biography and identity”. Palm trees have been hung in the museum’s central void, perhaps “a way to nervously fill that famous space, as if the art itself isn’t enough”.

How Kaari Upson turned her world upside down

Alice Godwin | Apollo | 11th June 2025

About to open in Germany, Upson’s retrospective celebrates a promising career cut short by early death. She came to prominence with her “Larry” series inspired by exploring the abandoned house of an unknown neighbour. It’s a commentary on masculinity but, more importantly, an example of how her art blurs boundaries. She blurs individual identities, but also the boundary between fact versus fiction, between what is public versus private. This retrospective “will surely not be her last.”.

“In the rush to draw a line under the age of the starchitect, we’re at risk of losing more than we think”

Owen Hopkins | Dezeen | 23rd February 2026

Celebrity architects go way back – at least to Michelangelo. However, with the recent spate of deaths of leading architects– most recently Frank Gehry- the starchitect era is said to be over. Glamour projects brought benefits, such as reduced conformity, but often at huge cost. Gehry’s Bilbao boosted the local economy, but few other such projects were as successful. Still, starchitects kept architecture involved in the civic conversation. That is still needed to achieve a “more equitable and sustainable built environment”.

Between Worlds: Visitors to 37-08 Utopia Parkway

Sarah Lea | Gagosian Quarterly | 20th October 2025

Cornell’s studio has been re-created in a Paris gallery, bringing many reminiscences of this unusual artist. He lived in suburban New York and dreamed of travelling to Paris. His collages, box assemblages and films were made with materials from bric-a-brac stores. Inspired by surrealism his boxes are exercises in “urban reverie”. Despite friendships with many notable artists, he was a loner – or as a friend called him, a monk. Says a curator, Cornell was “born on the wrong continent at the wrong time”.

Bright shiny art

Rufus Bird | The Critic | 19th February 2026

When do falling prices indicate not a market slump but merely a healthy rebalancing? Right now in the art market, apparently. Art sellers are looking for new clients but when they are a new demographic or from a new geographic region, established artist may not always appeal. Thankfully, there are always masterpieces – “shiny” art, like the Klimts that were auctioned recently – which sell well and lift spirits. Such shiny art “will continue to ensure the art market remains in good health”. Sounds heroic!

More stories