The Easel

15th April 2025

David Hockney 25 review: an absolutely enormous splash

Caroline Roux | The Art Newspaper | 9th April 2025

Hockney is probably Britain’s most beloved, and widely covered, living artist. What can be learned from a huge Paris retrospective? Renowned for his optimism, Hockney’s recent work is more introspective, pushing back on accusations he is a hedonist. He remains prolific. And, seeing Hockney at scale reminds (again) that he is “a fabulous painter”. Another agrees “Like Monet and his Haystacks, there are things from our time that Hockney has shown us how to see.” A review of some key works is here.

Suzanne Valadon

Beatrice Loayza | 4Columns | 11th April 2025

Valadon is usually considered a minor figure in fin de siècle Paris. A “stellar” retrospective indicates she is more than that. Entering the bohemian art world of Montmartre as a model, she somehow managed to become an artist herself. Not surprisingly, themes of motherhood and adolescent self-discovery appear often in her paintings. Her female figures are shown empathetically, as “subjects, not objects”. Although they are being scrutinised by the artist, “their secrets and obsessions are their own”.

What-ho, Watteau!

David Platzer | The New Criterion | 11th April 2025

As with Vermeer, we know little about Watteau. He came from modest Flemish circumstances and lived a “vagabond life”, mostly in and around Paris. An acute observer of life, his portraits and scenes of soldiers have nuance and emotional depth. His re-invention of the fêtes gallantes genre owed something to Flemish art traditions but more to imagination and an attentiveness to fashions of the day. Watteau is unsurpassed in “capturing feminine elegance” and communicating that “elegant pleasures are fleeting”.

Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur asks not if it’s great or even good art, but if it makes you laugh – and it does

Mark Hudson | The Independant | 26th March 2025

Perry, a potter and famously a transvestite, seems a very British artist., His art is both cerebral and full of anti-establishment humour. A new show of pots, prints and tapestries, spread amidst the ornate rococo splendour of London’s Wallace Collection, is a case in point. Replete with fictitious identities, it includes items such as a tapestry in “hallucinogenic” colour that “makes you chuckle with respect at [its] mad hubris”. The only thing that doesn’t work, says a writer, is Perry’s claimed status as an underdog.

Singh in exultation

Skye Arundhati Thomas | The World of Interiors | 11th April 2025

What is going on in Singh’s paintings? A “pioneering” post-Independence artist, her works combine Indian elements like folk narratives and court painting with Surrealist influences. Teeming with ideas her works present detailed narrative tableaux that are “incohesive yet beautiful”. Even western eyes can detect themes of domestic life and India’s history of communal violence. Having struggled to interpret Singh’s work, one writer seems to give up and simply admires the “lush colours”.

Discover the Cubist World of Fernand Léger

Anastasia Kirpalov | The Collector | 29th March 2025

A primer of sorts on Léger, who gets less attention than he should. He started thinking about cubism after a Cezanne exhibition in 1907, but an even bigger visual epiphany was seeing the sun glinting off gun barrels during WW1. Viewing the machine age with great optimism, he combined a “tubular” style of figuration with the use of primary colours to communicate how different the new age would be from the natural world. Léger’s emphatic use of primary colours is now regarded as a precursor of Pop art.

8th April 2025

Ed Atkins’ Digital Surrealism Unfolds in Tate Britain’s Largest Survey to Date

Jessie James | Stupiddope | 4th April 2025

As mundane digital functions infiltrate daily life, we all acquire a digital representation of ourselves. Atkins survey show in London focuses on these versions of  ourselves, on the “me and “not-me”. His work deals with “the in-betweens: between physical and digital”, in ways that are deeply human. Emotion matters, death matters, people are awkward. “Atkins dares to ask what it means to be human when your body is rendered in code and your feelings come with a loading screen”.

Mahtab Hussain: What Did You Want to See?

Veronica Simpson | Studio International | 7th April 2025

British Asians in Birmingham – predominantly Muslim – have long suffered racist stereotyping. Having been criticised for being either too Asian or too British, Hussain has had to think hard about identity. A solo show features portraits of individual British Asians together with images of Birmingham’s 160 mosques. Far from confirming the usual stereotypes, it’s a study in “mind-boggling diversity”, which is Hussain’s point. Perhaps like himself, “Birmingham [has] a very messy identity. It doesn’t know who it is.”

Bruce Nauman’s pensive Conceptual art from the 1970s seems timely again

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 7th April 2025

Nauman moved to Los Angeles in 1969 seeking inspiration. He took contemporary art seriously, especially Duchamp and his pun-laden works. One Nauman work from 1968 was a weighty steel slab titled “Dark”. Did that mean it was dark under the slab? Was the title written under the slab, as the artist claimed? The writer describes this work as “a compact of faith … a contract between strangers,”. That was a significant thing is turbulent 1968 and it is still a significant thing today.

In a New Exhibition at The Met, Chinoiserie Gets a Feminist Framing

Lisa Wong Macabasco | Vogue | 31st March 2025

When fine Chinese porcelain first arrived in 16th century Europe, its translucence, white colour and blue designs ignited a “Chinoiserie” craze. Europeans saw China as “exotic” and extended this fantasy to Chinese women – “goddesses, mothers, monsters, and performers”. Porcelain also became a metaphor for European womanhood – “fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken”. Porcelain was not culturally neutral as has been assumed. It embodied a “language” about how women were shown.

At Yale, a David Goldblatt retrospective bears eloquent witness to apartheid-era South Africa and beyond

Mark Feeney | Boston Globe | 3rd April 2025

Goldblatt photographed apartheid-era South African society. In doing so, he “bore witness” with distinction. His interest was in the commonplace – churches, mines, people at home and in the street – where “nothing ‘happened and yet all was contained”. Combining a humanist outlook with “visual simplicity”, he articulated the moral dilemmas that attended daily life under apartheid. Goldblatt’s images, says the writer, are “eloquence of a very high order”. Gushes another, his work is “magisterial”.

A new documentary continues the Thomas Kinkade art hustle

Philip Kennicott | Yahoo | 4th April 2025

Thomas Kinkade was an American artist whose “kitsch” Americana brought him great fame and art world derision. Later came mental illness and an early death. The story is rich with art world issues. What is art – do “black-velvet Elvis paintings count?”, asks one writer. Who decides this? Would critics who ridiculed his work deal equally harshly if his artworks were priced in the millions? Is a stash of unseen original Kinkades now worth a fortune? Details of the documentary are here.

More stories