The Easel

8th July 2025

Turning Style into Power

Richard Thompson Ford | The Yale Review | 20th May 2025

In the late 1700’s, men’s fashion shifted to a more restrained look. London’s much admired Beau Brummell exemplified a new idea – the dandy, someone who cut a striking figure.  Black men saw being a dandy as a way to assert their individuality and sensuality. Further, elegant attire was “a quiet but confident assertion of self-respect”. Musicians like Miles Davis created a “hip, tailored style” that was widely adopted. A distinctive Black sartorial aesthetic had successfully “subverted … the racial hierarchy”.

Wangechi Mutu’s Debut Rome Exhibition At Galleria Borghese

Lee Sharrock | Forbes | 30th June 2025

Mutu’s star seems ever ascendant, becoming the first living female artist to have a solo show at Rome’s Galleria Borghese. Amidst the villa’s opulence and spectacular art, Mutu’s work is a “counterpoint”. Some of her materials are humble – wax, wood and soil – things usually absent from art history’s grand narratives. Bronze, such a heroic material, is “reimagined as porous and ancestral”. In various ways, she asks, “who is seen … who is erased?” Mutu’s work, says the writer, is “elegant yet subversive”.

The elephant in the room: India’s cultural influence takes centre stage

William Dalrymple | The Observer | 25th May 2025

India’s story is illuminated through the devotional art of its great religions – Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. This art has amazing longevity – beginning about 2500 years ago – and boasts a sphere of influence right across Asia. Its sophisticated “cultural and linguistic apparatus” transformed cultures and yielded painting, sculpture, Zen meditation, haiku, Japanese ink wash landscapes as well as Ankor Wat and Borobudur. ” One of the most thought-provoking and aesthetically satisfying shows for years.”

What Does It Feel Like to Be Called an Emerging Artist at 72? Ask Takako Yamaguchi

Ella Martin-Gachot | Cultured | 26th June 2025

Suddenly, 70-ish Yamaguchi is hot, both in the auction room and with a first solo show in LA. She isn’t sure why recognition has arrived now, after decades of work. Perhaps it has been delayed by her “nonchalant” changes in style, borrowing from “the trash-heap of discarded ideals”. Her current interest is semi-abstract seascapes inspired by artists like Georgia O’Keefe. Before that, it was an acclaimed series of photo-realist shirts. “My work is not in the present … it’s either the past or the future”. An interview with the artist is here.

Artist Ben Shahn’s Nonconformity

Frances Brent | Moment | 2nd June 2025

Contemporaries of Shahn called him “overpowering”, a comment that owed much to his passionate support for leftist causes. For him, art was a means to focus attention on social and political issues. Working from photographs, he painted modern-ish figurative works that captured the troubles of the Depression and the hopes of the New Deal. That was Shahn’s career highpoint, after which it declined as the post-war world fell for abstraction. Says one critic, a “revelatory survey”.

What happens when priceless art is damaged – and the people who fix it

Florence Hallett | iNews | 8th July 2025

Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus has been attacked twice in the last century. Given its enormous value, the cost of painstaking restoration was irrelevant. More frequently, artworks are damaged accidently – usually by workers in a gallery. Advances in materials science allows near-miracles to be worked, assuming someone is willing to pay. Involving the artist can be tricky because they may use the opportunity to re-work the piece. Some galleries recognise their art as “living and so introducing the possibility of death.”

1st July 2025

Anselm Kiefer takes on Van Gogh, with results both heroic and absurd

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 24th June 2025

It sounds a good idea – putting van Gogh alongside Kiefer, the German artist who is such an admirer. Parts of the show work –dour late van Gogh’s rhyme with Kiefer’s bleak landscapes. However, the Kiefer works, huge and sometimes bombastic, are shown up by the subtlety of the smaller van Goghs. And van Gogh did have sunny moments. Kiefer, in contrast, is solid “Teutonic angst”. But let’s make allowances. Van Gogh died in peaceful 1890; while Kiefer has painted with two wars weighing on him.

Yoshitomo Nara review: cutesy terrors swear, smoke, play guitar and burn down houses

Eddie Frankel | The Guardian | 9th June 2025

When this show was in Bilbao, it attracted the praise one might expect for a highly successful artist. Yet, there was a hesitation – perhaps Nara’s art is straightforward fun and lacks the “profound emotional depth” that some claim. Now it has opened in London, this writer has a view on thar. For years Nara has produced “cutesy kitsch with a vicious edge. I quite like it. [Yet} I’ve never encountered a show less in need of explanatory wall texts, or more resistant to artsy over-intellectualising.” Images are here.

Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse delve into art’s ‘uckiness’ at The Courtauld

Katie Tobin | Wallpaper | 22nd June 2025

A 1966 sculpture exhibition in New York featured work that was breaking away from minimalism for something more sensuous. It earned the title ‘eccentric abstraction’. That sensibility has endured and appears in a London show via works that focus on body parts and textures. Erotic it is not, with “bulging, drooping sculptures” and “various turdlike piles and unpleasant growths and cavities”. It’s more a confrontation with “bodiness” – the works are “very tempting to touch”. A video (4 min) is here.

Peter Zumthor’s controversial LACMA wing is flawed and thrilling

Christopher Hawthorne | Punch List | 20th June 2025

Los Angeles’ new LACMA building has opened for preview. It’s a better building that what it replaces (phew!) though with a slightly smaller area to display art. It is designed so that visitors can “curate their own journey” and allow a more diverse, less “Eurocentric” display of art. But did these objectives require a “curvilinear behemoth” that one long-time critic calls  “absurd”? A final verdict will await the art to be installed but, for $800m, LACMA must have been hoping for a more rapturous reception.

Vatican exhibits Raphael’s legacy with the reopening of the Hall of Constantine

Victoria Cardiel | Catholic News Agency | 30th June 2025

In 1508, Raphael began painting four rooms in the Vatican. He died in 1520 before finishing the fourth, “most important” room, leaving that to his workshop. A decade-long cleaning shows the frescoes to be the “peak of high Renaissance artistry”. Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel at the same time. While away in Florence (says a background piece), Raphael took a sneak peek and was impressed. “Some of his figures [become] bigger, brighter, more monumental: he has now seen Michelangelo.”

Technology in the service of art

Niccolo Lucarelli | Contemporary Lynx | 24th March 2025

Inspired by the surrealists to “change the rules of the game”, Lijn has spent her career making sculpture that mixes art and science. That means kinetic sculpture, poetry-infused machines, and various animated installations. Regrettably, her unconventional work, now given a prestigious retrospective, is being smothered by impenetrable jargon. For example, is her work “technological feminism – and what exactly does that mean? It’s all a bit unclear. An interview with the artist is here.

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