The Easel

10th February 2026

Henri Rousseau’s wild dreams

Michael Prodger | Engelsberg Ideas | 2nd January 2026

The strange case of Rousseau. He desperately wanted to be am. artist and managed to exhibit alongside professional artists. Yet his work was “clumsy and maladroit” with stilted figures, skewed perspective and “dogs out of scale”. His jungle paintings, though intended to be realistic, have a dreamlike quality and seem to contain a narrative. Those qualities appealed to the surrealists who promoted his work. Whether his shortcomings were deliberate or simply a lack of capability is still debated.

Prisoner of war

Alice Inggs | The World of Interiors | 6th February 2026

McCullin, for decades a war photographer, brought defining images of 20th century conflicts to British breakfast tables. As he tells it, that career was harrowing and, at times, left him feeling he had been “stealing from people’s lives by taking their images”. Nowadays he takes moody landscape images of Somerset and serene studies of Roman sculptures. These are arresting images but, observes one writer, “it is in proximity to devastation and death that McCullin’s work feels most alive.”

German Expressionist Gabriele Münter Finally Gets Her Moment in the Spotlight

Katie White | artnet news | 4th November 2025

Before the drama of her painting career, Münter tried photography while visiting the American south. Returning to her native Munich she began painting and was caught up in the tumult of modernism sweeping Europe. She and Kandinsky founded the legendary expressionist “Blue Rider” group. Her vibrant colors and simplified forms exemplified their belief in colour as a language of emotion. Once a leading inter-war artist, Münter has since been relegated to merely Kandinsky’s lover.

The private lives of Gwen John

Laura Cumming | The Observer | 7th February 2026

A former lover of Rodin, John’s biography is well known. A large retrospective casts her in a different light. Her many interior studies, showing silent women in small, silent rooms, hint at her real interest – inner experience. Her subjects are often dressed in blue, are seated and appear lost in thought. Are these portraits or, rather, studies of the state of introspection? John described herself as “a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies.” One writer says, “a great modern artist”.

No longer the best advert for good art

Pierre d’Alancaisez | The Critic | 5th February 2026

Is contemporary art “stuck”? If so, is that because artists can’t imagine the future or because they are held back by “legacy cultural institutions”? Such issues are an unintended highlight of a survey at London’s pioneering Saatchi gallery. Saatchi saw its role as encouraging “a reckless, speculative” production of art. Not much of the art that resulted was great, but the approach put an intense focus on the “now”. In contrast, art in 2026 is weighed down with culture war arguments about the past  A video (5 min) is here.

3rd February 2026

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes at David Zwirner

J Scott Orr | Whitehot Magazine | 17th January 2026

Eggleston caused a furore when his first show at New York’s MoMA featured colour photography. The rich colours he used commonly appeared in advertising, causing critics to call his work garish and an affront to fine art photography. At issue was a Kodak dye process (long since discontinued) that created colours so intense that images “acquired dimension”. Says one artist, Eggleston’s work was “one of the most perfect combinations of medium and subject in the entire history of art.”

The Unfolding of Time in Paint

Rachel Cohen | The Yale Review | 11th December 2025

One for fans of Joan Mitchell. Mitchell liked to paint multi-panel works, especially after her mid-career move to live in France. The writer discusses four works from the perspective of how they reflected Mitchell’s life. Mitchell claimed that her work expressed her memories of landscapes and that she liked “the vertical”, the rhythmic breaks between the panels. That rhythm conveyed a sense of time. Painting, she said, never ends … “it is the only thing that is both continuous and still”

A New British Museum Exhibition Peels Back the Layers of the Samurai Myth

Jimmy Chen | The Collector | 12th January 2026

This exhibition illustrates the inseparability of art and culture. Samurai emerged as a warrior class in the protracted feudal conflicts of Japan’s 12th century. Once peace was established in 1615, samurai moved into administrative or academic roles and were expected to support the arts and be attentive to religious matters.  A significant proportion were women. Codes of honour are mostly myths arising from avid Western interest. If all this sounds like far away history, consider this name – Darth Vader.

Celebrated Gallerist Marian Goodman Has Died at 97

Erik Morse | Vogue | 26th January 2026

Some commercial gallerists are acclaimed for their financial acumen, but few can claim to have changed tastes. Goodman was one of the latter. She opened her New York gallery in 1977 with the aim of bringing avant garde European artists to the US. This strategy worked and broadened the gaze of the US market. Underestimated by some male collectors, one competitor was more perceptive: “She defined the model of the contemporary gallery as having the same standards as a great museum.”

The Woman Who Immortalized the Bauhaus

Alice Rawsthorn | Aperture | 23rd January 2026

The Bauhaus is usually portrayed as a mostly male affair. Lucia Maholy arrived at the school as the wife of renowned artist Maholy-Nagy and became its unofficial resident photographer. Her “immaculately composed” still lifes of design objects defined a “radically new style of industrial photography”, while her “dispassionate” images of the school’s architecture still define our perceptions of the institution. Those images were later taken and used without attribution, making them famous but not her.

A man of women

Sabine Altorfer | Die Zeit | 29th December 2025

Critics are ambivalent about Vallotton. He moved to Paris as a teenager and found that engravings and illustrations perfectly suited his talent for composition. So far so good. After his marriage in 1899 he turned to painting. This work is technically accomplished, but sometimes without any clear tone. His female nudes often portrayed them “like curiosities of art history”. Concludes one writer, Vallotton was “relatively stolid and unadventurous”.

More stories