The Easel

12th August 2025

A revelatory new view of Barbara Hepworth

Jackie Wullschlager | ft.com | 1st August 2025

Famous in Britain, Hepworth is “unknown” in France, something a “stunning” show of her work there wants to change. The “radiant quietude” of her works contrasts sharply with artists like Giacometti and his heavily worked figures. Said Hepworth, “it was not dominance which one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion”. Perhaps this respect for her materials gives her work a “gentleness and reserve”. An alternative (but lesser) review is here.

Brian Clarke, stained glass artist, 1953-2025

Tanya Harrod | ft.com | 12th July 2025

Clark fell in love with stained glass while still at primary school. Later, having absorbed London’s “punk” aesthetic, he produced secular glasswork using vivid blocks of colour on a large scale. Technically innovative in his use of sheet glass, he worked with many “starchitects” on shopping centers, airports, office buildings and religious buildings. He has never been given a public gallery show and “there is no obvious heir to his ambitious genius”. Another obit is here.

Curator Nada Shabout Traces the Enduring Legacy of the Baghdad Modern Art Group

Farah Abdessamad | Observer | 11th August 2025

In 1951 the Baghdad Modern Art Group formed to develop a cultural identity for newly independent Iraq. That meant linking a venerable artistic heritage to modern life and “modernism”. They also sought to claim a part of modernism for themselves. The modernism of Matisse and Picasso borrowed much from Arab, African and Islamic cultures. Iraqi artists didn’t think of modernism as “a rupture … because abstraction was in their history and in their collective memory. It wasn’t something new.”

Connecting the Polka Dots

Kathy Wong | MOMA | 30th July 2025

An essay of appreciation for the dot. Polka dots are versatile – “they understand any language”. In fashion they can be down market or on designer brands. They can have an industrial feel, like Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots or be artisanal like in Seurat’s paintings. Assembled into icons they represent computer interfaces. Their magic is that dots “don’t need to have a meaning. In [their] geometric fluidity … we find proof of universality and connection—between time, space, and each other.”

Jean-François Millet and the drudgery of rural life

Michael Prodger | The New Statesman | 6th August 2025

In mid-eighteen hundreds France, people were leaving farm life to take their chances in the cities. Millet, a country boy, knew the realities of peasant life and made it the subject of his work. Wanting to be modern, a realist, he avoided romanticising rural life but did want to show the “dignity of toil”. Says one writer, his art is not naïve but rather “sophisticated, carefully staged naturalism”. One admirer was a young van Gogh who regarded Millett as “the essential modern painter”.

The Enduring Pleasures of Art Nouveau

Emily Watlington | Art in America | 4th August 2025

Art nouveau sometimes gets dismissed as unserious and decorative. Further, its depiction of “sensuous, nymph-y women” is not exactly 21st century. The writer argues for forgiveness. Art nouveau aimed to represent nature at a time when technology seemed to be taking over. It also aspired to make beauty available to all, much the same as William Morris did with the Arts and Craft movement. In art nouveau, “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same [and was] the precursor of modern art.”

Our greatest football photographer’s secret? Ignore the game

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 4th August 2025

Believe it or not but located in the glamorous Tottenham stadium in London is an art gallery. Proving that art and soccer are logical bedfellows Oof gallery is staging a retrospective of the sports photographer Peter Robinson. On-pitch drama didn’t interest him. The fans, in his view, displayed the humanity of the game most vividly. Rather spoiling the art-sport theme, another artist exhibiting alongside Robinson has embroidered football shirts. Says the writer, “messy, not Messi.”

5th August 2025

Marley and me: ‘I had initiative – and Bob sensed that’

Sean O’Hagan | The Observer | 27th June 2025

Hanging around a concert hall, a very young Morris meets Bob Marley, is invited on tour and produces classic images of the reggae and (subsequently) punk band era. In parallel, Morris photographed his Black community in working class London. Besides his fine compositional instincts, Morris’s images combine documentary, reportage and portraiture. They have a sense of intimacy and ease. “It’s clear Morris loved being in these places with these people, and they loved him back”.

Humanity in all its diversity

Bernhardt Schulz | Monopol | 4th August 2025

Born in Cape Town, Stern left for Germany in 1901 where, after her art studies, she fell in with Max Pechstein and the German expressionists. Her paintings of Black people startled German viewers and, on returning to Cape Town in 1920, she scandalised audiences there with her “ugly” cutting edge modernism. That gave her an ambivalence both at home and in Germany, something that only added to her renown. Her portraits in particular are an important part of South African art history.

The self as a muse: Leonard Foujita’s world in paintings and photos

Jennifer Pastore | The Japan Times | 18th July 2025

Arriving in edgy, 1913 Montparnasse, Foujita immediately attracted attention. Besides his exotic looks his paintings stood out, consisting of black ink outlines and a pale palette, a fusion of Japanese compositional aesthetics and European figures. Mostly featuring nudes, self-portraits or studies of cats, they sold for a fortune. He produced Japanese military propaganda in WW2 before retiring to Paris with a sullied reputation. His greatest work says the writer “was himself”.

The cancelled, confiscated, vindicated art of Lovis Corinth

Matthew Sperling | Apollo | 29th July 2025

Unlucky Corinth. For most of his career he was a respected German realist painter. Leading up to WW1, though, he rejected academic norms and helped establish German expressionism with its bold colours, distorted forms and emotional depth. The Nazis disapproved and mostly stripped museums of his work. With only fragments of his oeuvre now on public display, Corinth is a “peripheral” figure. A Berlin show seeks to re-establish him as a key figure in the development of modernist painting. Background on his art is here.

Was the Renaissance Real?

Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | 4th August 2025

The Renaissance looms large in art history, but two recent books dispute that the period was special.  The writer argues that such views neglect the role of the visual arts. “Painting was where the action was [and] eclipsed science and philosophy as the main site of intellectual energy. The writers might have been trapped in the old tongues, but the painters had eyes left free to imagine. Renaissance painting [lies] between … the medieval and the modern. It’s this double consciousness which remains so lucid to us today.”

What Vermeer’s Love Letters Say

Scott Samuelson | 3 Quarks Daily | 29th July 2025

The writer mulls over a favourite theme – why do Vermeer’s paintings still enthral? Part of the reason is his intense realism, coupled with his documentation of light, “the precise flow of a moment’s illumination”. But there is more. Vermeer’s precision helps us understand the various allegorical objects such as bowls of fruit or images of Cupid.  The faces of his women “contain what can only be hinted at … the painted reality is a way of reading the allegories, not the other way around”.

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