The Easel

19th August 2025

Awe and Reckoning: Edward Burtynsky’s ‘The Great Acceleration’

Samuel Abrams | aei.org | 11th August 2025

Pollution is often photographed to elicit an emotional response. Burtynsky doesn’t take that approach, instead using what he calls a “deadpan aesthetic” that avoids advocacy. He has spent decades revealing the vast production systems that underpin modern life – mines, farms, factories. “His ability to render vast, human-altered landscapes both legible and emotionally resonant sets him apart in a visually overloaded culture. Remarkable.” An interview with Burtynsky is here.

In Touch With the Galaxy

Rachel Hunter Himes | The Nation | 18th August 2025

Starting out as a documentary photographer, Simpson was quickly acclaimed for her conceptual juxtapositions of text and images. Like the Pictures Generation photographers, she focused on the way images sway our views of gender and identity. Now she has a “corner-turning” show of paintings, where meaning is equally opaque. Simpson merges magazine images with images of snowy landscapes, rocks, waterfalls, drawing a link, not so much with Black experience as with vast “time and space”.

The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in Pompeii

Staff | The Economist | 14th August 2025

New funding has accelerated excavation at Pompeii, with “breathtaking” results. Luxury and slave lifestyles played out side by side, shown most recently in a spectacular bathhouse. Art gives these ruins a very human feel. Some almost pristine frescoes feature narrative designs that variously portray religious subjects, sex and heroic deeds. One room has frescoes that tell a familiar story – the “tension” between an imagined idyllic past and the realities of contemporary life. Says the writer, “same old humanity”.

The Kinetic Force of Art-World Couple Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely Comes to Life in Somerset

Anna Cafolla | Vogue | 6th June 2025

The artistic imagination is usually so singular as to preclude collaboration. Saint Phalle and Tinguely were exceptions. Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures, wonky contraptions made from junk materials, differed profoundly from Saint Phalle’s paintings and jaunty figurative sculptures. Yet, things like colour choices or mechanical motifs showed that they traded ideas. Said Saint Phalle of their decades-long collaboration, “we couldn’t sit down together without creating something new”.  A review of Tinguely’s work is here.

Come Back Later When Your Work Isn’t So Human

Yael Friedman | Los Angeles Review of Books | 30th July 2025

The diversity of Fink’s photography reflected someone who was “deeply attuned to the natural choreography of life”. Debutante balls and Hollywood parties were treated just as seriously as civil rights protests. He had a politically engaged viewpoint but, says one writer, what he mostly brought was empathy. “Fink’s gaze is never judgmental, never pitiful or satirical. It barely registers as a “gaze” at all … his photos insist on shared experience.”

‘As urgent and relevant today as it ever was’: The radical manifesto hidden in Georges Seurat’s 1884 masterpiece

Kelly Grovier | bbc.com | 13th August 2025

Seurat was something of a workaholic, quite happy working in his studio on the theory of contrasting colours. Hoping to convince the Parisian art world that he had cracked that code, his first big pointillist work, Bathers at Asnières, demonstrated painstaking colour placement. Despite its wonderful evocation of a hazy summer day, the Paris Salon was unimpressed. Only a half century later was Bathers at Asnières recognised as a masterpiece because of Seurat’s profound insights into how we see.

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.”

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