The Easel

26th August 2025

Beatriz Milhazes’s Labors of Love at the Guggenheim

Shana Nys Dambrot | The Village Voice | 20th July 2025

Milhaze loves colour and the circular form. Add to this her mash-up of Brazilian and European geometric abstraction and the resulting paintings and collages are, says one writer, a “controlled riot of form and colour”. Botanical motifs appear frequently as do textile-like patterning, all represented in the “saturated palette of tropical modernism. This work is beautiful but not contemplative. It’s optically disruptive”.  Milhaze is regarded as Brazil’s most successful contemporary painter.

Re-Envisioning Native American Art at the de Young

Staff | de Young / Legion of Honour Museums | 22nd August 2025

San Francisco’s de Young Museum is tackling a fraught issue – how to display its Indigenous art. Previously such decisions reflected top-down, non-Indigenous views of what was important. Now curatorial decisions involve collaboration and consultation. Greater recognition is being given to geographically different groups. And Indigenous curators are keen to intersperse contemporary works among older pieces. That speaks to their key message – “we are still here … a very living community”.

Toward Vertigo

Oliver Renaud-Clement | Ursula | 22nd August 2025

Tōgo Murano is hardly known outside Japan. At home though he is revered. He borrowed freely from brutalist, modernist and symbolist styles without becoming a devotee of any. His true allegiance was to sukiya, a refined style originating from tea house designs that has been “loosened up” to accommodate variation. So, what was the power of his designs? “He harnessed irrationality to form a consistent, highly poetic language, a language that somehow worked”. A backgrounder is here.

Can we paint our dreams?

Laura Cumming | The Observer | 17th August 2025

Bethlam Hospital near London has treated mentally ill patients for centuries. Some of its patients have made art, trying to explain to their doctors what is going on. They describe “raw, unmediated experience” far removed from the sleek catchy images that the surrealists said described the unconscious state. So, are these artworks or just “self diagnosis”? And how do they relate to dreams, such a renowned source of artistic inspiration? How different is the half-awake state from the processes of mental illness?

Fear and Loafing in Las Vegas: Ralph DeLuca on the Art Market Cool-Off

Ralph DeLuca | Cultured | 21st August 2025

Some view the art world as dealing in cultural objects that embody ideas. Others see it as simply trading precious objects. Both views have merit. News that the art market is “cooling” may thus cause alarm – people are no longer interested in ideas – or merely a yawn – prices go up and down. Perhaps, says the writer, art prices are falling because “politically correct” art no longer resonates. The suggested remedy is to buy memorabilia and fossils, “objects that strike a personal chord, not just ticking an art world box”.

Picasso: tête-à-tête

Michael Cary | Gagosian Quarterly | 11th April 2025

Phillip Guston was vilified when, in 1970, he changed from abstract expressionism to figuration. Little wonder then that artists usually stick with a single style. Not Picasso though. He thought that sticking to one style simply led to “affectation”. In fact, he celebrated that he had “no style” and even went so far as to deny that his work could be divided into “periods”. “What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists … things always work out.”

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.

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