The Easel

2nd September 2025

Antony Gormley: Sculpture is ‘the Most Radical’ of Artforms

Antony Gormley | ArtReview | 27th August 2025

Sculpture doesn’t get nearly the column inches that painting enjoys, something that seems to rankle Gormley. The charisma of masterpieces like the Sphinx of Giza, Nefertiti’s bust, Michelangelo’s David and the Statue of Liberty comes from the inherent qualities of sculpture. It is the most radical of artforms because it “refuses the functional logic that most things in the world obey. [Further], it insists that by changing matter, it changes the world. Sculpture, rather than making a picture of a thing, is the thing.”

Why museum expansion is the drug architects just can’t quit

Christopher Hawthorne | Punch List | 15th August 2025

What comprises “good” museum design? For some decades, the answer seems to have been ‘bigger is better’. Blame for that can be shared–museum directors wanting a bigger brand, ambitious donors, governments seeking tourists. All that ignores the long-standing criticism that museums are places “artworks go not to live but to die”. They should aspire to be “cultural incubators [offering] encounters with authenticity“. Sadly, there is no spreadsheet function to optimise for that.

Art and Ecstatic Ambience in Las Vegas’s Neon Vortex

Chen and Lampert | Art in America | 27th August 2025

If you want to know what art looks like “outside Tribeca”, try Las Vegas. These writers discovered the art there is “hospitality grade … a collision of art and entertainment”. Gigantic murals are so large “people cannot help but notice”. Their highlight, at the Bellagio, was a “world-class exhibition tucked between a Perrotin gift shop and a craps table. Art here doesn’t just survive—it thrives on spectacle, excess, and sparkle. … [and one day will] have its own wing in the Smithsonian.”

The Pleasure of Patterns in Art

Samuel Jay Keyser | The MIT Reader | 15th August 2025

A deep dive into how we perceive. Why do we enjoy looking at Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day” (1877)?  Partly it’s the prominence of faces, objects we are hardwired to notice. More subtly, many objects have a triangular shape and are arranged in triangles, Such “visual rhymes” occur even if the objects are not exactly identical – look at the cobblestones. “Our eyes trace patterns, spot subtle variations, and construct visual rhymes, taking satisfaction in order amid difference.”

One painting at a time: ‘The Little Pastry Chef’ by Chaïm Soutine

Susan Gray | Prospect | 26th August 2025

Soutine’s work ramps up the emotions, sometimes almost to a level of visual violence. Emotional intensity is one ingredient of Little Pastry Chef (1927). The pose communicates “concentrated energy and vitality” while also hinting at the insecurities of youth. Soutine has chosen as his subject a hospitality worker, a new class of urban worker in an urbanising society. Individual insecurity, social turbulence – Soutine knew how to unsettle. Decades hence, Willem de Kooning took note.

Windows to the Soul

Michael Payne | The Magazine Antiques | 22nd August 2025

Before photography, recording one’s image basically meant portraiture. The well-to-do could afford detailed ceremonial images. In regional USA itinerant artists developed an alternative – vernacular portraiture. It combined an uncomplicated “sentimental and emotional” aesthetic and only needed mid-level art skills. The absence of shadowing or nuanced colour transitions. and scant regard for perspective reveal these were not big city artists. Once photography arrived this unique genre faded away.

These women painters inaugurated a new chapter in human history

Sebastian Smee | Yahoo | 29th August 2025

Male artists have long tackled big themes in philosophy and history. Until the mid-20th century, though, most female artists painted subjects drawn from the domestic domain. The pressures that flowed from this – the “studio” being a kitchen table – give a “freshness” to their art. A small painting of a brown teapot, for example, probably painted after the breakfast things were cleared up, is “gorgeous … quiet works emerging from private rooms [can] be as charged with significance as those depicting war”.

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.”

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