The Easel

9th September 2025

From the Hindenburg to the DMZ, contemporary artist Lee Bul’s latest exhibit explores failed utopias

Lee Jian | Korea JoongAng Daily | 1st September 2025

Bul, the eminent Korean artist, started out in performance art but as international acclaim grew she moved into sculpture, installation, and painting. The centrepiece of this retrospective is a huge Zeppelin-shaped balloon, emblematic of “failed utopian dreams”. A tall structure reflects her view that architecture is an expression of “our hopes, our vision”. Such works, she hopes will “come off as somehow familiar, accessible, [but also with] a hint of something a bit strange”. A profile of the artist is here.

Francis Newton Souza — the ‘enfant terrible’ of Modern Indian art

Nishad Avari | Christie’s | 1st September 2025

For Indian art to emerge from under the British influence, it needed strong characters. Souza was one. Co-founding the Progressive Artists Group in 1947, he aspired to create something both modern and Indian. His broad strokes, figurative distortions and “dark exploration” of religion and sex were seen as disruptive, and he moved to London. It was there, ironically, that he produced a torrent of strong work that now underpins his reputation. Says one writer, “Souza created the visual language of modern India”.

Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings

Nolan Kelly | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st September 2025

Yuskavage knows that her impolitic paintings give her a “bad girl” image. She trained in the “highbrow” European figurative tradition but married that with a “lowbrow” vulgar sexuality from popular culture. That contains a tension that attracts much attention, creepy figures depicted with great technical proficiency. She references how women have been portrayed in western art, but the final product still leaves viewers uneasy – is this “the straight-A student [or] the back-of-class troublemaker”?

Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry – Le Château de Chantilly

Staff | Salterton Arts Review | 23rd July 2025

A book of hours was a prayer book that set out religious observances. Written and illustrated by hand, such books were among the most precious of Gothic artworks. The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry, completed in 1416, shows “jewel-like landscapes, toiling peasants and frolicking nobles”. Both the commissioning Duke du Berry and the illustrators died when the book was nearing completion. “Absolutely magnificent … better than the Mona Lisa”.

Van Gogh and the secret meanings of plants

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 1st September 2025

A new book describing the symbolic meaning of plants and flowers in art. It emphasises happy connotations. Flowers have variously signalled purity (lily), love (rose) and wisdom (iris). Yet less happy associations abound. Van Gogh painted the poisonous oleander as a warning of danger. The palm, common is medieval art, signalled the choice of death over a pagan marriage. And mushrooms living in the dank undergrowth represented “sinfulness at the base of humanity”. Not quite a breezy summer read.

Secrecy, Leverage, and Power: The Art World’s Economy of Truth

Orlando Whitfield | Literary Hub | 15th August 2025

The art market thinks of itself as a refined l place, but is described by one writer as “commerce dressed up as culture”. Inigo Philbrick, a young art dealer jailed in 2022 for fraud, personified this characterisation. The linked piece, a description of how Philbrick and his offsider engineered the sale of a Paula Rego painting, fits firmly in the category of a ripping yarn. Philbrick is now out of prison, has participated in a BBC documentary and plans to return to art, saying “I was a great art dealer.”

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”.

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