The Easel

11th November 2025

Egypt’s Grand Museum opens, displaying Tutankhamun tomb in full for first time

Yolande Knell and Wael Hussein | bbc.com | 1st November 2025

The Grand Egyptian Museum, now officially open, is claimed to be ‘the largest cultural building of the 21st century”.  It’s huge, and brags that it covers 30 dynasties of pharaohs. Says one writer “it’s absolutely stuffed with treasures” – boats, golden idols, statues, sarcophagi plus items from everyday life. Says another, it is “a gesture of modern nationhood, Egypt announcing itself as a cultural superpower.”

Facing the truth about apartheid

Sean O’Hagan | The Observer | 24th October 2025

Edelstein was a press photographer in apartheid-era South Africa, left for Britain, and then returned during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Her portraits of victims and perpetrators of apartheid have become renowned. One, featuring a boy’s murderer with the boy’s mother, “hums with a sense of uncomfortable uncertainty”. Are we seeing “performative contrition”? Was amnesty offered too broadly? The Commission revealed “what happened”, but its overall success remains “questionable”.

100 years of Calder’s circus

Kelsey Rose | Substack | 18th October 2025

Arriving in Paris in 1926, Calder wanted something to announce himself in art circles. He came up with a miniature circus, a work now enjoying a 100th anniversary show. Charm is not its only quality. It shows his interest in movement and his facility with wire, thus foreshadowing his sinuous wire portraits and mobiles. His circus has a whimsical quality much appreciated by art critics of the time. And, with performances that could go for two hours, “Cirque Calder predated performance art by forty years.”

This 17th-Century Female Artist Was Once a Bigger Star Than Rembrandt. Why Did History Forget About Johanna Koerten and Her Peers?

Meilan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | 29th September 2025

Opportunities open to artistically inclined women in 17th century Holland were governed by class more than gender. With family support, they could become “art stars” and those that did sold work at Rembrandt-level prices, helping define the visual culture of that age.  However, female lace workers were poorly paid and anonymous despite lace being an expensive fabric. By the 19th century, art by men overshadowed everything and the preservation of works and reputations was prioritised accordingly.

A Devotion to Art

Kathryn Murphy | Literary Review | 7th November 2025

A new view on Vermeer. Married to a Catholic, it has long been assumed Vermeer was under their influence. Now it is claimed he was a Remonstrant, a Christian sect that, like the Catholics, was unable to worship publicly. This view prompts “beautiful” new interpretations. His Little Street, for example, is claimed to be a hidden Remonstrant church. Other paintings have supposed religious meanings. This helps explain what most characterises Vermeer’s work – “immanence – that simmer of the sacred in the everyday.”

Paris Photo 2025: Exploring the Curation

Staff | Magnum Photos | 7th November 2025

Paris Photo claims to be the world’s leading photography fair. It is, by its nature, eclectic, exactly the moment when Magnum Photo can delve into its fabled archive and highlight some great images. Running parallel to the main event are shows by Susan Meiselas (reviewed here) and Luc Delahaye, one of the greats of French photography (reviewed here; 9 min).

4th November 2025

In the Shadow of Ruth Asawa

Lisa Yin Zhang | Hyperallergic | 17th October 2025

It seems this show will be as big a hit in New York as it was in San Francisco. Asawa’s early work was diverse – drawings, watercolours, folded paper, ceramics – but on a visit to Mexico she learned looped wire basketry. Her iconic sculptures soon emerged, in a wide variety of shapes that seemed “inside and outside at the same time”. Later, she tied bundles of wires to make fractal-like arrangements. Once thought “domestic” Asawa’s work “seems to make [the] continuity between all things tangible”.

L.S. Lowry’s ‘Coming Out of School’: Painting His Own Gray World

Willard Spiegelman | msn.com | 2nd November 2025

For a long time, Lowry was considered “just” a local painter. His focus was not on some major international art movement but on England’s industrial north. “Coming Out of School” (1927) is one such work, an imagined after-school scene in a grey town with “a sky full of clouds, or smoke from the industrial factory”. It’s a very local scene. One writer links his admiration to the genuine interest Lowry showed in what people do. “I have no idea why that should be so moving.”

The Louvre’s Jacques-Louis David Retrospective Offers a Fresh Perspective on the French Master

Sarah Belmont | ARTnews | 8th October 2025

David lived in interesting times – the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration. These politics animate his art, and he used his art as a political tool. Not surprisingly, Caravaggio’s dramatic style was a major influence. Nowhere is this clearer than in his The Death of Marat, an iconic image of the Revolution. Marat suffered ill-health in life but in David’s rendering of his death, he is exalted as a martyr. Not just a personal elegy to a friend, David’s work is also “potent propaganda”.

Juliana Halpert Rates the Los Angeles Art Scene’s Tricks and Treats So Far This Fall

Juliana Halpert | Cultured | 15th October 2025

Made in LA is the seventh biennial celebration of art in that city. After spending a year choosing artists to feature, the curators decided not to have a unifying theme. Various critics mention a few artist they think deserve more recognition, but the whole thing seems flat. The curators “assembled a biennial so meatless that I’m wondering whether it’s even worth biting into. ‘Made in L.A.’ needs active curation like a novel needs a protagonist.”

Framing in museums

Peter Schade | The Burlington Magazine | 1st November 2025

Artists have views about the type of frame that best suits an individual work. They often create with that frame in mind. Sadly, their preferences are frequently overridden. The Medici’s wanted uniform frames. French collectors chose frames to suit their interior decoration. Over many decades, London’s National Gallery has painstakingly re-framed about half its collection. Says the writer, “An appropriate frame is like a perfectly fitted dress or a well-tailored suit.”  Multiple images of frames are here.

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