The Easel

25th November 2025

When Homer Went to Gloucester

Matthew Whiman | MFA Boston | 3rd November 2025

Homer was slow to pick up watercolour. By mid-career, though, he became the pre-eminent American artist of this luminous but tricky medium. This was a time when the great outdoors lost its religious connotations. That suited Homer’s observational style and led to what became his late, great subject – the sea. He painted the drama of the ocean and portrayed the fishermen who worked it as “industrious”. It was with such images that Homer created a place for watercolour, and himself, in American art.

Spectrum of desire

Jo Livingstone | 4Columns | 21st November 2025

If you think of medieval art as purely religious, you are missing some of the story. Sex and desire was a “multifaceted” concept that frequently appeared in devotional images. Experiences did not divide neatly between spiritual and secular. Gender was a fluid concept. Medieval thinkers thought “Christ was a mother to humanity”. Lust, a no-no if purely carnal, was acceptable if part of devotional practice. Just as in our time, “there is no defence against desire, and desire continually disrupts”.

Get Cartier! How Jean Nouvel turned an old Paris department store into a museum to rival the Louvre

Catherine Slessor | The Guardian | 10th October 2025

Fondation Cartier was established by the luxury brand to collect and exhibit contemporary art. Its experimental, “anything goes” approach is exemplified by its new building, a renovated department store near the Louvre. Notably it has “insanely expensive” moveable floors that create varied exhibition spaces. Says a curator “exhibition-making is at the centre of culture, a succession of ideas … subject to constant change.” Says one writer its “a massive machine for the unexpected.”

Unintended Beauty

Marigold Warner | Lens Culture | 1st November 2025

The German photographer Andreas Gursky pioneered images of industrial buildings and infrastructure. Wiper has emerged as another photographer exploring that industrial aesthetic. His work didn’t emerge from a prior interest in industry or engineering but rather from discovering their “accidental aesthetics. You have this first layer of graphical symmetry … [but] there’s another layer of ‘what’s actually happening here [We are dissociated] from the science and technology underpinning our lives”.

The rise and rise of private foundations in France

Catherine Bennett | Apollo | 13th October 2025

Paris has a history of philanthropy toward art. It is also unusual for its six or so large wealthy private art institutions. Encouraged by tax breaks for cultural activities plus (of course) the potential for brand building, they easily outcompete the public museums for acquisitions and exhibitions. The Louvre, with its crumbling building and parlous security offers a stark contrast. Responds one private foundation, the “richer cultural offering” now available in Paris “is good for artists and visitors alike”.

Finland’s lighthouse

David Platzer | The New Criterion | 30th November 2025

Like many aspiring artists, Halonen went to Paris to absorb its modernist vibe. He picked up the fashions of the 1890’s – Primitivism (studying under Gauguin), post-Impressionism, the Japonisme craze – and took it all back to Oslo. What emerged from his studio, though, was the Finnish landscape in all its variety. His winter scenes drew particular acclaim, showing blue-ish shadow falling on the snow. In a country still under Russian rule, that work helped coalesce a Finnish sense of identity.

18th November 2025

Studio Museum in Harlem Reopens in a Stunning New Home

Maximilliano Duran | ARTnews | 13th November 2025

After a seven-year closure, the Studio Museum in Harlem has re-opened in a “brilliant” new building. It can display three times as many works as previously. More space is allocated to an artist-in-residency program that boasts illustrious alumni. It is a moment of recognition for an institution that, initially “invisible” to the mainstream, has since had “grand influence [and] rewritten the canon” for artists of African descent. Claims its chairman, Studio Museum has helped “the margins … come to the centre”.

Refurbishing modernism

Bennett Tucker | The New Criterion | 12th November 2025

In the early 20th century, new ideas were crowding into furniture design. The arts and crafts movement espoused truthfulness in materials. The Bauhaus embraced industrial materials. Frank’s pioneering home designs emphasised neither luxury nor modernist simplicity, but comfort. Interiors, he said. should be casual with a “warm and eclectic atmosphere”. A dining table setting by a Frank acolyte combines “comfort, luxury and the minimalist ethos of the Bauhaus”. Despite talk of design for the masses, nothing was cheap.

Gifted by Emperor Nicholas II to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna on Easter Day, 1913: the Winter Egg

Jonathan Bastable | Christie’s | 10th November 2025

Is the Winter Egg the greatest of all the eggs made by Fabergé for the Romanov family?  Who is to say, but it is often listed among the favourites. Carved from rock crystal and adorned with over 4000 diamonds, it is a technical tour de force. Its delicate, beautiful exterior hides a surprise – inside is a hanging basket filled with wood anemones. History gives this egg a poignancy – it was made in 1913, the year before war and revolution. It is going to auction next month.

The enduring appeal of Limoges

Camille Okhio | Elle Decor | 20th October 2025

Enamelling started in monasteries in the Middle Ages. Its heyday, though, was in the Renaissance when a technique was developed to paint translucent paste onto a metal surface before firing. This allowed for more precise, free-flowing images. Multiple layers created painterly images in gleaming (unfading) colours on small caskets, plates and rings. Of course, it was frightfully expensive and most work went to royalty, the church or the Rothschilds. A specialist gallery in Paris is the place to go if interested.

Malick Sidibé Was an Architect of Utopia and Purveyor of Nostalgia

Emmanuel Iduma | Art in America | 6th November 2025

Sidibé was in the right place at the right time, opening a photographic studio in Bamako just as Mali became independent. His images brim with the exuberance and pride of new nationhood, not anticipating the nation’s turbulent post-colonial politics. “There is no future to be glimpsed … but there is at least a hint of the uncomplicated past”. Sidibé’s vivid backdrops and sanguine subjects helped establish the visual vocabulary of African portrait photography.

The fallout from Nigeria’s spectacular $25m museum and the Benin Bronzes

Todah Openyemi | bbc.com | 13th November 2025

The saga of restitution of the Benin bronzes is still not over. A major new museum – the Museum of West African Art – now about to open, was expected to house these artifacts but local politics have intervened. Ownership of the bronzes has been passed to a traditional ruler, who says he will open his own museum. Facing a PR disaster, the embattled museum director gasps “we will be about the modern and contemporary [art]”.

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, National Gallery review – an exhibition that illuminates the shadows of the enlightenment age

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 5th November 2025

Wright trained in London but then returned to regional Derby. Despite being technically prodigious, some have regarded him as a “provincial” artist. He followed Caravaggio’s heightened light and shade, using it in his “seminal” images of the British Enlightenment. Two works that show “scientists” demonstrating experiments convey an unease with the power of their knowledge. Supposedly provincial Wright had articulated the age-old fear of “the scientist playing God”.

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