The Easel

22nd September 2026

No One Is Accountable in Taryn Simon’s Detective Story

Aruna D’Souza | Hyperallergic | 18th September 2026

Starting out as a photographer Simon has since evolved into a documentarian-artist. A major new show displays a single 10-year work focused on the career experiences of an anonymous FBI agent. Using both images and text, it highlights the social systems that impact our lives. What do we take away from an exhibition that’s a bit like a book? “There are some really good anecdotes [as well as] a sense of helplessness … [while we] retrospectively wonder at all the horrors we’ve lived through.”

The cosmic paradox of Anish Kapoor

David McAllister | Prospect | 12th September 2026

After Kapoor’s high-profile summer show, this piece tries to get inside his “impersonal” sculptures. He insists they have nothing to do with his Indian/British identity nor the materials he uses. Instead, his work aims to establish “that strange in-betweenness, between nothingness and eternal possibility” The fundamental question, he says, is whether the object ‘holds any poetic value”. Is that quality planned or accidental? Says Kapoor, “of course, it’s a bit of both”.

The Largest Carpet Ever Woven: An Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the Project Commissioned by Louis XIV

Staff | Finestre sull' Arte | 13th September 2026

In 1668 and living in the Louvre Palace, Louis XIV wanted further personal glorification. This resulted in an unprecedented commission of 92 carpet panels to decorate a 440m hallway. These Savonnerie carpets took 20 years to manufacture, were never displayed as intended and many were sold off during the French Revolution. A video  taken when 32 were recently hung in Paris shows their astonishing scale and detail. Four are briefly on display in New York. Gasps one writer, “Baroque masterpieces”.

Art Institute unveils ode to ‘relentless experimenter’ Mary Cassatt

Courtney Kueppers | Chicago Sun-Times | 8th September 2026

Cassatt was a Paris resident when her friend Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionist group. She agreed and was a regular presence in their later shows. Her paintings had a characteristic focus – contemporary women and their daily lives. Caregiving was, in her hands, treated as a serious subject and domestic scenes were underpinned by a “steely rigour of design”. Says one critic, “the outstanding woman painter of the 19th century”. Discussion of a lost Cassatt mural is here.

On Lisette Model

Adam Shatz | London Review of Books | 24th September 2026

Failing to make it as a professional musician, Austrian-born, Model left Europe for pre-war New York. There, she established herself as a street photographer. After her death, a large archive of images of jazz musicians and jazz clubs was discovered. Her “plainspoken” images, now seen as central to her output, capture a society rife with segregation and anti-communist fever. Said Model, “I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America”.

The Antiquarium at Villa Albani Torlonia doubles its capacity with the addition of a newly renovated exhibition space

Nica Fiori | AboutArtOnline | 20th September 2026

No superlatives are too grand to describe the Torlonia Collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. A long dispute between the Italian state and one of Rome’s grand families over control of the collection resulted in it being opened to the public. This is happening – slowly – with newly restored works focused on polychrome and gorgeous coloured marbles. Imperial quarries yielded purple-ish porphyry and green breccia, luxurious materials that helped make ancient Rome “very colourful”.

The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design

Anna McNay | Studio International | 18th August 2026

Marx’s house was full of kitschy, “enjoyably silly” items, not what one might expect of such a widely influential designer. Training as a pattern designer, she was exposed to the abstract pattern making of various Indigenous cultures. With WW2 creating opportunities for women, Marx designed the seat fabric used on the London Underground, among many projects. More widely acclaimed at the time than now, she moved past the “waning Arts and Crafts ideas” to establish “a distinctively British Modernism’”.

15th September 2026

Maurizio Cattelan’s NIGHT: A Brilliant Reordering of Power, Memory and the Museum

Staff | ArtCollectorNews | 11th September 2026

Cattelan’s reputation as a “comic existentialist” was secured when he taped a banana to a gallery wall and it sold for $6m.Hiis work is full of punchline but also “instability of meaning”. A solid gold toilet, for example, is both absurd and a satire of excessive wealth. The Pope being felled by a meteorite illustrates the “precariousness of power.” Cattelan’s works are “not simply provocations … seriousness and irreverence are never opposites.”

Dearly Departed Dolly

Christian Viveros-Faune and Blake Gopnik | Strictly Critical | 11th September 2026

Parton asked Warhol to paint her portrait so she could gift it to a friend. The work didn’t please. It was similar to other Warhol portraits, that presented subjects as “impossibly perfect”. From Warhol’s perspective, these were portraits of celebrities as “shallow surfaces and absent souls”. Beneath her “eager to please” public persona, Parton was a smart and insightful songwriter. Warhol’s portrait misses that about her and about her best songs. His portrait “doesn’t match the darkness that lurks beneath.”

Ileana Sonnabend: a taste for the unexpected, a life in contemporary art

Candace Wetmore | Christies.com | 14th September 2026

Sonnabend was one of a tiny group of art dealers who can be said to have influenced the direction of art. After dabbling in art in post-war New York, she opened a gallery in Paris in 1961, introducing contemporary American art to Europe. Moving back to New York in 1971 she introduced an astonishing, “daring” rollcall of major artists. Such was her judgement that Rauschenberg said, “I never finished a painting without wondering what Ileana would think of it.’ Said Sonnabend “I only want what I don’t like”.

The Art World Needs Better Fights

Travis Diehl | Spike | 2nd September 2026

Is there an analogy between the art world and professional wrestling? The professional wrestling world is rich with good guys (“faces”) versus bad guys (“heels”) and other such narratives. Current politics also has a WWE vibe, so what about art? Not all artists are sincere – think those that specialise in “platitudes and evasions” – but rarely do we hear denunciations and trash talk. The art world needs to agree that “art itself matters enough to fight about.”

What’s Going on With the Met’s Odd New Giacometti Show?

Ben Davis | Artnet | 15th June 2026

Giacometti was interested in simplified sculptural forms and liked the Egyptian sculptures he saw in Europe’s museums. He was also inspired, perhaps even more so – by the elongated figures in some tribal African carvings. A show that exhibits his gaunt, spectral figures around an ancient Egyptian temple thus connects loosely with his back story. But so what?  Curators are having fun mixing old and new objects but where is the narrative? “It is kind of a half-show, with a half-premise”.

Alina Szapocznikow: Autobiography in fragments.

Alison Gingeras | Ursula | 31st August 2026

As a teenager Szapocznikow survived a Nazi concentration camp. Her later sculptures never revisited that trauma directly. She was acclaimed for figurative abstractions, casts of legs, arms and breasts presented as if they were found objects. They spoke to the body’s “devastating confrontation” with life while also affirming its “continued capacity to feel and to love”. Her final work, made following a cancer diagnosis, was Szapocznikow‘s statement that “the body remains the ultimate measure of human experience”.

Another Life on Paper: “Here Lyeth: Grave Rubbings by Ann Parker and Avon Neal”

Leslie Thompson | Glasstire | 8th September 2026

The Puritan communities of colonial New England were often austere. Nowhere was that clearer than in their graveyards. Death was commonplace and not sentimentalised. Gravestone carvings were varied, some restricted just to symbols that could be managed by local craftsmen. These carvings are a record of culture – of caring, of racism intertwined with acts of remembrance, of inevitable death. Many headstone carvings now exist only as wax rubbings on paper, a fragmented memory of what once was.

Older links