The Easel

Archives: Staff

22nd September 2026

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

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”.

15th September 2026

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

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.”