The Easel

23rd September 2025

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories

Joe Lloyd | Studio International | 19th September 2025

Marshall’s study of Italian Renaissance paintings made him want to be a part of that art history tradition -“like Giotto and Géricault”. But where, he thought, were the Black figures? His works are thick with references, both to art history and to popular culture. In that sense they are “living history paintings” featuring the lived Black experience, Black subjects with their own preoccupations, emotions and ambitions. Says one writer, a “staggering, triumphant show”. A discussion of one key work is here.

Radical Harmony at the National Gallery: ‘you can have just too many dots’

Melanie McDonough | Yahoo news | 12th September 2025

Pointillists like Seurat were, it seems, “narrowly doctrinaire” with their ever-so-carefully painted dots and colour choices. But Paris at that time was a hotbed of artistic experimentation, and colour theory didn’t exactly sound exciting. Signac emerged as an apostle of Seurat but his dots were coarser. Sometimes he even used lines! Despite the affinity of dotting with landscapes, this painting movement faded.  Seurat’s La Grand Jatte “was the great painting of the movement, but it still seems like a one-trick pony”.

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