The Easel

21st October 2025

Wayne Thiebaud’s slices of Americana

Michael Prodger | The New Statesman | 15th October 2025

Thiebaud was never taken by “preachy” abstraction. He knew from working as an illustrator that his real love was the still life. That genre has a strong tradition in Europe leading this writer to emphasise that Thiebaud was addressing the classic still life problems – “lighting, colour, structure”.  Cezanne, one of his heroes, had declared that art should “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”. Thiebaud, with his hot dogs, toffee apples and slices of cake, obliged.

Taking a dance through Cecil Beaton’s fashionable world

Amy de la Haye | Showstudio | 16th October 2025

Photographers can achieve fame because of their images or their glamour subjects. Beaton did both as well as becoming a celebrity himself. A “neo-romantic”, he conjured the glamour of English aristos and Hollywood stars, influencing fashion, photography and design – usually through the pages of Vogue. Beaton’s narrow view of fashion makes him somewhat anachronistic today with one writer admitting that “the artificiality of it all [is] wearying”. A piece about the giddy thrill of what goes with what is here.

The Turner prize is the cockroach of art

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 7th October 2025

For some, art is a vehicle for protesting about social ills or proclaiming on identity issues. Not this writer. The target of his ire, not for the first time, is Britain’s bewildering Turner Prize. Like some other writers he wearies of “political” art that it favours. One work, “a mess”, turns out to be the work of an autistic artist. “Who is right, the “critic judging the evidence …or the Turner judges showing compassion? Are we really here to choose the best artist or to be morally improved by … right-on social politics?”

14th October 2025

Peter Doig Turns Serpentine Into A Living Soundscape With ‘House Of Music’

Nargess Banks | Forbes | 10th October 2025

Can you have an exhibition where music gets nearly equal billing to the art? Doig paints to music and in this museum show, he wants it to feature prominently. Some of his paintings are hung in warmly-lit rooms where huge vintage speakers play Doig favourites. These paintings have a mysticism that make them, says one writer, “assuredly musical … ambiguous”. Says another, the music “will change, in the best way possible, how and what you see,”

Nigerian Modernism in London: ‘A bold new language for art’

Alastair Smart | Christie’s | 2nd October 2025

At last, a survey of modernist African art! This particular London show focuses on Nigeria, and it tells a complicated story. Independence created a sense of cultural “emancipation” but, in a country with 250 ethnic groups, the art that has emerged is hugely diverse. One critic thinks some of it is “folksy”, but perhaps that’s part of the story. It is a parochial story and should not, says the curator, be viewed through a “pan-African lens. It ought to be understood on its own terms”.

Inside the V&A’s Marie Antionette Style with curator Dr Sarah Grant

Staff | The Cultivist | 20th September 2025

A show about Marie Antionette’s legacy is probably more culture than art. Joining the French court aged 14, dress was one way for her to project “feminine power”. The few pieces of original fabric that survive, together with reconstructed dresses, signal that this was a life of performance. Muses one writer, what carries most impact is less the eye-popping jewellery than an appreciation of Antoinette’s very human dilemma. She was being set up, and we, “caught up in looking … [are unwittingly] a part of a mob.”

How Hans Ulrich Obrist Became the World’s Most Influential Curator

Emily Steer | AnOther | 3rd October 2025

Obrist has a “terrifying” work ethic, networking, curating shows, appearing at art events, interviewing artists and/or posting to Instagram. Few curators can match his art world influence. His new memoir is busy with forthright views: nothing can replace one-to-one, in-person encounters; he wants to combine disciplines – certainly art and architecture, but also art and science; artists should be given jobs in government; art requires looking and looking and looking; he doesn’t cook.

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