The Easel

25th March 2025

Edvard Munch Portraits review – smug, creepy and weird, but where’s the drama?

Adrian Searle | The Guardian | 12th March 2025

Think Munch, think Nordic angst? Pretty much, judging by a show of his portraits in London. Munch painted his wide circle of friends – artists, musicians, the well-to-do. They are an odd lot, “the smug, the arrogant, the faintly creepy”, captured with psychological acuity, sometimes in hallucinatory colour.  Some complain about the weak selection of works in this show. Why not include, asks one, the “wild portrait of the mistress who shot him”. Some people, it seems, can’t get enough angst.

11th March 2025

A philanthropist’s art collection that shows how Goya anticipated Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne

Mark Hudson | The Independant | 13th February 2025

Stellar collections of art have long drawn big crowds when they tour, especially if full of Impressionist paintings. The latest, a Swiss collection, has its share of star paintings yet the reviews are just a little ho-hum. Maybe that’s local one-upmanship (London’s Courtauld is bigger and better). More likely, Impressionism is simply over-exposed.  A Goya work, on its own, is “drop dead brilliant”. Yet, while the above writer is positive, another grouches that it is “a drearily grand exhibition”.

Nothing Lasts Forever: a long overdue retrospective on working-class Britain arrives in London

Diane Smyth | British Journal of Photography | 5th March 2025

Images of urban decay are sometimes called ‘ruin porn” and often feature grim images of poverty or class neglect. Not so from Mitchell who photographed northern England – particularly Leeds – in the 1970’s and later. His images show “utopian” social housing projects that end in failure (“dying buildings”) but also document those cities’ cohesive communities and the dignity of their residents. Mitchell is something of a “cult figure”, a “chaser of a disappearing world” with images that “exude warmth and empathy”.

Drawing is still flourishing. This exhibition proves it

Robert Chandler | Prospect | 5th March 2025

Not exactly a review and not exactly a personal narrative, this mostly is a declaration of faith in drawing. The “fundamental” art of drawing still flourishes, even though few institutions still teach it in depth. David Hockney points to its enduring appeal thus: “it helps you put your thoughts in order”. For other artists drawing is an aide during the ”hazardous way of getting to the depth of a memory”. And, in some cases, drawing is “the obstinate work of love without which [many] drawings might never be begun”.

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