The Easel

19th August 2025

The Kinetic Force of Art-World Couple Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely Comes to Life in Somerset

Anna Cafolla | Vogue | 6th June 2025

The artistic imagination is usually so singular as to preclude collaboration. Saint Phalle and Tinguely were exceptions. Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures, wonky contraptions made from junk materials, differed profoundly from Saint Phalle’s paintings and jaunty figurative sculptures. Yet, things like colour choices or mechanical motifs showed that they traded ideas. Said Saint Phalle of their decades-long collaboration, “we couldn’t sit down together without creating something new”.  A review of Tinguely’s work is here.

12th August 2025

Brian Clarke, stained glass artist, 1953-2025

Tanya Harrod | ft.com | 12th July 2025

Clark fell in love with stained glass while still at primary school. Later, having absorbed London’s “punk” aesthetic, he produced secular glasswork using vivid blocks of colour on a large scale. Technically innovative in his use of sheet glass, he worked with many “starchitects” on shopping centers, airports, office buildings and religious buildings. He has never been given a public gallery show and “there is no obvious heir to his ambitious genius”. Another obit is here.

Jean-François Millet and the drudgery of rural life

Michael Prodger | The New Statesman | 6th August 2025

In mid-eighteen hundreds France, people were leaving farm life to take their chances in the cities. Millet, a country boy, knew the realities of peasant life and made it the subject of his work. Wanting to be modern, a realist, he avoided romanticising rural life but did want to show the “dignity of toil”. Says one writer, his art is not naïve but rather “sophisticated, carefully staged naturalism”. One admirer was a young van Gogh who regarded Millett as “the essential modern painter”.

Our greatest football photographer’s secret? Ignore the game

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 4th August 2025

Believe it or not but located in the glamorous Tottenham stadium in London is an art gallery. Proving that art and soccer are logical bedfellows Oof gallery is staging a retrospective of the sports photographer Peter Robinson. On-pitch drama didn’t interest him. The fans, in his view, displayed the humanity of the game most vividly. Rather spoiling the art-sport theme, another artist exhibiting alongside Robinson has embroidered football shirts. Says the writer, “messy, not Messi.”

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