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?”

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