The Easel

13th October 2026

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing, Barbican review- painting at its most joyously intelligent

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 10th October 2026

It’s hard to get a feel for Ryman’s singular white paintings because reproductions usually miss their subtleties. Yet the subtleties are there, such as “a glossy, almost perfect white haunted by a memory of green”. Variation in the density and texture of the paint and the framing materials were also Ryman specialties. For one critic, such minute effects are “dry and boring”. Ryman explained that he used white because it helped “make things visible”. Don’t try to analyse, he advised, “the essence of all painting is feeling”.

The bravest modern artist — he dares to paint Jesus

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 5th October 2026

Described as a “brutalist-realist“, Howson’s early work included Glasgow “bovver boys” with bulging neck muscles. That subject matter reflected the social tensions of post-Thatcher Britain. Following a turn toward religion, he now frequently paints “uncool” images of Jesus. The writer admits the exhibition is “tangibly discomforting” with images that make you feel “you are being splattered with Jesus’s sweat”. So, what’s the attraction? “Its strikingly original …boy, can he draw”.

6th October 2026

Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, two potters united by a shared ambition

Glenn Adamson | Financial Times | 16th September 2026

Bernard Leach initially dominated postwar British ceramics with rustic brown pots. Rie, an emigre from Germany, offered a refined, modernist alternative. When Hans Coper turned up on Rie’s doorstep looking for a job, one of ceramics great partnerships was formed. They were in some ways opposites – she used colourful glazes and precise designs while he was “a sculptor at heart” and used a stark, restricted palette. Together, “they wanted to make work that would require no explication, no context.” Images are here.

Magritte: This Is Still Not a Pipe review – brilliance and trash from the surrealist who sent up Freud

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 23rd September 2026

Magritte was no ordinary modernist, nor for that matter, an ordinary surrealist. Uninterested in surrealism’s dream culture (think Dali) he was attracted to the slippery connection between words and images. His deadpan, matter-of-fact style only made his paintings more confounding – most famously his painting of a pipe that declares “this is not a pipe”. Sometimes, to annoy people, he would “paint like a clumsy moron. Magritte was too intelligent to respect anything, least of all art.”

The Bayeux Tapestry

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 28th September 2026

Another take on the Bayeaux Tapestry and the surprises it offers modern (English) eyes. So often reproduced in school history books it reveals itself, when seen in the flesh, to be an artwork, “a monster of outrageous medieval inventiveness”. It is also unexpectedly modern. Needle and thread when used skilfully, yields surprising characterisations – “of happiness to subservience to anger. Nowhere do we see standardisation or lazy repetition. [An artwork] that feels as if it has finally and belatedly come home.”

No, Renoir isn’t kitsch nonsense. See the National Gallery’s five-star smash

Alastair Sooke | AOL | 30th September 2026

Renoir has acquired a few haters, based on syrupy late career works and his porn-y nudes. This reviewer pushes back. His earlier work – his “glory years” – richly described working-class Montmartre and pushed the boundaries of depicting transient light. Impressively, some of his most joyous renditions of life’s fleeting pleasures were completed after being drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Says one critic, Renoir was “an artistic innovator and painter of the first rank”.

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