The Easel

1st April 2026

Raphael at the Met, Review: A Must-See Show the ‘Greatest Influencer’

Alex Greenberger | MSN | 26th April 2026

Critics don’t really review this show, they simply murmur reverences After apprenticing in Urbino and an uneventful stay in Florence, Raphael found fame in Papal Rome. His paintings, alongside drawings, tapestries and architecture, had “remarkable narrative force” and conveyed “an earthbound humanity that was [previously] missing”. Says the curator, he was fully the equal of Leonardo and Michelangelo.. Vasari, writing in 1550, said “nature created [Raphael] as a gift to the world”. Sounds about right.

24th March 2026

Leica hawk

Robin Muir | The World of Interiors | 7th March 2026

Why isn’t Helen Levitt more widely known? Street photography emerged fully in the post war period but Levitt, with her lyrical images of New York neighbourhoods, was an earlier “pathfinder”. Similarly, she turned to colour photography ahead of more famous names like Eggleston. Her preference was for the emotional over the descriptive or the political. Her most famous images remain those of New York neighbourhoods, rather than the glamour of uptown. Said she “I can feel what people feel.”

What Do We Really Think of the New New Museum?

Hrag Vartanian et al | Hyperallergic | 18th March 2026

New York’s New Museum has long been seen as scrappy and risk-taking, the city’s anti-MoMA. With its just-opened extension, is it gentrifying? Some of the opening show gets a bashing, because it is “tethered to Western European Modernist ideas of art”. Curatorial experimentation is largely absent. As one writer observed about an earlier expansion of the institution, “architecture is deterministic. A more corporate [building] envelope means a more corporate approach in general”.

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