The Easel

22nd September 2026

No One Is Accountable in Taryn Simon’s Detective Story

Aruna D’Souza | Hyperallergic | 18th September 2026

Starting out as a photographer Simon has since evolved into a documentarian-artist. A major new show displays a single 10-year work focused on the career experiences of an anonymous FBI agent. Using both images and text, it highlights the social systems that impact our lives. What do we take away from an exhibition that’s a bit like a book? “There are some really good anecdotes [as well as] a sense of helplessness … [while we] retrospectively wonder at all the horrors we’ve lived through.”

The Largest Carpet Ever Woven: An Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the Project Commissioned by Louis XIV

Staff | Finestre sull' Arte | 13th September 2026

In 1668 and living in the Louvre Palace, Louis XIV wanted further personal glorification. This resulted in an unprecedented commission of 92 carpet panels to decorate a 440m hallway. These Savonnerie carpets took 20 years to manufacture, were never displayed as intended and many were sold off during the French Revolution. A video  taken when 32 were recently hung in Paris shows their astonishing scale and detail. Four are briefly on display in New York. Gasps one writer, “Baroque masterpieces”.

On Lisette Model

Adam Shatz | London Review of Books | 24th September 2026

Failing to make it as a professional musician, Austrian-born, Model left Europe for pre-war New York. There, she established herself as a street photographer. After her death, a large archive of images of jazz musicians and jazz clubs was discovered. Her “plainspoken” images, now seen as central to her output, capture a society rife with segregation and anti-communist fever. Said Model, “I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America”.

15th September 2026

Ileana Sonnabend: a taste for the unexpected, a life in contemporary art

Candace Wetmore | Christies.com | 14th September 2026

Sonnabend was one of a tiny group of art dealers who can be said to have influenced the direction of art. After dabbling in art in post-war New York, she opened a gallery in Paris in 1961, introducing contemporary American art to Europe. Moving back to New York in 1971 she introduced an astonishing, “daring” rollcall of major artists. Such was her judgement that Rauschenberg said, “I never finished a painting without wondering what Ileana would think of it.’ Said Sonnabend “I only want what I don’t like”.

What’s Going on With the Met’s Odd New Giacometti Show?

Ben Davis | Artnet | 15th June 2026

Giacometti was interested in simplified sculptural forms and liked the Egyptian sculptures he saw in Europe’s museums. He was also inspired, perhaps even more so – by the elongated figures in some tribal African carvings. A show that exhibits his gaunt, spectral figures around an ancient Egyptian temple thus connects loosely with his back story. But so what?  Curators are having fun mixing old and new objects but where is the narrative? “It is kind of a half-show, with a half-premise”.

Older links