The Easel

13th October 2026

Four Art Critics Walk Into a Bar… and Debate the Met’s Pollock-Krasner Retrospective

Julia Bryan-Wilson Jarrett Earnest Johanna Fateman David Rimanelli | Cultured | 7th October 2026

Fascinating. The many agendas surrounding these artists – marriage, relative abilities, self-sacrifice – give this show sizzle. Krasner’s work stalled in the 1940’s so she focused on promoting Pollock. His works in that period dominate. After the early 1950’s, he hit a dry patch. Following his death, Krasner’s works show a “magnificent grace”, and she emerges from this show much enhanced. One critic observes “without Krasner, we don’t have Pollock. [And yet] the one thing they do together [a collage] is terrible”

6th October 2026

Cloud Spotting with John Constable and Alfred Stieglitz

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 25th September 2026

In 1821 Constable did something unusual – he made studies of the sunset, with the land below treated as a secondary feature. He made many such “skying” works and thought the sky in a landscape painting was “the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment”.  Photography promised an ability to capture the sky with even greater immediacy, but the technology took a long time to meet that challenge. Only with Stieglitz’s cloud studies in the 1920’s did photography start to capture “the ethereal realm above our heads”.

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