The Easel

15th September 2026

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”.

Alina Szapocznikow: Autobiography in fragments.

Alison Gingeras | Ursula | 31st August 2026

As a teenager Szapocznikow survived a Nazi concentration camp. Her later sculptures never revisited that trauma directly. She was acclaimed for figurative abstractions, casts of legs, arms and breasts presented as if they were found objects. They spoke to the body’s “devastating confrontation” with life while also affirming its “continued capacity to feel and to love”. Her final work, made following a cancer diagnosis, was Szapocznikow‘s statement that “the body remains the ultimate measure of human experience”.

8th September 2026

“Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas” at The Met Cloisters

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 14th August 2026

Up to about 1500CE, European artists imagined mythical creatures that combine features of animals and humans. Such imaginings were an attempt to explain the known world and express spiritual visions. In the Americas, completely independently, hybrid creatures were similarly being imagined that linked the human and the divine. These are beautiful and provocative objects, “a sampler of greater ventures hopefully to come.” Images are here.

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