The Easel

25th November 2025

When Homer Went to Gloucester

Matthew Whiman | MFA Boston | 3rd November 2025

Homer was slow to pick up watercolour. By mid-career, though, he became the pre-eminent American artist of this luminous but tricky medium. This was a time when the great outdoors lost its religious connotations. That suited Homer’s observational style and led to what became his late, great subject – the sea. He painted the drama of the ocean and portrayed the fishermen who worked it as “industrious”. It was with such images that Homer created a place for watercolour, and himself, in American art.

Spectrum of desire

Jo Livingstone | 4Columns | 21st November 2025

If you think of medieval art as purely religious, you are missing some of the story. Sex and desire was a “multifaceted” concept that frequently appeared in devotional images. Experiences did not divide neatly between spiritual and secular. Gender was a fluid concept. Medieval thinkers thought “Christ was a mother to humanity”. Lust, a no-no if purely carnal, was acceptable if part of devotional practice. Just as in our time, “there is no defence against desire, and desire continually disrupts”.

18th November 2025

Studio Museum in Harlem Reopens in a Stunning New Home

Maximilliano Duran | ARTnews | 13th November 2025

After a seven-year closure, the Studio Museum in Harlem has re-opened in a “brilliant” new building. It can display three times as many works as previously. More space is allocated to an artist-in-residency program that boasts illustrious alumni. It is a moment of recognition for an institution that, initially “invisible” to the mainstream, has since had “grand influence [and] rewritten the canon” for artists of African descent. Claims its chairman, Studio Museum has helped “the margins … come to the centre”.

Malick Sidibé Was an Architect of Utopia and Purveyor of Nostalgia

Emmanuel Iduma | Art in America | 6th November 2025

Sidibé was in the right place at the right time, opening a photographic studio in Bamako just as Mali became independent. His images brim with the exuberance and pride of new nationhood, not anticipating the nation’s turbulent post-colonial politics. “There is no future to be glimpsed … but there is at least a hint of the uncomplicated past”. Sidibé’s vivid backdrops and sanguine subjects helped establish the visual vocabulary of African portrait photography.

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