The Easel

18th August 2026

Derrick Adams: View Master

Lee Ann Norman | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st July 2026

The challenge of a mid-career survey is to sum up an artist’s trajectory while it is still evolving. A case-in-point is Adams, whose colourful paintings of Black people at leisure convey “Black joy”. His figurative works are popular, but what is the enduring idea? One writer suggests it is identifying those banal moments “that make individual lives whole”. Or, says this critic, Adams shows how Black people can exist within a Eurocentric culture yet “create something else entirely”.

An Andrea della Robbia Masterpiece Is on View at The Met for the First Time in 70 Years

Rena Gross | Galerie | 14th August 2026

Andrea della Robbia trained as a goldsmith before developing a method of glazing terracotta sculptures and devotional bas reliefs. Not only was his glazing more durable than a painted surface, but colours like “della Robbia blue” gave sculptures “a lifelike presence and an ethereal force”. Even though their work became popular throughout Europe, the della Robbia’s kept their techniques a secret, so much so that when the family died out several generations later, those secrets died with them. A video (3 min) is here.

11th August 2026

Portrait of a City review — a nostalgic stroll through a century of the American urban experience

Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 3rd August 2026

A “nostalgic” exhibition that surveys a century of American photography. Stieglitz is generally credited with the first modernist photograph in 1907. From there America produced a roll call of great image makers, both men and women. Inevitably, much focus lands on that greatest of all melting pots, New York city. Some famous photographers, being recent immigrants, could empathise with their subjects “energy and appetite for change that is almost tangible”. Says one writer,  “exhilarating”.

Art Auctions

Jackson Arn | The Point | 2nd August 2026

Spectacularly cynical take on a New York auction of “rich-guy art” that bores the writer “catatonic”. Many attendees “had brought their dogs—the better to help them imagine the art hanging in their living rooms, I suppose.” Once the sale starts “nothing can topple the awesome power of English accents.” The writer focuses on “a fully functioning, eighteen-karat gold toilet” by Cattelan. It sells for exactly the value of the metal it contained, nothing more. “It was, for once, an honest sale.”

David Geffen Galleries

Ian Wardropper | The Burlington Magazine | 1st August 2026

A renowned former art gallery director assesses LACMA’s dramatic building. A new building was sorely needed, and its exterior has “undeniable Brutalist power”. High internal natural light levels and raw concrete walls limit what art can be placed where.  “Shockingly”, the building allows barely 1% of the collection to be shown. Is the building just following the current popularity of “mixed-use lifestyle centres”? Pleasure is at the core of a museum experience but “art is [hopefully] not forgotten in the process”.

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