The Easel

2nd September 2025

Art and Ecstatic Ambience in Las Vegas’s Neon Vortex

Chen and Lampert | Art in America | 27th August 2025

If you want to know what art looks like “outside Tribeca”, try Las Vegas. These writers discovered the art there is “hospitality grade … a collision of art and entertainment”. Gigantic murals are so large “people cannot help but notice”. Their highlight, at the Bellagio, was a “world-class exhibition tucked between a Perrotin gift shop and a craps table. Art here doesn’t just survive—it thrives on spectacle, excess, and sparkle. … [and one day will] have its own wing in the Smithsonian.”

Windows to the Soul

Michael Payne | The Magazine Antiques | 22nd August 2025

Before photography, recording one’s image basically meant portraiture. The well-to-do could afford detailed ceremonial images. In regional USA itinerant artists developed an alternative – vernacular portraiture. It combined an uncomplicated “sentimental and emotional” aesthetic and only needed mid-level art skills. The absence of shadowing or nuanced colour transitions. and scant regard for perspective reveal these were not big city artists. Once photography arrived this unique genre faded away.

These women painters inaugurated a new chapter in human history

Sebastian Smee | Yahoo | 29th August 2025

Male artists have long tackled big themes in philosophy and history. Until the mid-20th century, though, most female artists painted subjects drawn from the domestic domain. The pressures that flowed from this – the “studio” being a kitchen table – give a “freshness” to their art. A small painting of a brown teapot, for example, probably painted after the breakfast things were cleared up, is “gorgeous … quiet works emerging from private rooms [can] be as charged with significance as those depicting war”.

26th August 2025

Beatriz Milhazes’s Labors of Love at the Guggenheim

Shana Nys Dambrot | The Village Voice | 20th July 2025

Milhaze loves colour and the circular form. Add to this her mash-up of Brazilian and European geometric abstraction and the resulting paintings and collages are, says one writer, a “controlled riot of form and colour”. Botanical motifs appear frequently as do textile-like patterning, all represented in the “saturated palette of tropical modernism. This work is beautiful but not contemplative. It’s optically disruptive”.  Milhaze is regarded as Brazil’s most successful contemporary painter.

Re-Envisioning Native American Art at the de Young

Staff | de Young / Legion of Honour Museums | 22nd August 2025

San Francisco’s de Young Museum is tackling a fraught issue – how to display its Indigenous art. Previously such decisions reflected top-down, non-Indigenous views of what was important. Now curatorial decisions involve collaboration and consultation. Greater recognition is being given to geographically different groups. And Indigenous curators are keen to intersperse contemporary works among older pieces. That speaks to their key message – “we are still here … a very living community”.

Picasso: tête-à-tête

Michael Cary | Gagosian Quarterly | 11th April 2025

Phillip Guston was vilified when, in 1970, he changed from abstract expressionism to figuration. Little wonder then that artists usually stick with a single style. Not Picasso though. He thought that sticking to one style simply led to “affectation”. In fact, he celebrated that he had “no style” and even went so far as to deny that his work could be divided into “periods”. “What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists … things always work out.”

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