The Easel

9th September 2025

Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings

Nolan Kelly | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st September 2025

Yuskavage knows that her impolitic paintings give her a “bad girl” image. She trained in the “highbrow” European figurative tradition but married that with a “lowbrow” vulgar sexuality from popular culture. That contains a tension that attracts much attention, creepy figures depicted with great technical proficiency. She references how women have been portrayed in western art, but the final product still leaves viewers uneasy – is this “the straight-A student [or] the back-of-class troublemaker”?

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”.

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