The Easel

16th September 2025

How a tiny stone from a warrior’s tomb is shaking up ancient Greek art at Getty Villa

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 10th September 2025

Ancient art history. Roman sculpture had its foundations in the Classical Greek (480 BCE onward) and Hellenistic (331 BCE onward) eras. That aesthetic focused on the ideal male form, harmonious proportions and expressive movement. A recent excavation in Greece has yielded a stone carving of a naturalistic male coming from the much older Bronze Age cultures of Minoa or Mycenae. Whatever the carving’s origins “long-settled art history has gotten a jolt”. A backgrounder is here.

Man Ray and the dreams of objects

Staff | Kolapse | 7th September 2025

Man Ray was always chasing the next new idea. In 1921 he placed objects on or near light sensitive paper and then exposed them to light. Voila, the rayogram was created! It led to a decade of experimentation and a dalliance with the surrealists who loved anything that resembled dream imagery. Perhaps the reason the linked piece has such a ‘try hard’ tone is that, with hindsight, the rayogram has proven to be more whimsical historical footnote than enduring idea.

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”?

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