The Easel

30th September 2025

‘The Art of Manga’ Brings New Worlds to the de Young Museum

Janea Melido | KQED | 25th September 2025

Manga, once a uniquely Japanese black and white graphics product, is now global. The most famous manga is One Piece. Having appeared weekly for 28 years it is now a “cultural juggernaut”. Loosely, it’s a pirate adventure story that focuses not on raiding parties but on adventure and freedom. Other manga address crime, sports, history, sexuality, friendship, science fiction, martial arts and more. Says a curator “there is a manga for everybody” A review of a Netflix adaptation is here.

‘Sixties Surreal’ Curator Dan Nadel Is Expanding American Art History, One Outlier at a Time

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 22nd September 2025

The textbook story of post war art seems neat and tidy – abstraction, Pop, Minimalism and so on. Yet plenty of art didn’t fit this “New York centric” discourse.  Viewing such work from the 1960’s, one writer detects a common thread – psychosexual imagery. A curator suggests differently – these artists simply didn’t fit the “formalist” conversation of that time. Old academic views have “started to crumble” but the aim is not to establish another canon, just “a different set of players and ideas”.

The Lucas Museum and the Question of Narrative Art

Leo Braudy | Los Angeles Review of Books | 17th September 2025

Important, maybe. Geoge Lucas is using his Star Wars fortune to build a Museum of Narrative Art. Narrative art is visual storytelling where the representation of physical movement conveys “elapsed time.” The Chauvet cave paintings, for example, imply the pursuit of animals. Bas-relief carvings show Egyptian pharaohs sallying forth in their chariots. And the Bayeux Tapestry justifies William the Conqueror’s invasion of England. The take-out seems to be that movies are narrative art par excellence.

Enthusiastic about Pictures

Elizabeth Goldring | London Review of Books | 25th September 2025

Following its $330m renovation, the history-oriented back story to New York’s Frick Collection. To turn his family home into a public museum, Frick followed the example of London’s Wallace Collection. Having discovered the Old Masters, he bought so rapidly that dealers allowed him to trade-in superseded acquisitions. Renovation has allowed the Collection to display more of its decorative arts objects. Frick most liked buying paintings though, saying “you can draw your dividend daily”.

23rd September 2025

‘Little Beasts’ at the National Gallery

Stuart Vyse | Skeptical Inquirer | 7th July 2025

In the 1500’s, Netherlanders regarded insects as vermin. Once they acquired an empire though, that changed. Artists and the learned classes were wonderstruck at the unknown insects and wildlife being brought in from the colonies. Both male and female artists created work, the best of which was “delightfully intricate and realistic”, seeding the idea of empirical observation. By around 1600, scientific enquiry was seen as separate from philosophy, and natural history was an established discipline. Images are here.

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