The Easel

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”.

4th August 2026

Betye Saar, influential assemblage artist who ‘liberated’ Aunt Jemima, dies at 99

Carolina Miranda | LA Times | 27th July 2026

Saar leapt into fine art on seeing an exhibition of assemblages by Joseph Cornell. Soon enough she was scouring garage sales for objects with “a certain energy” that she could use in her shoe box sized assemblages. Often, they addressed political themes, most famously those where she included (and ridiculed) Black mammy figures that represented “Black female servitude”. Said she,” I like to think I recycled those images from negative to positive”. Images of some key works are here.

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