The Easel

22nd September 2026

No One Is Accountable in Taryn Simon’s Detective Story

Aruna D’Souza | Hyperallergic | 18th September 2026

Starting out as a photographer Simon has since evolved into a documentarian-artist. A major new show displays a single 10-year work focused on the career experiences of an anonymous FBI agent. Using both images and text, it highlights the social systems that impact our lives. What do we take away from an exhibition that’s a bit like a book? “There are some really good anecdotes [as well as] a sense of helplessness … [while we] retrospectively wonder at all the horrors we’ve lived through.”

The Largest Carpet Ever Woven: An Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the Project Commissioned by Louis XIV

Staff | Finestre sull' Arte | 13th September 2026

In 1668 and living in the Louvre Palace, Louis XIV wanted further personal glorification. This resulted in an unprecedented commission of 92 carpet panels to decorate a 440m hallway. These Savonnerie carpets took 20 years to manufacture, were never displayed as intended and many were sold off during the French Revolution. A video  taken when 32 were recently hung in Paris shows their astonishing scale and detail. Four are briefly on display in New York. Gasps one writer, “Baroque masterpieces”.

On Lisette Model

Adam Shatz | London Review of Books | 24th September 2026

Failing to make it as a professional musician, Austrian-born, Model left Europe for pre-war New York. There, she established herself as a street photographer. After her death, a large archive of images of jazz musicians and jazz clubs was discovered. Her “plainspoken” images, now seen as central to her output, capture a society rife with segregation and anti-communist fever. Said Model, “I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America”.

15th September 2026

What’s Going on With the Met’s Odd New Giacometti Show?

Ben Davis | Artnet | 15th June 2026

Giacometti was interested in simplified sculptural forms and liked the Egyptian sculptures he saw in Europe’s museums. He was also inspired, perhaps even more so – by the elongated figures in some tribal African carvings. A show that exhibits his gaunt, spectral figures around an ancient Egyptian temple thus connects loosely with his back story. But so what?  Curators are having fun mixing old and new objects but where is the narrative? “It is kind of a half-show, with a half-premise”.

Another Life on Paper: “Here Lyeth: Grave Rubbings by Ann Parker and Avon Neal”

Leslie Thompson | Glasstire | 8th September 2026

The Puritan communities of colonial New England were often austere. Nowhere was that clearer than in their graveyards. Death was commonplace and not sentimentalised. Gravestone carvings were varied, some restricted just to symbols that could be managed by local craftsmen. These carvings are a record of culture – of caring, of racism intertwined with acts of remembrance, of inevitable death. Many headstone carvings now exist only as wax rubbings on paper, a fragmented memory of what once was.

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