A career recapitulation, of sorts. Early on, Semmel decided to paint “images that were erotic for women … reimagining the nude without objectifying the person”. For decades she has done just that, mostly painting herself, undaunted by the visible impact of ageing. She is a “rapturous colourist”, adept at showing “the carnal nature of paint. She is the anti-muse.”
Is Arbus’s photography sympathetic or voyeuristic? Her friends thought her “hugely empathetic”, an impression also conveyed by a show of her early work. Sentimental, though, she was not. Just like her celebrated later work, her early images support the view that Arbus is among the greatest of twentieth century photographers, “prescient [for her] acceptance of difference.”
Warhol’s art. He thought “the true substance of photography is the shadow cast by and on its subject. This was the essence of his major innovation, which still reverberates today: the reciprocity between painting and printing. The sheer graphic power of the silkscreen image … confers on any subject a drama of light and shadow, an urgent aesthetic bounty grounded in the photographic now.”
Brassaï and Stettner both cut their artistic teeth on street photography but from there they diverged. Brassaï avoided improvisation where he could, sometimes giving his images a “frozen” quality. Stettner, whom Brassaï mentored, was all spontaneity. His sympathetic images of New York commuters combine “theatrical composition and voyeuristic opportunism”.