The Easel

11th November 2025

Facing the truth about apartheid

Sean O’Hagan | The Observer | 24th October 2025

Edelstein was a press photographer in apartheid-era South Africa, left for Britain, and then returned during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Her portraits of victims and perpetrators of apartheid have become renowned. One, featuring a boy’s murderer with the boy’s mother, “hums with a sense of uncomfortable uncertainty”. Are we seeing “performative contrition”? Was amnesty offered too broadly? The Commission revealed “what happened”, but its overall success remains “questionable”.

4th November 2025

L.S. Lowry’s ‘Coming Out of School’: Painting His Own Gray World

Willard Spiegelman | msn.com | 2nd November 2025

For a long time, Lowry was considered “just” a local painter. His focus was not on some major international art movement but on England’s industrial north. “Coming Out of School” (1927) is one such work, an imagined after-school scene in a grey town with “a sky full of clouds, or smoke from the industrial factory”. It’s a very local scene. One writer links his admiration to the genuine interest Lowry showed in what people do. “I have no idea why that should be so moving.”

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