The Easel

25th June 2024

Joel Meyerowitz: A year of consecration

Jonas Cuénin | Blind | 24th May 2024

Meyerowitz seems to have gone against the tide in his career. He grew up as a “street kid” and still loves the chaos and spontaneity of street life. Yet, he says, “reportage” photography has never been an art world favourite. Further, he wanted to shoot in colour when the fine art market preferred black and white. Of course, there is the ever-present dilemma, “do I represent the world in the right way? Photographs may look like just pictures, but they’re really about your ideas.” A backgrounder and images are here.

Matisse and the Sea

Phyllis Tuchman | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st June 2024

Matisse grew up in France’s industrial north. On first seeing the Mediterranean, its colour shocked him – “blue, blue, blue, so blue that you want to eat it”. A “radiant” show suggests that the sea played a “paramount role” in his subsequent career. Both his hotel interiors in Nice, and his later cutouts, speak to the intensity of his reaction to blue and blue water. Matisse had realised, says one critic, that colour needn’t match appearances but instead could convey emotion. “Colour intensity became the new aim.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s MoMA Show Does Too Much

Madeline Leung Coleman | Vulture | 14th May 2024

Frazier grew up in an industrial town and her most acclaimed photography records family and friends amidst economic decline. That background gives her work an empathetic and collaborative feel, blurring the line between artist and subject. Frazier calls her groups of images “workers monuments” and says that she wants to “stand in the gap between working-class and creative-class people.” Says the critic “I was knocked sideways by the tenderness of the images, by their toughness.”

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