The Easel

8th July 2025

Turning Style into Power

Richard Thompson Ford | The Yale Review | 20th May 2025

In the late 1700’s, men’s fashion shifted to a more restrained look. London’s much admired Beau Brummell exemplified a new idea – the dandy, someone who cut a striking figure.  Black men saw being a dandy as a way to assert their individuality and sensuality. Further, elegant attire was “a quiet but confident assertion of self-respect”. Musicians like Miles Davis created a “hip, tailored style” that was widely adopted. A distinctive Black sartorial aesthetic had successfully “subverted … the racial hierarchy”.

What Does It Feel Like to Be Called an Emerging Artist at 72? Ask Takako Yamaguchi

Ella Martin-Gachot | Cultured | 26th June 2025

Suddenly, 70-ish Yamaguchi is hot, both in the auction room and with a first solo show in LA. She isn’t sure why recognition has arrived now, after decades of work. Perhaps it has been delayed by her “nonchalant” changes in style, borrowing from “the trash-heap of discarded ideals”. Her current interest is semi-abstract seascapes inspired by artists like Georgia O’Keefe. Before that, it was an acclaimed series of photo-realist shirts. “My work is not in the present … it’s either the past or the future”. An interview with the artist is here.

Artist Ben Shahn’s Nonconformity

Frances Brent | Moment | 2nd June 2025

Contemporaries of Shahn called him “overpowering”, a comment that owed much to his passionate support for leftist causes. For him, art was a means to focus attention on social and political issues. Working from photographs, he painted modern-ish figurative works that captured the troubles of the Depression and the hopes of the New Deal. That was Shahn’s career highpoint, after which it declined as the post-war world fell for abstraction. Says one critic, a “revelatory survey”.

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