Famous artist couples: What happens when one is better known than the other?

Acclaimed photographer Joel Meyerowitz and artist Maggie Barrett have been in a creatively rich relationship for 30 years. But it hasn’t been without complications, as captured in a new documentary.

Artists’ private lives have long informed the curiosity of others, their romantic partnerships even more so, with numerous books, exhibitions, and online listicles addressing this particular facet of culture. “They’re like rock stars of the heart,” said the filmmaker Jacob Perlmutter, on a video call. “There’s such a romantic quality to artistic couples, and as human beings we’re attracted to that — look at all the plays and novels we absorb!” “Artists are eccentric, they put their emotions onto canvas for a living,” Perlmutter continued, though caveated that “any couple sharing the same profession is interesting.” Leaning into this fascination is a new documentary on Joel Meyerowitz and Maggie Barrett — he, the internationally renowned American street photographer, then aged 84, and she, 75, an English artist and self-published author — which released in the US in late 2024 and in the UK on March 21. On Christmas Eve in 2021, Perlmutter and his now-wife, the photographer Manon Ouimet, moved into the Tuscany home of Meyerowitz and Barrett. The two couples would share this space (as well as homes in New York and Cornwall) for a year, as Perlmutter and Ouimet sought to construct a film that answered the question, “what would it be like, for one artist couple to make a film about another artist couple?” The intrigue around artist couples spans generations. A 1933 article about Frida Kahlo, which resurfaced a few years ago, was met with a collective eye roll: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art” ran the headline from The Detroit News, referencing a gulf between Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera. Fans were similarly animated in 2010 when Marina Abramović’s former partner and collaborator, Ulay, turned up in New York for “The Artist is Present”, her endurance-based performance at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 20 years after they had last saw each other. Perlmutter, already a fan of Meyerowitz’s work, found himself similarly enamoured when he met the couple together in London, by chance, a few weeks after spotting Meyerowitz in a hardware store. “They had a magnetizing aura about them, they seemed to radiate,” Perlmutter recalled. “During the pandemic, I came across Maggie’s blog: if the Internet is a digital street, I stumbled across her as I once had Joel.”