Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...through the calendar, museums in the U.S. and abroad will be mounting shows that will attempt to map the many lines drawn by what Talbot boasted was "the pencil of nature." The first, and one of the most ambitious, is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston until April 30 (stops in Canberra, Australia, and London follow). Curated chiefly by the collector Daniel Wolfe, "The Art of Photography: 1839-1989" is a thorough but not a definitive history -- one version of the story, splendidly but narrowly focused upon questions of style through the work of just 85 major figures...
...19th century, the modern world was taking shape, in some respects the shape that photography gave it. The new art form fostered the trend by which the antique notion of fame was supplanted by the more salable idea of celebrity. And in the great age of imperial expansion, the camera was just the tool to bring home views of the exotic places that had been gathered in by the Western powers...
...1840s, the world's first portrait studios had sprung up in New York City and Philadelphia, churning out likenesses of glassy-eyed sitters who looked as though they had been whacked with a board. But it was in England and France that photography took on the character of an art in the work of men like the Parisian caricaturist Nadar, who brought a warm-blooded gravity to camera portraiture...
...device remained for decades an exotic box, a contraption mostly for adventurers and the wealthy. That changed after 1888, the year George Eastman introduced the inexpensive Kodak. Amateur photography became the new folk art, and fine-art practitioners had to scramble for a way to distinguish themselves from the mobs of snapshooters. Their response was pictorialism, an international style of soft focus, poetic yearnings and darkroom tricks that were beyond the abilities of the untrained. During the pictorialist phase of their careers, Alvin Langdon Coburn in England and Edward Steichen in the U.S. turned away from mere realism toward...
...challenge fittingly complex for a state-of-the-art public official who, at 45, is working for his fifth President and has served in six Cabinet departments. Darman has been a policy adviser, a crisis manager, an editor of Bush and Reagan speeches, a campaign strategist and, above all, a negotiator of intricate deals. The one he found "most exciting," he says, occurred when, as a young Justice Department official, he helped broker Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. And the most significant? He names the 1986 economic-summit communique, improving policy coordination among the industrial democracies. Years hence...