Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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FAMED Viennese Painter Oskar Kokoschka has long boasted that his portraits captured the secret life of his subjects. Onetime Big Time Dancer Adele Astaire, who had never seen the original, last week viewed a color reproduction of her Kokoschka portrait (see color page) for the first time since it was painted in 1926, let out a cry of anguish, posed for a photographic version, finally calmed down enough to remark, "Well, it's better to be remembered as hideous and funny than not to be noticed at all." See ART, Psychological Portraitist...
...Opener Approach. No one viewing Kokoschka's work is likely to accuse him of over-idealization (see color pages); he himself refers to his subjects, most of them close friends, as "my victims." Explains Kokoschka: "My first aim is to find a streak in the personality of the subject, something that the photographer will not be able to reproduce. I have to break through the secret law and pattern of each person, as if I were using a can opener. Then I start painting with my eyes, my heart, my nerves, my antennae...
...affair begins with a canvas by E. L. Kirchner which has long been a source of particular exasperation to me. Why Kirchner puts a cat in front of a mirror which conflicts with it and behind a figure which jumps behind it in terms of color, is a complete mystery. Once a painting functions as an entity, poetic licence is justified. But until it does the word is meaningless. This painting does not. If the term "expressionism" means something more than emotionalism, then there is more expression in a plum by Chardin. There is more expression, for that matter...
...Jacob knows how to make a bronze face human-and interesting. The impressive garnering of Epstein's portraits, on view this week at Manhattan's James Graham & Sons gallery, offers convincing proof of his unique talent (see color page). The 19 bronze casts (the largest Epstein show in the U.S. in more than two decades) glow with richness, powerful psychological insight and sense of deeply observed human beings...
...color is a ruddy red, and the language is expectedly lively: HE (with a disdainful swipe at the brow): "I will return to the past, to the scenes of my childhood." SHE (inspecting her fingernails): "Well, I'm sorry I'm not your rocking horse...