Word: portrait
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Djuna Barnes showed her first oil painting, Portrait of Alice, at Peggy Guggenheim's Manhattan gallery last week, many critics were surprised to find that the woman who wrote Nightwood (1937) could paint with similar distinction. In Nightwood no less magisterial and exacting a critic than T. S, Eliot found "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy...
...output of original and talented Djuna Barnes consists of a total of six paintings and six peculiar books. The Portrait of Alice is a full-length study of a woman in a burgundy robe standing against a background of gold. It suggests the quality as well as the style of the great Italian primitives. Asked last week how she came to paint Alice (1934), Djuna Barnes said: "I asked myself one day, why not paint a painting? ... I painted most of it on my hands & knees, because I couldn't afford an easel...
...Lippi, the veins on the hands and arms by the Surrealist virtuoso Salvador Dali. In Silence the delicacy of the veil over the sleeping girl's face, the pearl-like drops of water, suggested the Dutch masters. Milena's superb taste falters only rarely, notably in her portrait of her Royal cousin, which might have graced the shop windows of a military tailor...
...Portrait of a Man Posing for a Picture of a Man Posing for a Portrait-General Sir Bernard Montgomery, Rommel-rousing commander of Britain's Eighth Army, dutifully doing duty on a model's stand in Cairo...
...Family Portrait-The eagle profile of London's 63-year-old Security Planner Sir William Beveridge beside the humorous and kindly fullface of white-haired bride Jessy...