Word: portraited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Biographer as Surgeon. Soyer's group portrait is essentially a salute to the past, an evocation of his fellow realists and their combined debt to Eakins as the greatest painter in the American realist tradition. Soyer unabashedly searched the past for precedent, modeled his composition on Fantin-Latour's 1864 Homage to Delacroix. He prepared himself by making separate portraits of each figure from life, except for the late Reginald Marsh, whom Soyer had painted 24 years earlier; he simply copied the old portrait into the final 6-ft. 8-in. by 7-ft. 4-in. canvas...
While working on the Homage, Soyer was constantly worried that he might fail. He jotted in his progress notes: "Will I be able to capture the tremor in the temples of Jack Levine's portrait, the anxious face of Moses [Soyer's twin brother], or the aura of aloneness about Edward Hopper?" In the end, he largely succeeded, but says Soyer: "The secret of doing big group paintings has been lost. Portraits painted today are fragmentary, personal, capricious, nervous, tentative, incomplete, accidental, at times full of inaccuracies. But they are fascinating-revealing of the artist more than...
Artist as Analyst. A spate of recent shows has established that contemporary portraits are two-way mirrors. Larry Rivers makes a collage portrait of Pop Artist Jim Dine on a metal storm window. Raise the bottom half, lower the top pane, and presto, a different Dine peers through. Pop Artist Andy Warhol tries to beat the penny-arcade snapshot by silk-screening the image many times over. Reginald Pollack found he had painted himself into a corner; his Self-Portrait (opposite page) shows his face surrounded by images of the girl he was then courting. She outnumbers...
Many of today's artists prefer to call their unlikely likenesses "interpretations" rather than portraits. Abstractionist Hugo Weber became friends with Mies van der Rohe while they both were teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Not until 15 years later did Mies permit a portrait, and then Weber had to sketch while the architect worked at his desk. The blue of Mies's habitual business suit pervades a shoulder-swaying pose as slashing as icy spindrift. Weber still does not know if his subject was pleased, but Mies did buy one of his oils and three drawings...
...three of them ready to let down their hair, hips, waistlines, bustlines, or anything else that might suit an unseemly occasion. The tidy one is Actress de Havilland, who flings away her composure but retains her chic. As the murdered lover's widow, Mary Astor offers an ashen portrait of a woman who is not quite dead but already appears embalmed. Oscar Nominee Agnes Moorehead, as Charlotte's loyal drudge is a snarling, scratching sound-and-sight gag who seems determined to out-overact the best of them. But Bette meets the challenge in a climactic staircase scene...