Word: portraited
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...bureau survived, but as a shattered agency. An internal Treasury review, completed in October 1981 but little known outside the bureau, produced a portrait of an agency in agony, "grinding to a standstill." Unsure of its mission, it was readily buffeted by shifting political winds. Said the report: "There is widespread distrust of top management. There is little unity within the organization. Morale is very poor. This situation goes far beyond the normal criticisms and complaints which are leveled against management in any organization...
...only an American one. As a young man, he worked with Gustave Courbet. He knew, and was respected by, some of the finest artists in Paris: Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet. He appears (with Baudelaire, Manet and other French luminaries) in Henri Fantin-Latour's group portrait of the rising art stars of 1864, Homage to Delacroix. "This American is a great artist, and the only one of whom America can be justly proud," said Camille Pissarro. And Marcel Proust turned part of his name, unpronounceable by the French, into an anagram: he became the painter Elstir in A la Recherche...
...brought a Japanese aesthetic of hints and nuances into late 19th century painting. His abhorrence of narrative, his preference for the exquisitely designed moment over the slice of life, was new; it epitomized the idea of Art for Art's Sake. It was provocative, in 1871, to call a portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. It implied that the hallowed sentimentality about motherhood in Victorian England was cultural baggage, that the aesthetic life of shapes mattered at least as much as social piety...
...absurd to class him with Degas or Manet. He didn't have the range, the formal toughness or the breadth of human curiosity for that. Yet sometimes he approached them, as in his finest portrait, his 1872-73 study of the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle. When he sat for Whistler, Carlyle was 78 and heavy with fame, depression and guilt. All this is conveyed in the disturbed but massive black profile of the coat and in the tenderness of Whistler's treatment of the face...
...life he still called America "my home," after almost a half-century of continuous expatriation. Nobody knows why; Whistler may not have been sure himself. He feared not being honored as a prophet in his own country, but in fact his work was eagerly sought by American collectors and portrait clients, some of whom were all but obsessed by it; the Detroit millionaire Charles Freer owned 40 of his paintings and hundreds of his drawings. Moreover, he was a prophet--Americans imitated him, especially photographers. After 1900, Alfred Stieglitz and his circle labored to give their prints the evocative blur...