Word: portraited
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...1960s, Ionesco attracted such collaborators as Jean-Louis Barrault, who magically staged A Stroll in the Air; Laurence Olivier and Zero Mostel, who both played the lead in Rhinoceros (with Mostel winning a Tony Award on Broadway); and Alec Guinness, who starred in Exit the King, a Lear-like portrait of the inevitability of death. Ionesco was hailed as someone who might bridge the gap between literature and entertainment. Instead, his work grew more remote and austere, and his audiences dwindled. His last play, Journeys Among the Dead, was withdrawn before opening in New York City...
...fill a room with chairs to prepare for an orator who turns out to speak only by growling. Most of Ionesco's works were funnier than Beckett's, more verbal, richer in farcical action and far less despairing. In Soprano, mock-philosophical discussion shaded into nonsense. The Lesson, a portrait of a megalomaniacal teacher, reflected dark satire of the powerful. Rhinoceros blended those themes with a manic physical portrait of a city where everyone turns into a rampaging beast. This eccentric mix of humor and horror, of prattle and inarticulate profundity, influenced writers from Tom Stoppard to Edward Albee...
When Avedon brought this knowledge to portraiture, he unsettled people who suppose a camera captures the psychological truths of the sitter. To the contrary, an Avedon portrait is just as likely to be a record of the photographer's preoccupations and psychic distresses, in which the sitter plays an unknowing part. If his portraits are psychological studies, the psychology is his, and that, he admits, is why so many of them are so gloomy...
Among those ends is to convey the unwelcome news that the body capitulates over time, a task for which Avedon's icy style is ideal. Seen in his deadly light, the mortification of the flesh never looked so mortifying as in his portrait of Dorothy Parker, taken after she had steeped herself for decades in martinis and her own bile. Yet put aside the thought that she was rattling herself to pieces, and the very lines of her droopy complexion are as weirdly captivating as strange tattoos. Even if Avedon never had in mind Rilke's claim that "beauty...
...creature's most famous portrait is exposed as a hoax...