Word: portraited
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...must be added that few of those outraged by The Satanic Verses have ever seen it, much less opened it. Their fury, and the timorousness of government officials fearing violent uproars, has been prompted by one accusation: that the novel contains a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad and thus amounts to a terrible insult to Islam. The plain, simple truth is that the novel does nothing of the sort, but only those who consent to read the thing will discover this for themselves...
Instead, in Warhol one had the detached art-supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...which are truly awful in their curt, grainy enunciation of the facts of casual or ceremonial death. The sign on the wall of the death chamber -- SILENCE -- provides an essential motif of Warhol's imagination, and it was hardly an accident of gesture that his best-known self-portrait has his finger on his lips...
Perhaps the most moving of these -- a Spanish equivalent, in its effort to embody intellect, of David's portrait of the Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty...
...money than in memories. For this piano, the Charles family was torn asunder in slavery times: to acquire it, the white man who owned them traded away Doaker's grandmother and father, then a nine-year-old. On this piano, Doaker's grieving grandfather, the plantation carpenter, carved portrait sculptures in African style of the wife and son he had lost. To Doaker's hothead older brother, born under the second slavery of Jim Crow, the carvings on the piano made it the rightful property of his kin, and he lost his life in a successful conspiracy to steal...