Word: portraited
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...opposite is the case with James Levine: The Life in Music, a portrait of the Metropolitan Opera's dynamic artistic director, scheduled to air in August. The tightly woven hour combines Levine's own reflections -- on choosing music as a career, his admiration for Toscanini -- with revealing views of him at work. Whether he is steering his orchestra through a demanding passage during rehearsal ("I need super concentration here . . . like you were driving in heavy traffic") or attending to business in his Lincoln Center office, every scene seems to define the man and command our respect...
...biographical approach is far more successful in The Long Night of Lady Day, a lovely portrait of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. Using old film footage, stills, recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues, the documentary traces a tragic life, from Holiday's troubled childhood (at a girls' institution, she was once punished by being locked overnight in a room with a corpse) through her angry encounters with racism to the mounting drug problems that eventually killed her at age 44. The research is impressive; witnesses range from Bandleader Artie Shaw to the warden's secretary at the federal...
...death, drove O.K. over the brink. He had a Munich dollmaker construct a soft, life-size, redhaired effigy of his former lover, fetishistically complete in every anatomical detail. The doll shared his bed and during the day he would dress it up and take it out. In Self- Portrait with Doll, 1920-21, Kokoschka is seen pointing with a woebegone expression at its sexual parts, presumably to indicate a cooling of the one- sided affair. Eventually, after he and some friends got drunk, he "murdered" the doll and flung it on a garbage truck in Dresden: the dumper dumped...
...figure for him. Kokoschka had to work in Germany because the decorative traditions of Vienna could not, in the end, contain the intensity he wanted to project into painting. And just as surely, he had to leave Germany because of Hitler. In 1937 he painted a big-jawed self portrait, titled Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist," which commemorated his inclusion in the Nazi exhibition of "Degenerate Art." A figure among the trees, in the background on the left, sketchily furnishes the key: it is the Adam from Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Kokoschka was being driven from his European paradise...
...burning temples in the background one might suppose the scene was a Baltic beach in August. And yet it has a strange, mocking intensity: despite his official position, the old dog could still bite when left to his own subjects, far from the civic view and the official portrait, in his own studio...