Word: portraited
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Saul K. Padover, distinguished American political scientist (Jefferson: A Biography, Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Freedom), wrestles with these problems for 667 pages; the result is a fascinating draw. A self-described "Jeffersonian democrat," Padover exhibits an intimate and often lurid portrait. As an adolescent, Marx embraced Christ, then, in a long hysterical poem, identified himself with Lucifer. During the exhausting research and writing of Das Kapital, he was plagued by illnesses ranging from carbuncles to chronic liver inflammation. Padover shows the father of socialism distracting himself from the pain and humiliation of a carbuncle on the scrotum...
Christman, research historian at Washington's National Portrait Gallery, has introduced an eclectic choice of portraits, accompanied by masterly biographies in miniature. Here is the fervent "Stonewall" Jackson and the loquacious Henry James; here, too, is Charles Pinckney, the Revolutionary War officer remembered for his "incredibly bad military advice." The works themselves are undistinguished, apart from the self-portraits by Mary Cassatt and Edward Hopper; but these busts, etchings, daguerreotypes, oils and sketches constitute a museum of the human physiognomy-and of our civilization over the past two centuries...
Photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) is best remembered for Depression photos of Southern dirt farmers published in the celebrated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Text for that book was written by the late James Agee, whose eager eyes peer out from a 1937 portrait that is one of the 219 remarkable photographs in this long overdue retrospective volume. No captions are needed to display the range and depth of Evans' artistry. He knew the truth that lay in the luminous surfaces of things, whether they were the grim visages of farmers, the abstracted faces of New York subway...
...subject is hard to please. The first official portrait of Henry Kissinger, painted by Boston Artist Gardner Cox and commissioned to hang in the State Department, was vetoed: Kissinger did not like it. He was pleased, however, by a second attempt, by Houston Artist J. Anthony Wills. "It's an excellent likeness, swelled head and all," pronounced Kissinger last week. He didn't even mind that Wills had "painted out the scepter." In fact, quipped the former Secretary of State, the unveiling was "one of my most fulfilling moments. Until they do Mount Rushmore." Artist Wills, too, felt...
Cimino, 37, broke into movies as a writer for Clint Eastwood. After directing the promising Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he spent four years on various scripts before joining forces with De Niro on The Deer Hunter. Here Cimino creates a portrait of the war that beggars logic and is boundless in terror. An early Viet Nam sequence, in which imprisoned Americans are forced to play Russian roulette by their Viet Cong captors, is one of the most gut-wrenching ever. With Peter Zinner's virtuoso editing, an agonizing sound track and Vilmos Zsigmond's fiery cinematography, Cimino creates...