Word: portraitist
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...this is to show that Imogen Cunningham has been a very good photographer for a very long time. She is a portraitist. In the mid-1920s, influenced by the photographs of Paul Strand, she did a series of intense studies of plants, and even these are portraits. She bears down on a single bud or stalk and reveals the uniqueness of a living thing in the same way she concentrates on a human face and reveals its essentials. For her, Ansel Adams glares down from the top of a mountain, tripod slung over his shoulder, finger jabbing...
Saul Steinberg has always refused to be photographed: at the desk where he produces some of the sharpest, most visionary cartoons of our time, Steinberg keeps a couple of special masks, made from paper bags and decorated with parodies of his own face, to thwart any would-be portraitist. As if a photograph would catch his image in a distortion he could not control. As if being so revealed would endanger his perspective as self-appointed "inspector" of modern life--a term which is also the title of his new book of cartoons...
...mark of Lehmbruck's sculpture is its inwardness. Lank, elongated and contemplative, his figures seem involved in a degree of soul searching that inevitably recalls the earlier romantic artists of 19th century Germany. Lehmbruck was an excellent generalizer but an undistinguished portraitist. He seldom made an individual's face. The earliest known Lehmbruck, a bust of himself done in 1898 at the age of 17, is an exception to this. But it is, as one might expect, a rudimentary effort, stiff and mute. Fifteen years later, when he made his Head of an Old Woman, the image succeeded...
...first dialogue of art is always with other art. Hence the desire of most women who make art to be known as artists first and only incidentally as women. "To be put in any category not defined by one's work," states Portraitist Elaine de Kooning, "is to be falsified." Eva [Hesse, the brilliantly gifted German-born sculptor who died two years ago of a brain tumor at the age of 34, is a case in point: her work belonged, and contributed on exactly level terms, to the kind of antiformalist direction in American sculpture that Robert Morris...
...barbaric gemstones strewn across the velvet sophistications of Orthodox theology. Brussels: three Bruegels newly cleaned to support a reflective commemoration. Amsterdam: 24 matchless Rembrandts, the best from each of 21 collections the world round. Paris: 304 Giacomettis, shyly revealing beneath surfaces textured like used chewing gum, a tender-hearted portraitist...