Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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RICHARD BURTON: A LIFE by Melvyn Bragg (Little, Brown; $22.95). This meticulous biography includes generous quotations from the subject's letters and a 350,000-word private diary; the result is a portrait of a vivid actor who approached language with the same passion he lavished on Elizabeth Taylor...
...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...
Disk jockeys across the country broadcast Wright's telephone number, provoking a barrage of angry calls from outraged citizens. Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire juxtaposed a bandit's mask with a portrait of Wright, solemnly intoning that "a pay raise without a vote is stealing." Later Humphrey came as close to blows as Senators ever do with fellow Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, who favors the pay hike, during a heated exchange at a committee hearing on the subject. Some of Wright's House colleagues, the vast majority of whom want the raise, have started comparing him, unfavorably...