Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait of America's moral disgrace. Freudians spend years trying to call up the primal image-memories, turned to trauma, that distort a neurotic patient's psyche. Photographs sometimes have a way of installing the image and legitimizing the trauma: the very vividness of the image, the greatness of the photograph...
...Cover: Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart from Scala/Art Resource, N.Y. Teardrop by Tim O'Brien
...painters had batting records, that of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain, would be perfect. Not only did he paint the best official portrait of the 17th century -- the head of the wary, coarse, cunning old Pope Innocent X, in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili collection in Rome -- but he also made what is perhaps the greatest nonmythical, secular painting in all art history: Las Meninas, in the Prado. Neither is in the wonderful show of 38 paintings by Velazquez, about half lent by the Prado, which opens at the Metropolitan Museum...
...wants to know where Philip Guston felt some of the authority for his last paintings lay, where those eloquently clumsy speckled gray-and-pink shapes looked back to, one need only consult passages in Velazquez like the extraordinary plumage of the headdress worn by Queen Mariana for his formal portrait of her in the Prado. Yet not one of his painter-admirers has made Velazquez seem "newer," or in any significant way changed the address of his work. Velazquez himself seems always new, fresh on his own terms, which record the act of scrutiny in the purest imaginable form...
Velazquez's portraits of Philip IV are the most remarkable biography of a monarch in all art, spanning his life from the confidence of youth to the melancholy and distance of his afflicted age. The face thickens, the eyes sag, the Bourbon lip takes on a heavy repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine years since any ((portrait)) has been made," Philip IV noted in 1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives...