Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...look at great portraits today without a certain nostalgia. The painted portrait is a form that, like blank-verse drama in the theater or the caryatid in architecture, would seem to be on its last legs. Indeed, with few exceptions, it has no legs and seems unlikely to grow new ones. Photography took them away. But older portraits have hardly lost their magic and their grip on the imagination. This is why "Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch," which is on view (through April 25) at the National Gallery in London, and will be seen later this year...
...Ingres created a gallery of the rich and the powerful (bankers, royalty, a newspaper owner, beautiful femmes du monde) that seems to define the high society of its day as fully as Felix Nadar's photographs recorded the artistic elites of the 1850s and '60s. Ingres loved doing portraits--and hated it. It was both hackwork and the vehicle of some of his highest instincts as an artist. It drove him crazy: "I don't know how to draw anymore," this greatest of 19th century draftsmen moaned to a friend. "I don't know anything anymore. A portrait...
Ingres never made his sitters conform to any type. He was too fascinated by the specific to do that. But some of his portraits have become stand-ins for classes of people, especially for the triumphant upper middle class of 19th century France. One example is his unforgettable image of Louis-Francois Bertin (1832), the anti-Jacobin journalist who had survived exile and the disapproval of Napoleon to become, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, a press lord--the owner of an influential newspaper, the Journal des debats. His belly strains against the confines of a wrinkled waistcoat; he leans...
Unfortunately, the rosy portrait that we and the University pain has its price--especially, as is the case this weekend when the targets of the con are parents. We miss an extraordinary opportunity to exert pressure for change. Through the eyes of an administrator, angry students are one thing, angry parents another. Imagine if hundreds of furious mothers descended on Dean Knowels' office demanding core reform. What might happen if fathers started knocking on President Rudenstine's door wondering why all the junior faculty were leaving...
Though Taylor steers clear of personal revelations, he speaks engagingly about his often dark dances: "I get my energy, I think, from being afraid--being afraid to choreograph, being afraid to fail." There are no failures on display in Dancemaker, just a clear-eyed portrait of a great artist at work...