Word: portraits
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...most striking paintings of "Panorama" was senior Javier Mixco's portrait of a man viewed horizontally. The man is pensive, frowning; his jaw is constricted and Mixco's expert use of light and shading add even more to the somber quality of this painting. What is the man thinking about? What is troubling him? The portrait seemed almost intensely private, as if the viewer was intruding on the man's personal agonies and demons. Despite all this, the painting itself was not dismal or depressing but extremely reflective, piquing the viewer's curiosity. Mixco's piece was further enhanced...
...Wols's photograph of his close friend Nicole Bouban (pictured) is the most visually compelling portrait displayed. Reclining on a pillow whose filigreed embroideries of butterflies merge with the platinum waves of her hair, Bouban's marmoreal face achieves the vacuity of expression associated with mannequins or dolls. Her smooth skin seems carved out of soap. But Wols's depiction is more than a trite objectification of a woman's face. Though she is reclining, this is not an image of repose. He effects the same response as that engendered in his self-portraits: the image is impossible to penetrate...
Parents with big purses may want to stay--or dine at least once--at the Plaza, well known to the younger set as the residence of Kay Thompson's mischievous Eloise, whose portrait (by Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight) overlooks the hotel's Palm Court. There, modern-day urchins can order kid-friendly delectables like Home Alone Sundaes and s'mores...
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...
...sacral. He was one of the last artists to whom the rhetoric of grandeur seemed not only possible but desirable. Of course it had to be for a myth painter doing an Apotheosis of Homer. But Ingres brought it into portraiture, most notoriously with his over-the-top portrait of Napoleon (1806) in his imperial coronation robes, as frontal and opulent as a Byzantine god. So weird was this attempt at deification that even David, Ingres's old teacher, found it "incomprehensible"--and it was so much mocked that the touchy Ingres refused to return to France until other paintings...