Word: portraits
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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...
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...
This willful approach paid off; through visual puns and analogies, the photographs play with the physicality of objects--books, paintings, objets d'art--not usually thought of as wholly physical. Morell delights in the frame of an oil portrait, the ghost negative of light on a color plate viewed at the wrong angle, the way the curve of the page interrupts an engraving. His choice of objects, often the kind that might arouse an antiquarian's obscure joy, recall the contents of Joseph Cornell's boxes, but the mood is different, more curious than nostalgic...