Word: self-portrait
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Such a work was his huge self-portrait head with a patriarchal beard, The Servant of Abraham, 1929. Another, majestic in its broken dark-green underwater light, was The Raising of Lazarus, circa 1929, which he worked up from a composite photo of a life-size articulated dummy being delivered to his London studio. For by now, Sickert's interests were shifting decisively to photography -- much to the puzzlement of the London art world. Photos were common speech, immediate, iconic but not "sensitive." They stood the Impressionist cult of the nuance on its head. And turning the black-and-white...
...lots all over the world, the harshly practical has always confronted the giddily romantic. In his faux documentary INTERVISTA (Interview), Federico Fellini imagines a fictional Japanese television crew interviewing him as he shoots an equally fictive movie version of Kafka's Amerika. The result is not so much a self-portrait as a sentimental-satirical vision of back-lot life, a jazzy juxtaposition of past and present, star egos and bit-player frustrations, epic pretensions and commercial hackery. It's a movie for movie lovers, especially those who romanticize the moviemaking process -- and Fellini's undimmed capacity for surreal gestures...
...advantage and the law turns bully. The Prairie depicts a pioneer clan named Bush, whose family values include squatting and kidnapping. The new nation may have been led by paragons like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; Cooper's characters were the nation they led. It is our first group self-portrait, and not an altogether flattering one. The man whose knack for heroics made realistic fiction in America all but impossible also showed how it could be done...
...same year he became chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist organization that gave him a platform for addressing the national press as to what kind of Democratic candidate might finally break the long Republican lock on the White House. The picture -- surprise! -- was a kind of idealized self-portrait: a nontraditionalist who could win back the alienated white middle class by repudiating tax-and-spend, something-for-nothing policies and stressing / economic growth to be achieved by heavy government investment in job-creating activities...
...heir to those sumptuous Venetian nudes; but Rembrandt avoids idealism, suffuses the real imperfect body with thought and a sense of moral reflection, re-creates the structure of flesh in terms of an amazing directness of "rough" brush marks. We think of paintings like this or the later Kenwood Self-Portrait (circa 1665), with its sketchy construction (arcs in the background, a near Cubist flurry of angular brush marks to indicate palette and brushes), as being a long way from the Italian Renaissance, but in fact they are grounded in it and in Titian's late manner...