Word: self-portrait
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WHETHER PHOTOGRAPHING with a small, hidden camera on the New York subways or approaching women on Havana's streetcorners, Evans always gave his subjects the freedom and space to interact within their own environment. Levitt's lonely man watching TV on a streetcorner, Friedlander's self-portrait in a sleazy hotel room and Evans' dreaming sailor on the subway--these photographs succeed because of the seeker's sensitivity in approaching his subject. Just as Evans' sequence of closeups of miners' faces bespeaks the unjustified nature of their existence, Robert Frank's photograph of wealthy office seekers with their tall, black...
...painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake...
...exemplary anguish. It was one of the last convulsions of northern romanticism; and like all romantic painting, it was essentially an art of subject matter. The expressionist attitude lay at the opposite pole of experience from the sensuous, Cartesian quality of French art. At the time Kirchner painted his self-portrait in conscript's uniform, France had also experienced-from the other side of the trenches-the horrors of total war. But nothing by a major French painter in those traumatic years resembled Kirchner's paroxysm of self-pity-the haggard artist displaying the raw (but fictional) stump...
...Jimmy. Last week the Commerce Department unveiled its answer to the President: a life-size painting of Elliot Richardson, done by the former Commerce Secretary himself. An inveterate doodler, Richardson, who also served as Attorney General in the Richard Nixon administration until the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, loaded his self-portrait with symbolism. He is painted into a corner, Richardson pointed out, but signal flags in the background impart the message: "I expect to refloat." Tiny sperm whales on his blue necktie recall the adage, "The spouting whale gets harpooned." Quipped Richardson of his canvas: "You may ask yourself...
...moon shots. Perhaps a prefigurement can be seen in the radio broadcasts of the Senate's Panama Canal debates. The broadcast of the debates has raised the tone and self-awareness of the speakers. If the networks established a pool system and followed certain rules of discretion laid down by the House management, the system would surely produce something better than the somewhat stolid and formal self-portrait that O'Neill suggests...