Word: self-portraits
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Among the most suspect: a Vermeer Self-Portrait that Bass tried to auction off at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet in 1962. Since only 30 unchallenged Vermeers are known to exist, a genuine Vermeer should have brought as much as $1,000,000. But there were so few bidders for Bass's Vermeer that he was forced to buy it back...
Recently he sat at his dressing room piano after a rehearsal at the Met and sketched a bravado musical self-portrait with his favorite Strauss works. He struck a theme from Don Juan: an image for the dark, liquid eyes, flaring nostrils and smoldering visage that prompted one of his many female admirers to compare him to "an untamed animal-sensual and earthy." Then Don Quixote: a reflection of his penchant for tilting in public at sacred cultural institutions. Then Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks: the insouciant wink-and-nudge of a joker who likes to imitate other people...
Leslie obviously means his portraits to be as challenging to others as the act of painting them is for him. His own self-portrait is a mixture of honesty and defiance. "If a person stands in front of you," he points out, "with his hands in his pockets and his shirt open, someone can stick a knife in his stomach." Thanks to Leslie's technical mas tery, the painting captures both his sullen antagonism toward the world and, at the same time, makes him look as innocent and as vulnerable as any of Pearlstein's coldly viewed nudes...
...hundreds of psychological portraits of war figures, Macmillan thus characterized Mussolini's successor, Marshal Badoglio: "Honest, broadminded, humorous. I should judge of peasant origin." It might stand also as a fair self-portrait of the grandson of a Scots crofter...
...Whiteley stop there. Above his self-portrait erupt five flat thought balloons, containing a photo of a nude torso, a tube of oozing white oil paint, a fungoid dream landscape with a bit of highway, a montage of Hitler in a motorcade emoting into a zebra-striped speech bubble-and a question mark. The whole is obviously meant to depict the varied factors that Whiteley believes shaped his artistic sensibility; the balloons are also signs pointing to Whiteley's belief that life is a journey to be traveled and that it is dominated by the demonic force of history...