Screen People

Boris Chaliapin
Elizabeth Taylor
1949
gouache on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Boris Chaliapin
Katharine Hepburn
1952
gouache on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Boris Chaliapin
Marilyn Monroe
1956
gouache and watercolor on paper
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Boris Chaliapin
Ingmar Bergman
1960
watercolor on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Kees van Dongen
Jeanne Moreau
1965
watercolor on paper
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Boris Chaliapin
Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave
1967
tempera on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Robert Rauschenberg
New Cinema
1967
screenprint
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Frank Gallo
Raquel Welch
1969
epoxy resin
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Julien Quideau
Isabelle Adjani
1977
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Norma Wasserman Miller
Peter Falk
1973
oil on canvas
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Anonymous Photographer
Marisa Berenson in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon
1975
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Andy Warhol
Robert De Niro, Jon Voight, Jane Fonda -
Vietnam Aftermath Films
1979
paper collage with photo-overlays
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Irving Penn
Nastassja Kinski
1983
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Richard Bernstein
Miami Vice
1985
tempera and pastel on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Ken Regan
Sigourney Weaver
1986
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Theo Westenberger
Molly Ringwald
1986
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Gregory Heisler
Kevin Costner
1989
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Timothy White
Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon
1991
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from Metamorphoses

    Now have I brought a woork too end which neither Joves fierce wrath,

    Nor swoord, nor fyre, nor freating age with all the force it hath

Are able to abolish quyght. Let comme that fatall howre

Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over mee no powre,

And at his pleasure make an end of myne uncerteyne tyme. 

Yit shall the better part of mee assured bee too clyme

Aloft above the starry skye. And all the world shall never

Be able for to quench my name. For looke how farre so ever

The Romane Empyre by the ryght of conquest shall extend,

So farre shall all folke reade this woork. And tyme without all end

(If Poets as by prophecie about the truth may ame)

My lyfe shall everlastingly bee lengthened still by fame. 

– Ovid (43 BC-AD 17), translated by Arthur Golding (1567)

French Likenesses in Terracotta

Augustin Pajou
Ideal Female Heads
before 1806
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Josesph Chinard
Bust of Juliette Récamier
ca. 1801-02
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

" . . . what happened was I came across some newspaper articles about people who saw ghost images on their television set after close-down. There was a spate of these articles, and I collected them and decided to make a work which dealt with something that has been said many times (it was said first by Marshall McLuhan), that the television set now exists in everybody's front room as the fire used to, where you had this moving image all the time. It was the focus; people could sit around the fire and look into it and see pictures, tell stories, regenerate imaginative, creative thinking on the basis of this eidetic imagery. Television is exactly the same thing. I'm convinced that one of the sources of pleasure in television viewing is not to do with the programme, it's actually to do with that moving thing. We go back to the cave and the fire, it was important for our species. I think people are using the television set for something quite creative and subversive and original, and these newspaper articles were really about that . . . "

Joseph Chinard
Family of General Guillaume-Philibert Duhesme
ca. 1801-05
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Joseph Chinard
Portrait of a man
1787
terracotta
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

" . . . what happened to the people in the newspaper articles was made peculiar by the cultural interpretation and by the denial of the unconscious and the denial of what's actually going on when they looked at their television and saw ghosts. All the interpretations which they got were either, 'It's a flying saucer beaming messages', or 'It's a hoax'; it was always empirical, they always wanted to explain these things by saying there's something outside you that's making a picture on your television set. At no point did anyone say, 'Oh, isn't that interesting, the moving imagery has triggered off your imagination, in connection with certain anxieties you may have, and you have seen a picture that has spoken to you and prophesied the doom of the planet, as in the Bible.' No one said that. There was this total denial. I wanted to recreate that situation, to make it possible for everybody, including myself, to have that sort of visionary experience. I made a video which consisted of a fire, and the fire is slowed down – people see things in the flames – and the soundtrack consists of a reading of newspaper articles. I read them in a whisper, as though this were a dreadful secret that I'm sharing with everybody. There is also some improvised singing that I consider analogous to the kind of automatic writing that I do, which creates a sort of uncanny atmosphere. When it was shown on Channel 4, they told me that aside from the flying saucer contingent who were very enthusiastic, they also had a number of other letters . . . "

– extracts by Susan Hiller from a 1991 conversation with Andrew Renton at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London

Jean-Marie Nogaret
Bust of a young woman
1802
terracotta
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Jean-Antoine Houdon
Portrait-bust of Denis Diderot
1771
terracotta
Louvre, Paris

Jean-Antoine Houdon
Portrait-bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1779
terracotta
Louvre, Paris

Philippe-Laurent Roland
Portrait-bust of Thérèse-Françoise Potain Roland
ca. 1782-83
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Fantasy-bust of veiled woman
ca. 1865-70
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Bust of Mary, Queen of Scots
ca. 1860-70
terracotta
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Louis-François Roubiliac
Portrait-bust of Francis Willoughby, FRS
1751
terracotta
British Museum

Aimé-Jules Dalou
Mother and child
terracotta
ca. 1873
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Clodion
The Surprise
1799
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Clodion
Offering to Priapus
ca. 1775
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Winter Begins

Blustery rain on Friday, and I sat under a cafe awning studying this newest San Francisco weather as it blew in from the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles to the west. Contemplation seemed to confirm what the date (November 15th) seemed to proclaim – nothing less than the (local) beginning of winter.

Tangerine Tango (Pantone color of the year for 2012) reliably turned up (immediately above) as it has done throughout the year – in any and all settings, under any and all conditions.

Sartorial commentary needed for this next photo also. Watching the current episode of Project Runway All Stars, I was pleased and surprised when one of the guest judges turned out to be 16-year-old Tavi Gevinson (of Style Rookie fame). She was articulate (to say the least) and at one point uttered words applicable to the rainy-day fashion statement above – "Even though I'm a dropped-crotch apologist" said Tavi Gevinson.

(I tried saying "dropped-crotch apologist" ten times quickly – and quickly failed.)

Note to Self: color adjustments to camera settings for pictures in yesterday's post and in today's (diminished-light experiment) worked better outdoors than indoors.

Fluorescent Hell

Just yesterday I was marveling here about the fashionable prevalence in European art galleries and even certain art museums of naked fluorescent tubing. No sooner do I open my mouth on the subject than I discover these images from The Petrified Forest, John Miller's recent show at Praz-Delavallade in Paris.

The outsize photorealist paintings are based on stills from reality TV scenes – specifically, scenes in which people have been driven to weep (it is of course taken as a given that all reality TV shares the common goal of forcing the participants to break down and weep, sooner or later).

The banality (not to say sordidness) of the artist's chosen subject is doubly well-realized by the washed-out color palette he correctly selected (to indicate the emptiness of these poorly-staged emotions) and by the bleaching effect of the gruesome strip-lighting.

Thus, the question asked here yesterday about the usefulness of such a cold, killing light-source has now been amply answered.  

Magazine Work

Above are a couple of stills from Sweden's Next Top Model, a licensed spin-off of the popular American reality show. I found these unexpected black-and-white images on the site of Peruvian fashion photographer Bell Soto, who had been invited to shoot the aspiring models for an episode of the Swedish show.

I was looking for more of Bell Soto's fashion work, having already glimpsed a hint of it at the end of one of those long untraceable trails of internet image-links. After getting past the Top Model distraction, I found many praiseworthy magazine spreads by Bell Soto to look at – but will only use a couple of samples here.
  

 

Set of 4 photos above from a feature for Fiasco. Set of 4 photo-spreads below from a feature for Carbon Copy. 

And a couple of extras at the end, as at the beginning.