portrait
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“They also asked me why I didn’t make my
female figures more beautiful. If I have to choose between making
something look beautiful and making something look realistic, I would
choose the latter. Paintings that depict really beautiful women are
rarely truthful representations of reality, because real people have
flaws. Take, for example, the figures in classical oil paintings…”
— Wei Dong
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“Most Young Kings Get Their Heads Cut Off.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat Holding Engagement Ring, New York, NY Photographed by Allen Ginsberg
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In the autumn of 1889, 41-year-old Gauguin received a distraught
letter from his young friend after a particularly harsh critical
reception of Bernard’s paintings. In a reply found in Paul Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends (public library), the painter writes to his 21-year-old friend:
Your disconsolate letter reaches a countryside as
sorrowful. I understand the bitterness which sweeps over you at the
foolish reception of you and your works… What would you rather have? a
mediocrity which pleases everybody or a talent which breaks new ground.
We must choose if we have free will. Would you have the power of choice
if choosing leads to suffering — a Nessus shirt which sticks to you and
cannot be stripped off? Attacks on originality are to be expected from
those who lack the power to create and shrug their shoulders.
As for me, I own myself beaten — by events, by men, by
the family, but not by public opinion. I scorn it and I can do without
admirers. I won’t say that at your age I was like this, but by the
exertion of sheer will power, that is what I am like to-day. Let them
study carefully my last pictures and, if they have any feelings at all,
they will see what resigned suffering is in them — a cry wrung from the
heart… But you, why do you suffer, too? You are young, and too early you
begin to carry the cross. Do not rebel; one day, you will feel a joy in
having resisted the temptation to hate, and there is truly intoxicating
poetry in the goodness of him who has suffered.
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“It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.”
The Dead Bullfighter
1864-1865, oil on canvas
76 × 153.3 cm (29.9 × 60.4 in)
by Édouard Manet
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In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking “Untitled Film Stills.” Over three years, the series grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the “Untitled Film Stills”—resembling publicity pictures made on movie sets—read like an encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s “Stills” are entirely fictitious; they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. While the pictures can be appreciated individually, much of their significance comes in the endless variation of identities from one photograph to the next. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.
Untitled Film Stills, 1977 by Cindy Sherman
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by Natee Utarit