Plausible Portraits of James Lord
With Commentary by the Model
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Incisive reflections on more than twenty portraits of the author by some of the greatest artists of the last century
Over the course of his life as a friend and confidant of artists and collectors, and as a lover of art himself, James Lord has written some of the best accounts we have of modern aesthetic genius; his biography of Giacometti was widely acclaimed for succeeding, in the words of one reviewer, "in every way as one of the most readable, fascinating and informative documents, not just on an artist, but on art and artists in general" (The Washington Times). And yet through his connection with the great artists of his day, it was inevitable that Lord would himself become the object of the artist's gaze. In fact, from the time he was a young man, Lord sat for many of the major and minor painters and photographers of his day, including Balthus, Cocteau, Cartier-Bresson, Freud, Giacometti, and Picasso—in all but one case at the artist's request. In Plausible Portraits, Lord gathers, alongside these images, his reflections, penetrating the mind of artist and model alike in a sequence of illuminating double portraits of two masters at work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's an unremarkable face in itself thick jaw, blunt nose, deep-set eyes but Lord's has been rendered by an implausible list of art luminaries, friends such as Picasso, Cocteau and Dora Maar. Here, he reproduces his portraits alongside 24 inspired reports of their making. The acclaimed biographer of Giacometti and author of four admirable volumes of memoirs (Some Remarkable Men), Lord is supremely qualified to consider the sad, noble diligence of life study, the "self-defeating quest for fragile but visible perpetuation" that portraiture reveals. For years he has awoken to meet his image not in glass but in pictures, keenly discerning the artists who blink back through them. He recognizes in Giacometti's portraits the artist's increasingly urgent pursuit of the human gaze, conduit of the vigor he strained to catch. He shrewdly notes the personal "charm" with which Cocteau imbues his image, and the trademark style with which Lucian Freud dominates his. An American who has lived in France since WWII, Lord evokes in Jamesian prose an old world alight with potential acquaintance, with summer visits to Balthus's villa and dusty afternoons spent awaiting the fruits of his stillness. It is with tolerant affection that he regards the bold youth who sought Picasso's attention in 1945; now Lord marvels at the master's knowing pictoral reply: in a matter of moments, Picasso indulgently produced a figure quite like "his Blue Period pictures of wistful harlequins and romantic acrobats." A series of photographs taken by Elizabeth Lennard 52 years later uncannily intimate the subject's absence: "Only my wristwatch and ring seem assured of enduring reality, and they already appear to adorn a ghost." Such selfless insight implicitly recommends a life spent amidst works of art and endows Lord's account with arresting grace.
