Said the late great French art critic Theodore Duret: "There is art and there is official art ... and there always will be." Most portrait-painting shows are filled with handsome, sycophantic canvases, obviously "official." Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art put on a huge, unusual show containing 270 mostly "unofficial" portraits (done usually for the artist's own pleasure, without commission). Visitors had a chance to see what some of the most talented painters alive do with portraiture when free to be as sincere, malicious, foolish, irregular or what not as they like. Items:
ΒΆ Russian Marc Chagall (TIME, Oct. 26) showed...
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