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TLS November 10, 1989 Improvisations on Hollywood We look back to a review by Michael Wood of Hollywood: A novel of the twenties by Gore Vidal. To read the piece [...]

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, exhibit of Pablo Picasso's portraits, called 'Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation,' includes 100 paper works and 130 canvases. The stylistic variety demonstrated is incredible and the different treatments indicate that some were intended as portraits while others just used a person for a starting point. The titles are not explanatory because Picasso did not name his works. The paintings were primarily from memory or sometimes from photographs.

The works of artist Joan Miro, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, express a mysterious feeling that is a mixture of seriousness and playfulness. Common objects are transformed into magical representations which reveal the pleasure the artist had in the process of transformation. Miro was an abstract artist, though he denied being one, and influenced American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. Ordinary concrete objects presented Miro with a multiplicity of images, imbued with a magical quality which he reproduced in his works.