Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere (Modern Library Paperbacks) - Softcover

"One can only speak properly about paintings in front of paintings," Paul Cézanne once said. It is usually, though, critics who speak in front of paintings, not artists. With an eye toward rectifying that situation, Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times, constructed Portraits. He invited individual artists to meet him at museums, then tagged along on their peregrinations through various galleries--sometimes the most unlikely ones. At New York's Metropolitan Museum, the late Roy Lichtenstein, papa of pop, stopped to praise some frou-frou Fragonards. Who knew? "Clearly there's something wrong with me," Lichtenstein said.

Kimmelman's knowledge of art is astonishingly broad, and he has a way with questions that ignite each artist's memories, reflections, and opinions. Otherwise, he inserts himself only to offer enough biographical data or physical description to bring a reader up-to-date and up close. For the most part, he simply listens. Closely. The result is a series of interviews so cozy readers may feel they're eavesdropping. Few readers will ever make another foray through the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art or London's National Gallery completely alone. After devouring these "portraits"--most of which appeared originally as articles in the Times's art pages--they will be accompanied forevermore by the lively, eccentric, thoughtful, unguarded voices of Jacob Lawrence, Kiki Smith, Wayne Thibaud, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Elizabeth Murray, Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Brice Marden, Hans Haacke, and Chuck Close. --Peggy Moorman

A Notable Book of the Year:
The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post
A Best Book of the Year: Publishers Weekly
A Choice Art Book of the Year: Town and Country

"Michael Kimmelman is the most acute American art critic of his generation, and Portraits, his first book, is a fine debut. Patiently, inquisitively, and with remarkable insight, he coaxes from artists a whole range of responses to art that take us in their own words to the heart of their own work. A valuable book and a great read."
--Robert Hughes

In Portraits, Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, speaks with eighteen of today's important artists as they view some of the world's great art. Kimmelman's engaging, informal profiles of Chuck Close, Wayne Thiebaud, Brice Marden, Kiki Smith and others reveal not only what they said about the art they chose to look at in various museums and elsewhere, but also what they revealed about themselves and their work in the process.

"A fascinating collective portrait of the relationship of living artists to a shared past."
--The New York Times Book Review

"This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to become more familiar with con-
temporary art or who wants to savor the words of working artists, words that defy a common notion that artists cannot communicate." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Sixteen handsomely wrought biographical essays, essays that also reveal much about the state of museums today, the way artists employ the past, and the inclu-
sive temper of America's most prominent art critic."--New Orleans Times Picayune