When faced with the task for a design class to make a fake magazine spread featuring the ‘soul’-made-image of a famous celebrity/author/politician/etc., how do you ignore always having that line hanging out in the back of your head?
“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. ”
Official portraits, casual snapshots, documentary photos, and publicity stills all attest to the pervasiveness of smoking in the art world of the second half of the 20th century. In fact, it’s hard to find images of certain postwar artists without a cigarette in hand. In striking contrast, today, even the artist would be forbidden from smoking next to his/her own work, which is on balance good, from a conservation and public health point of view. The silent excising, editing and effacing of smoking from photographs, which one encounters routinely is, however, deplorable from a historical point of view.
