Peter Plagens, art critic for Newsweek, is the author of Sunshine Muse:
Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 and the novel Time for Robo, among other
works. He is also a painter.
Two biographies of Thomas Eakins reveal the art world’s attitudes about the painter’s bodily obsessions: Was he a curious innocent, a brilliant anatomist or a dirty old man?
Photographs are supposed to be unbiased recognitions of
reality, but they’re really self-portraits of the photographer. The
Ongoing Movement, a blend of biography and analysis, examines what
happens when photographers create deliberately untruthful pictures.