"Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue" features 18 blue portraits printed on vintage handkerchiefs, balancing ideas of daintiness and resistance, past and present, surveillance and self expression.
The village is painted in exaggerated, almost surreal colors — whether it's the neon yellow of the killing field, or the electric-blue portrait of Chiang Kai-shek that looms over the village.
Picasso's "Blue Period" portrait of Ángel Fernández de Soto (1903) sold at its low-end estimate, and Claude Monet's superb 1906 Nymphéas was retracted when bids failed to reach the low estimate of $44 million.
His blue-eyed portrait, in white uniform with gold braid and multiple medals, stared down from walls in offices and private houses alike; but he was stocky and dull, the typical son of a German immigrant brewer, and preferred desk-duties to speeches and parades.
Klimt wove such a cloud of glitter and mystery around their relationship that it remains firmly ambiguous, a love of some kind but of what kind we have no need to know as we contemplate the glamour and poise of Flöge in Klimt's sumptuous, blue-saturated portrait of 1912.
The cost of battling shadows may be indicated by the fact that the most assured works here are the earliest: Brustlein's small blue-tinged portrait of a man from 1936 and Biala's charming view of Paris street life from 1938.
Cecilia," bought for £6.6 million in 2000, setting a new auction record for a Victorian painting, and Picasso's blue-period portrait of his fellow artist Angel Fernandez de Soto, bought for $26.5 million in 1995, belong to a foundation set up by the composer in 1992 to buy major paintings and lend them for public exhibition.
But Mr. Penn considered these blue-collar portraits, called "The Small Trades," some of the most important of his long and influential career.
Next came "A Blue Hand," her portrait of the Beats in India, few of whom were in robust mental health.
"The Girl in the Blue Hat," a portrait of her by the watercolorist Mary B. Titcomb, once hung in the White House, bought by President Woodrow Wilson.
