There were also tough, socially conscious pictures, a lot of them produced by Warner Brothers and quite a few starring James Cagney.
His recollection of it, reinforced by the misery he himself knew in his early days in Paris (where he had to burn his drawings to keep warm), produced the pathetic, socially conscious pictures of his brief Blue Period, such as the portraits of "The Mistletoe Vender" and "Woman Ironing," and the etching of the bitter-faced, semi-starved couple in "The Frugal Repast".
(This being a glamour-conscious picture, there is no sign of anything as gross as actual pox — I mean, eeewww).
(This being a glamour-conscious picture, there is no sign of anything as gross as actual pox—I mean, eeewww).
But on the evidence of a recent spate of highly self-conscious picture books, it would seem that the suspended-disbelief state of early childhood is adapting to the wink-wink, nudge-nudge sensibility of our moment.
Working in black-and-white and color and in a wide range of scales, Kulok turns out extremely self-conscious pictures of mostly ordinary things: bouquets of fake flowers in a car's rear window, doorbells in a tenement foyer, a stained leatherette headrest, a windblown tree at night, a barn.
"My son, Bill, was already very conscious about pictures," she recalls, "so I said: 'Let's do it together.
Whereas Michael Carrick now seems almost the exact opposite, a player who drifts through matches entirely inside the picture, conscious only of the departing momentum of those around him, like a tanker captain languidly guiding his hull through a matrix of shifting icebergs.
Clint Eastwood has once again turned his narrow-eyed gaze onto the Croisette with a new film, in competition: The Changeling, a long, self-conscious and cumbersome picture based on the true story of Christine Collins, a hard-working single mother in 1920s Los Angeles whose nine-year-old boy went missing.
