With heart and soul laid bare and often decorated in inky poetry, Van Ree's high contrast portraits manage to appear both fashionably staged and caught in-the-moment, documenting her very personal relationships with her subjects.
He painted many great church frescoes, but his greatest works are his portraits, which manage to be both warmly intimate and oddly estranging.
Her portraits somehow manage to combine effervescence with earnestness, a finely tuned sense of absurdity with nostalgia, satiric wit with genuine warmth.
(Nevertheless, the self-portrait did manage to set a record for Manet at auction, beating the $26.4 million paid for another painting by the artist at Christie's in New York in 1989).
Political restrictions pressed down on Iranian filmmakers, but Abdolreza Kahani managed a touching portrait of working-class life in Bist (Twenty), an ensemble drama about the staff of a Tehran reception hall faced with closure.
In an earlier book of stories, "The Secret Goldfish," David Means managed a dark portrait of today's working-class youth, aimless and bereft of the stability that "working-class" once conferred.
For our first-ever Television Issue, Richard Burbridge photographed comedy auteurs including "Broad City" stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, whose portrait manages to convey both their alchemic bond and their distinctive performative spirits.
Miraculously, with a few final, dazzling strokes of over-drawing -- a dot for an eye, an arching eyebrow and a slashing mouth -- Smith managed pull the portrait into focus and endow it with his characteristic intensity.
As is standard, Lev does not tell employees how to vote, but she does manage to paint a scary portrait of unionizing.
You see it in his royal portraits, which somehow manage to be simultaneously sophisticated and exuberantly coarse, in a way that makes them difficult to interpret.
