The Portraits Speak

Contains transcripts of conversations between artist Chuck Close and twenty-seven of his fellow artists who were also subjects of his paintings.

The chief art critic for "The New York Times" gives a painter's-, sculptor's-, and photographer's-eye view of art as he explores museums with some of today's most important artists. Photos throughout.

"Speaking the Truth about Oneself is composed of lectures that acclaimed French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered in 1982 at the University of Toronto. As is characteristic of his later work, he is concerned here with the care and cultivation of the self, which becomes the central theme of the second and third volumes of his famous History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984, the month of his death, and which are explored here in a striking and typically illuminating fashion. Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and constitute subjects. But in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are constituted by outside forces but in how they constitute themselves. In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, we find Foucault focused on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman dynasties, and concluding with fourth- and fifth-century Christian monasticism. Foucault's claim is that, in these periods, we see the development of a new kind of act-"speaking the truth" (about oneself)-as the locus of a new form of subjectivity, which he deemed important not just for historical reasons but also as something modernity could harness anew or adapt to its own purposes"--

Young Isabel Archer, a beautiful American, travels to Europe where her naivete - and recent inheritance - attracts many suitors. But despite her great promise, she falls victim to her own provincialism. Exposing the differences between the New and the Old Worlds, James's masterpiece examines the themes of freedom, sexuality, and betrayal.