It's an unremarkable face in itself—thick jaw, blunt nose, deep-set eyes—but Lord's has been rendered by an implausible list of art luminaries, friends such as Picasso, Cocteau and Dora Maar. Here, he reproduces his portraits alongside 24 inspired reports of their making. The acclaimed biographer of Giacometti and author of four admirable volumes of memoirs (Some Remarkable Men), Lord is supremely qualified to consider the sad, noble diligence of life study, the "self-defeating quest for fragile but visible perpetuation" that portraiture reveals. For years he has awoken to meet his image not in glass but in pictures, keenly discerning the artists who blink back through them. He recognizes in Giacometti's portraits the artist's increasingly urgent pursuit of the human gaze, conduit of the vigor he strained to catch. He shrewdly notes the personal "charm" with which Cocteau imbues his image, and the trademark style with which Lucian Freud dominates his. An American who has lived in France since WWII, Lord evokes in Jamesian prose an old world alight with potential acquaintance, with summer visits to Balthus's villa and dusty afternoons spent awaiting the fruits of his stillness. It is with tolerant affection that he regards the bold youth who sought Picasso's attention in 1945; now Lord marvels at the master's knowing pictoral reply: in a matter of moments, Picasso indulgently produced a figure quite like "his Blue Period pictures of wistful harlequins and romantic acrobats." A series of photographs taken by Elizabeth Lennard 52 years later uncannily intimate the subject's absence: "Only my wristwatch and ring seem assured of enduring reality, and they already appear to adorn a ghost." Such selfless insight implicitly recommends a life spent amidst works of art and endows Lord's account with arresting grace. (Apr. 15)
