Portrait

Miriam Katin's “Letting It Go” (Drawn & Quarterly: 160 pp., $24.95) is my kind of graphic memoir: loose, impressionistic, a portrait of the artist's inner life. Keyed by the decision of her adult son Ilan to take up permanent residence in Berlin, it is, in part, the story of her coming to terms, at long last, with her legacy as a survivor of the Holocaust. But without minimizing this part of the story, “Letting It Go” is much more than that - a meditation on love, on family, and an inquiry into art. Functioning in some sense as a sketchbook, Katin's story is delightfully open-ended, less a look back at a particular situation than a series of reflections from the trenches of her life as it is lived.

I was knocked out by one of the best photos I've seen in years -- Ken Hively's portrait of Sam Raimi for "Spider's Man" (June 27) on Page 4. As stylistically complex as a Karsh portrait with Hitchcock's menace, the photo masterfully evokes the formal rigor and psychological complexity that Raimi captures in his films. Please consider a full noir-ish portrait series of other auteurs by Mr. Hively. This one really rocks. Kerry Kugelman La Crescenta

A British music scholar says he has identified a previously unknown portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that could be worth millions. The 19-by-14-inch oil painting shows the profile of a man in a bright red jacket. Cliff Eisen, who teaches music at King's College London, said that it is only the fourth known authentic portrait of Mozart from his time, when the composer was at his professional height in Vienna. King's College said the portrait was probably painted by Joseph Hickel, who was a painter at Austria's imperial court.

W. Richard West Jr., the recently retired founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, spent $48,500 in museum funds to commission a portrait of himself and selected a non-Indian artist to create it, the Washington Post reported on Friday. The portrait of West by New York painter Burton Silverman hangs in a fourth-floor lounge of the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is dedicated to the arts and culture of American Indians. West has come under fire recently for travel expenditures.

Experts say a little-known portrait of a young woman, previously attributed to an anonymous German artist, is likely a drawing made by Leonardo da Vinci. The 13-by-9.4-inch parchment, which could be worth millions if the new attribution is confirmed, was bought in 1998 for $21,850 by a private collector at an auction in New York, said Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci. Vezzosi said several experts have backed the attribution over the last few months, but he cautioned that further tests, including carbon-dating, must still be carried out.

I am compelled to respond to Christopher Knight's myopic and absurdly pretentious review of Salvador Dali ["Method to his Madness," March 19], in which the artist is called a "gifted but secondary figure" and generally dismissed as a charlatan whose talent far exceeds his depth. Knight attempts to measure Dali using a dubious sort of Postmodern/Poststructuralist critique in the vein of someone who has just completed his midterm paper on Derrida. The result is a nearsighted portrait that does grave injustice to the artist's work, vision and intellect.

Poland-born, Australia-based animator Yoram Gross, the subject of the documentary "Blinky & Me," appears throughout the film, and yet the resulting portrait feels strikingly incomplete. Filmmaker Tomasz Magierski's admiration and respect for Gross are clear, as are the octogenarian's youthful spirit and resilience. But like "Life Is Strange," another recently released Holocaust-themed doc, this is more an illustrated talk than a cohesive nonfiction work. Magierski assumes a familiarity with Gross' productions, the most well-known of which is TV series "Blinky Bill," based on children's books about a mischievous koala.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could survive anything as brutal as a gunshot wound to the head. And yet about 10% of the time, such victims do live. But what happens next? What kinds of lives do – can – people go on to have? To get a sense of the possibilities, staff writer Melissa Healy interviewed four victims of such injuries and chronicled their lives since the event: Leonard Rugh, shot in 1969 while serving in Vietnam; Matthew Gross, shot on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in 1997; Jackie Nink Pflug, shot in Malta in 1985 during an airplane hijack; Danny Rodriguez, shot in 2009 during a run-in with a gang after a party.

For the last week or so, I've been dipping in and out of a long-forgotten piece of Southern California literature: Timothy G. Turner's short story collection “Turn Off the Sunshine: Tales of Los Angeles on the Wrong Side of the Tracks,” published by the Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1942. If you've never heard of the author, book or publisher, you're not alone; a Google search reveals little except for various online booksellers offering digital copies for download.