It looks like history, but it's art

The most famous photos of Jack Mitchell's career were several he took of John Lennon and Yoko Ono just weeks before Lennon was killed in 1980. You may recall seeing these tender yet eloquent pictures, without knowing the photographer's name.

Now, Mitchell has a retrospective show, a traveling exhibit of 130 black-and-white portrait photos of celebrities titled "Icons & Idols: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Arts, 1960-1995" at the Delaware Art Museum. The display features three of those Lennon/Ono photos, along with a host of other images of stars of stage, screen and other arts.

Mitchell portrayed dancers, a specialty at which he's still unsurpassed, before photographing actors and directors, writers, artists, composers and musicians. There's no disputing that Mitchell's prime was in the 1960s and 70s, when celebrities beat a path to his New York City studio to be photographed for magazines and the New York Times.

It's like turning pages in a diary to look at one portrait after another that attract viewers' attention with their dramatically lit, solid three-dimensional quality and sensuous feel for the roughened skin of a person's face or the texture of clothing. In this way, Mitchell is unabashedly indulgent in his handling, true to the painterly tradition from which such portraiture emerges.

Mitchell also brings to his work a quality of belief we associate usually with more unsophisticated or genuinely popular art. For instance, the radiance in some of these portraits comes from an inner excitement, resulting from his having made contact with a great tradition - without imitating it.

With dancers Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, actors Marcel Marceau, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Meryl Streep, writers Edward Albee and Clive Barnes, artists Isamu Noguchi, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein and singers ranging from Beverly Sills to Neil Diamond, Mitchell gets each to relax and reveal an uncharacteristic side in an unguarded moment.

His show is a tonic for frayed nerves.The public would welcome more displays that fit together with daily life, and can be taken, as this one is, as a total spectacle.