SELECTION OF TEXTS FROM THE CATALOGUE
PORTRAITS ABOUT PORTRAITURE,
MALCOLM WARNER
“The portrait was later very much admired, even by them,” Matisse recalled, “and I said to myself once more that Bonnard was right to declare that a portrait always ends up being a likeness.”
“(…) the idea of the genres proved resilient, not only among more conventional artists but also among the avant-garde. Each genre had its own story of transformation and survival in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While landscape played a vital role in the growth of abstraction, the traditions of portraiture were to be the main pattern, honored as much in the breach as in the observance, for modern art’s engagement with the human figure. (…)
For this reason it was looked down upon by theorists as a compromised genre, not to be taken too seriously by the most ambitious artists. Among avant-garde artists of the modern age who were not only ambitious but in rebellion against the whole idea of art as the imitation of nature, we might guess that it would have fared even worse. Surely the genre most tied to likeness was the one least likely to succeed.
But the opposite turned out to be the case. Though happy to give up the commissioned portrait to their more conservative colleagues, the modernists never abandoned portraiture as a form. It is striking how many great works of modern art show people sitting in chairs as portrait sitters had done for centuries. Modern artists went on with portraits without commissions, which to most portraitists of the past would have seemed absurd, and typically their sitters would be friends, relatives, or themselves (in the case of self-portraits), rather than paying clients. Often they would give portraits away as gifts. When they sold them, it was not necessarily to sitters or their families; it was mainly to the same dealers and collectors who bought others kinds of work. There were some age-old aesthetic reasons why they should continue with portraiture on this new footing. The painting and sculpting of portraits stemmed partly, as ever, from the urge to make art from everyday experience, including the company of others and one’s own physical appearance. But there were also reasons to do with the particular tendencies of modern art, and one of these was the desire to engage in original ways with the art of the past. Having largely renounced the commission, modern artists responded with creative freedom both to their sitters and to portraiture as a genre. Far from ignoring its purposes, traditions, forms, and canons, they took them as given things with which to work.
For artists looking to challenge the conventions of representation in art, what better arena could there be than portraiture, which for most people was all about likeness? It was the most subvertible of the genres. When artists couched a painting or sculpture in portrait-like form, or merely used a title containing the word “Portrait,” they could count on firm expectations on the part of the viewer and flout them to effect. (…)”
BEFORE THE MIRROR
PALOMA ALARCÓ
“(…) The mirror’s perhaps we can also speak of an encounter with our own reflection, our own self- portrait. (…)”
“The mirror is the origin of the self-portrait. In other types of portrait the artist faces the sitter directly and tries to reveal the mystery of the other; in the self-portrait he is before a mirror dealing with the challenge of capturing his own elusive identity. Once the painting is completed, the mirror gives way and the painting sets in motion fascinating exchange of gazes: between the artist and his reflected image, between us and the artist, who returns it. Given that our gaze coincides with another gaze, i.e., the mirror’s perhaps we can also speak of an encounter with our own reflection, our own self- portrait. This intertwining of spectator and artist through the metaphor of the mirror is endless. As Pascal Bonafoux wrote: ‘these looks that are looked at, these mirrors experienced through mirrors, lead to a mise en abîme that opens onto infinity.’
If, as George Steiner affirmed, the self-portrait represents the artist’s attempt ‘to achieve mastery over the forms and meanings of his very self’, it is not surprising that some artists’ obsession with painting themselves should be motivated by the need to delve elusive identity. Once the painting is completed, the mirror gives way and the painting sets in motion a fascinating exchange of gazes: between the artist and his reflected image; between us and the artist, who returns it. Given that our gaze coincides with another gaze, i.e., the mirror’s, perhaps we can also speak of an encounter with our own reflection, our own self-portrait. This intertwining of spectator into their life experience, their changing mental states. What is more, Romantic individualist ideals that were revived at the end of the 19th century resulted in the transformation of the traditional image of the artist, who ascended to the category of visionary hero, outside of society and against established norms.His isolation and suffering, the consequence of his new and tragic destiny, became an essential source of his art. For this reason it is understandable that at the moment of painting himself the artist no longer restricted himself to the image that was returned by the mirror; he turned to a wide variety of masks to offer a subjective interpretation of his own existential dilemma and validate his new artistic intentions. In this regard, we should bear in mind that photography, a new tool for artists who wished to go beyond the limits of the mirror, considerably expanded the possibilities of self-representation. (…)”
THE SPIRIT BEHIND THE MASK,
FRANCISCO CALVO SERRALLER
“(…) How can we deny that our own age has been the golden age of the portrait?
From a quantitative viewpoint this is unquestionable: never have so many portraits been made, for so many different reasons and in so many different media. In a way, it could be said that the genre of portraiture became the principal democratizing agent of art. Having one’s portrait made became something socially and materially within the reach of everyone (think of photography). It could also be said that the trivialization of the portrait transformed its identity, i.e. quantity affected quality. Whatever the case, the huge dissemination of portraiture cannot be described as an aesthetic simplification, even from a strictly sociological viewpoint. In fact, it has sharpened the artistic portrait and made it more sophisticated, whatever the medium in which it is created. Whether under the influence of its widespread social use, or for other more strictly aesthetic reasons, contemporary portraiture has widened its conceptual and practical horizons. Above all, it has transformed itself into an infinitely more complex genre. Having reached this point, I should make a short interjection to emphasize something normally passed over—the fact that all the changes that have come about in portraiture during our own age have not necessarily invalidated traditional practices. The painted portrait is alive and well, for instance, having evolved creatively just as much as portraiture in newer techniques.Returning to what most concerns us, the aesthetic revolution within contemporary portraiture resulted in the first place from the very different concept of mankind and his place in the cosmos that our age has developed. Secondly it resulted from the very different idea that we now have of what life is and what it means per se. It is no longer possible to locate mankind as the center of anything but himself—nor, however, can his body or soul be dealt with separately or reduced to an ideal, closed prototype. From whatever angle the question is considered—physical, biological or psychological—we cannot reduce man’s identity and thus the representation of his image to his exterior, morphological features. Nor do these fit within an interpretation that is not an ongoing, dynamic one. (…)”
THE MASK AS IMAGE AND STRATEGY,
JOHN KLEIN
“Never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it” Pablo Picasso
“(…) Picasso needed the mask to intercede for him against the Western tradition of realism. He deployed the idea of the mask in the Demoiselles both as an image of otherness and as a strategy in his ongoing desire to find alternative languages of visual representation.He had used the masking idea in both of these ways in the portrait of Stein as well, but the difference between the work of art done from imagination and the portrait of a particular individual is crucial. The short arc traced by these two paintings is dense with implications for the artistic use of the idea and physical characteristics of a mask when executing a portrait of an individual sitter. But the mask used either as an exotic substitute for the sitter’s face—the mask as image—or as a mediating term—the mask as strategy—does somehow protect the artist; it preserves his or her integrity and aids in negotiating the transaction between artist and sitter at the heart of making a portrait. (…)”
The image of the mask and the strategy of the mask: there is generally not a hard line between the two. (…)The fascination Picasso and other modern painters and sculptors felt for masks and masking is inseparable from the primitivist appropriation of exotic material culture that is such a key component of visual modernism, masking practices within the Western tradition notwithstanding. There is no doubt that modernist primitivism gave a new dimension to the role of the mask in portraiture. (…)
At the risk of stating the obvious, artists who deploy the mask as either a mediating device or as an image with particular cultural resonance do not paint or sculpt a mask that is then overlaid on a painted or sculpted face, like an actual mask on an actual face. In art the artist substitutes the mask for the face, or transforms the face into a mask. With actual masking, whether ritual or theatrical, the viewer or audience may be acutely aware that there is an individual behind the mask. In portraiture that engages the category of the mask, the mask becomes the face and there is no implied, hidden alternative. This irrevocable substitution of one face for another in such portraiture has implications that were neatly summed up when, informed that many people did not think Stein’s portrait looked much like her, Picasso replied ‘Never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it’. (…)”
A NAME , A WRETCHED PICTURE & WORSE BUST
FROM PICASSO’S STALIN TO WARHOL’ MAO,
WILLIAM FEAVER
“You can use your intent to make anything seem like anything”, Lucian Freud has remarked. “Picasso’s a master at being able to make a face feel like a foot.”
“(…) Since the period when Stalin and Picasso were young, the age of image proliferation has seen notions of fame and celebrity confirmed more and more by photography. Latterly the iconic studio portrait has become to an unprecedented degree the human face of the global brand. Stalin in his day, Mao and Marilyn in theirs, and artists too, from Picasso to Warhol, came to represent ultimate authority, glamour, genius or whatever. Screened, screen-printed, cheapened by tee-shirt piracy and coarsened or spiced in caricature, each in contrived characteristic pose, they have served as the lofty norm, elevated yet familiar. At the same time commissioned portrait painting has remained, on average, platitudinous. Clients’ requirements—pleasing likeness, dignified appearance—impose conformity; the urge that underwrites the genre is, as Lord Byron sneers in Don Juan, ‘To have, when the original is dust, a name, a wretched picture, &worse bust.’ That in itself is, of course, incitement to reinvent. In the age of Picasso the history of true portraiture—portraiture that enlivens—is one of reclamation. Portrait formats (head and shoulders, half length, full length) being more or less invariable and inescapable, the pressure has been to accentuate individuality in style or touch and in comprehensive ambition.
The most notable alternative to Picasso in Paris after the Second World War was Giacometti who in his studio off the rue Hippolyte-Maindron treated his few sitters as rarities, each posed as though clamped to the sort of brace used by early photographers to ensure rigidity during exposure. Where Picasso treated his portrait subjects like flowers to be plucked and trimmed and plonked in the vase, Giacometti created space around them, dislocating scale and compacting the features. His paintings represent, in effect, sculptural situations. The viewer is drawn in, past the framing and into magnetic proximity. The portrait sculptures too: even when, initially, they appear to be little more than frugally caked armatures they prove themselves and hold themselves like souls preserved, each a tense focal triumph, minutely animate. (...)”