THE MIRROR & THE MASK
Portraiture in the Age of Picasso
/ Ee6 February to 20 May 2007
Curators: Paloma Alarcó and Malcolm Warner
This 6th February the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and Fundación Caja Madrid are presenting their series of joint exhibitions, entitled The Mirror & the Mask. Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, which offers the first overview of this subject in 20th-century art. Considered one of the principal classical “genres”, the portrait nonetheless occupies a significant position in the work of many of the most important and influential artists of the early 20th-century avant-garde and the various subsequent modern art movements. The exhibition is jointly organised with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (Texas), where it will be shown between 17 June and 16 September 2007.
Private collectors, museums and foundations around the world have loaned paintings and a number of sculptures for this important project, which brings together 145 portraits by around 60 different artists. They include some of the leading names in modern art: Cézanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Freud, Warhol, Miró, Dalí, Giacometti, Modigliani, Kirchner, Munch, Nolde, Kokoschka, Balthus, De Chirico, Bacon, Grosz, Hockney, Malevich, Rousseau and others.
The exhibition’s primary aim is to study and reveal the transformations that took place in the genre of portraiture over the course of the last century, presented within a chronological framework based around the activities of the greatest portraitist of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso. Having remained almost static for centuries, the portrait at this period broke away from its commitment to a lifelike depiction of the model in order to offer new options dictated by the artist’s individual gaze, as well as by experimentation with new visual idioms their application; by the transformation of the modern individual; and finally, by changes in ways of seeing and representing the human being. In the modern portrait it is the individual stamp of the artist that establishes new codes and as a result the genre becomes a polyvalent one: it can look to traditional models or alternatively oppose them, penetrate individual identities or falsify them. In addition, it can create stereotypes but at the same time reveal the fragility and vulnerability of the sitter.
The 20th century saw a crisis in the identity of modern man and another with regard to art’s confidence in the truth of its images. The idea that art should be something different to nature, even at complete odds with the concept of verisimilitude which had always lain at the heart of the portrait, might suggest that the genre of portraiture would be of little interest to the intrinsically non-imitative nature of modern art. This was not, however, the case and we need
Images: Details of the following paintings:
Freud. Reflection (Self-portrait), 1981-1982. Private collection.
Matisse. The Girl with green Eyes, 1908. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Modigliani. Max Jacob, 1916. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Picasso. Head of a Woman (Fernande Olivier), 1909. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
Miró. Portrait II, 1938. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Warhol, Self-portrait, 1986. Courtesy Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York.
For more information and images:
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only to look at the list of names of artists who have worked within this genre in the 20th century –most of them represented in the present exhibition– to appreciate this and to understand their importance for the study of the historical development of the portrait as well as the relevance of the present exhibition.
In addition, the portrait is one of the best-represented genres in the collections of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which include outstanding examples from the 20th century. Portraiture has also been the focus of a number of the Museum’s exhibitions over the past few years (on Raphael, Memling, Kokoschka, etc) and has formed part of important sections within other exhibitions (Die Brücke, Mimesis, Form, Sargent/Sorolla). As a result, the present exhibition will not only enrich our vision of the portrait in the Museum’s collections but will also represent a coherent element with its exhibition strategy and the research carried out up to the present time.
The structure of the exhibition combines a chronological and thematic approach. It opens with the fin-de-siècle and early 20th century in a section devoted to the new approach to the portrait based on models formulated by Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, moving on to offer a comprehensive examination of the new aesthetic ideas to be found within the modern portrait. It ends around 1980 at a time of revision and recapitulation made possible by the versatility of the various idioms of contemporary art.
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum:
Before the Mirror
The exhibition opens with the pioneers of modern portraiture: Gauguin and Van Gogh, the first artists to offer an authentic reconsideration of the genre, principally through their self-portraits. This genre allowed artists to experiment with new techniques and artistic idioms, undertaken in the solitude of the studios before the mirror or through the use of photography. This section also includes self-portraits by Picasso and Munch.
Gesture and Expresion
The need to represent the sitter’s inner psychology brought about a radical change in the visual expression of the portrait, with a new emphasis on the importance of the sitter’s gesture, pose and movement as a means of transmitting a message or emotion. The most important artists using this new approach were to be found in Vienna in the early years of the 20th century: Kokoschka, Schiele and Klimt.
Modern Colours
Following on from Van Gogh, the young Expressionists such as Kirchner and Jawlensky and the Fauves such as Matisse, Vlaminck o Miró started to place new importance on colour as a means of endowing the portrait with a symbolic aura, raising the individual to the category of “type”.
Primitive Masks
The portraits of Madame Cézanne, in which a human being is stripped of its gaze, speech and any expressive eloquence and is transformed into a stone monument, together with the influence of primitive artist were influential for Matisse and Derain and also for artists such as Modigliani, and Picasso. These artists ultimately replaced the individual features of a face by a mask of abstract features, thus opening the way towards the formulation of the modern portrait.
The Broken Mirror
During his Cubist phase Picasso, and in his wake other Cubist artists such as Braque, Gris and Severini, subjected their sitters to formal fragmentation although retaining a vertical format and the placement of the sitter typical of conventional portraiture. This is a further example of
how the new artistic idioms developed by the avant-garde movements came to prevail over the traditional realistic intent of the portrait, relegating the sitter’s identity to a secondary plane and situating the new portrait only one step away from abstraction.
A Portrait of Society
Following World War I, many artists who had been involved in the avant-garde groups proposed a return to figuration. This involved not just a return to depicting the sitter’s appearance but also to certain conventions of traditional portraiture that had previously been eliminated. This new trend within portraiture, with its return to a certain classicism, is evident in numerous works created during the inter-war period, particularly by Picasso but also by Matisse, Dalí, and Lipchitz. During this period another group of artists comprising Grosz, Beckmann, Dix, Schad, Balthus and Freud worked within this genre, reviving figuration as well as the concept of the commissioned portrait. They did so, however, with a new intention; that of revealing an image of modern society through poses that reflected the instability of the times.
Dream and Nightmare
The symbolic portraits by Miró, Dalí, De Chirico and Frida Kahlo function as metaphors of the sitters. In them, the sitters’ appearances and identities are transformed and dissolved, taking on a new form based on Surrealism’s idea of the cryptic image. This section ends with self-portraits by Käthe Kollwitz and Felix Nussbaum which reflect the nightmare of the advance of the Nazi regime.
Fundation Caja Madrid:
Metaphorical Identities
The second part of the exhibition, shown in the Caja Madrid exhibition space, opens with a section focused around an important group of portraits by Picasso (including various sculptures) created around the mid-20th century. These are shown alongside works by Dubuffet, Giacometti and Antonio Saura which manifest different ways of interpreting the portrait through the distortion of the figures.Through his profound transformation of the body and face Francis Bacon visually represented modern man’s alienation and vulnerability. In this section the distortions of the body and flesh to which Bacon subjected his figures are related to portraits by artists such as Auerbach and Kossoff.
The Human Clay
Portraits by Lucian Freud and Stanley Spencer reveal the artists’ interest in conveying the solitude of human existence through one particular motif: the nakedness of the sitter. For Freud, flesh is the element that gives form to the portrait and defines it. “I want the paint to function as if it were flesh so that my portraits are really of a specific person and not just like them”. This section also includes portraits by Avigdor Arikha and Antonio López, two artists equally interested in the objective depiction of the human body.
Snapshots: Hockney/Kitaj - Shadows: Warhol
The last third of the 20th century saw a re-interpretation of the portrait as a result of a revision and reconsideration of the genre undertaken by various artists from the starting-point of the versatility of the various idioms of contemporary art. Portraits by David Hockney, Ronald B.Kitaj and Andy Warhol provide some of the best examples of this evolution and diversity, closing the exhibition with examples of their unique styles.
LECTURE SERIES
The Museum has organised a new thematic course in parallel to this exhibition. The course starts on 7 March and looks at both the portrait and modern identity from a completely new viewpoint in that it does not merely analyse the genre of portraiture but also involves the participation of leading specialists and creative figures from other fields such as film, literature and philosophy. The course comprises eight lectures on Wednesdays at 5.30pm in the Museum’s lecture theatre. It is directed by Francisco Calvo Serraller and continues until 9 May. Enrolment is open between 7 and 21 February for students and Friends of the Museum and from 22 February for the general public.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Title: The Mirror & the Mask. Portraiture in the Age of Picasso
Dates: Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and Fundación Caja Madrid: 6 February to 20
May 2007
Fort Worth (Texas), Kimbell Art Museum: 17 June to 16 September 2007
Organisers: Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Fundación Caja Madrid and the Kimbell Art Museum
Number of works: 150 (Madrid, 145; Forth Worth, 100)
Curators: Paloma Alarcó, Curator of Modern Painting, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and Malcolm Warner, Senior Curator, Kimbell Art Museum
Audioguide: available in Spanish, English and French
Publications: Catalogue (with essays by the two curators and others by Francisco Calvo Serraller, John Klein and William Feaver), published in Spanish and English; and an educational guide.
Website: in Spanish and English
Lecture series: The Portrait in the Century of Picasso. 7 March to 9 May 2007
Director: Francisco Calvo Serraller
VISITOR INFORMATION
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum: Paseo del Prado 8, 28014 Madrid
Opening times and ticket prices: Tuesdays to Sundays 10am to 70m. Ticket office closes 6.30pm
Temporary exhibition: 5 Euros (reduced price 3.50 Euros for students and visitors aged over 65)
Temporary exhibition + Permanent Collection: 9 Euros (reduced price 5 Euros for students and visitors aged over 65)
Pre-booked tickets available on the Museum’s website and on tel: 902 400 222
For more information: tel: (00 34) 91 369 01 51 and
Fundación Caja Madrid: Plaza de San Martín 1, 28013 Madrid
Opening times: Tuesdays to Sundays 10am to 8pm
Free entry
For more information: tel: 902 246 810 and
PRESS INFORMATION