The Portrait
Byron Kim, Emmett at Twelve Months #3, 1994, egg tempera on panel, each panel 2 x 2½ x ¾”, overall installation 17 x 14½ x ¾”. Collection of the Artist. © The Artist / Image Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.
When Richard Saunders set out to write the introduction to his book American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity, the first thing he did was make an attempt to define portraiture. “Early on, I looked at what [art historian] Dorinda Evans had written,” he recalls. “She termed it a ‘representation of a specific person.’ And that works. But then there’s Richard Avedon, who says that it’s ‘an image of someone who knows they’re being photographed.’ I don’t agree with that entirely, but it is useful.” Then, he says, there’s the differentiation that Shearer West makes between portraits and likenesses (a rather archaic term) and the question of what makes a documentary portrait—a mug shot or a driver’s license photograph—and what makes a fine art portrait.
For many art historians, a likeness is an easy-to-read image that captures the mere physical characters of a sitter. A caricature created by a street artist, for example, can be called a likeness but would hardly be considered a portrait. “For years, we were creating a differentiation between portraits and likenesses, placing portraits higher up on the chain than likenesses,” he argues. “But I think the more compelling question is: What do we make of all these images? Why do we create them? What function do they serve, and who is behind them?”
These questions are enough to make your head spin. But in the age of selfie sticks and Instagram and the all-too-easily-shared self-portrait, they seem more relevant than ever. Images are being created at an unprecedented rate, and many of these images feature faces as the focal point. Are these all portraits? Likenesses? And what about those other images that proliferate online and in print—the images of feet standing on brightly colored tile or those pictures of hands holding a coffee cup. Are these familiar tropes of online life another form of portraiture? Who, if anyone, gets to define what a portrait is—or what it means?
The question of portraiture wasn’t always so problematic. For centuries, portraits were paintings or sculptures commissioned by the ruling elite to show themselves—or their friends and family—at their best. “If you look at when portraits were painted, you’ll see that they were usually done at specific points in people’s lives,” Saunders explains. “It wasn’t as though someone woke up one day and said, ‘Ah, I need my portrait done.’ More often it was because they had just been appointed to office, or their son was going away to England to school or they had just gotten married. These portraits were statements about wealth, achievement and their place in society.” The images were typically created for display in private homes, though sometimes they had political import as well, like the bust of John Brown currently on view at the Tufts University Art Gallery, a keystone piece in their exhibit Mortal Things: Portraits Look Back and Forth. In this work, the famous abolitionist is shown in prison as he awaits trial. Created by the Boston-based sculptor Edward Brackett in 1860, the bust displays the gravitas of Brown’s situation and functions as a statement about the importance of his cause.
American Flag of Faces Exhibit, Ellis Island, New York, c. 1990–2011. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
The break with traditional portraiture began in the early 20th century when artists began to experiment with abstraction and found objects as a way of depicting themselves and others. Many of these provocative pieces were on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s recent show This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today. According to Anne Goodyear, one of the three curators of the exhibit (alongside Jonathan Frederick Walz and Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo), portraiture can also be defined by examining the intent of the creator. Bowdoin’s exhibit focused on the history of abstract portraiture, and as Goodyear argues, this history is not a truly linear one. It is a history of moments and waves, swells of abstraction that tend to correspond with political movements. As the viewer moved from gallery to gallery, they were presented with a series of paintings and sculptures that aggressively challenge the very idea of portraiture, from Marsden Hartley’s One Portrait of One Woman (the woman being Gertrude Stein, whose work was referenced multiple times in the show) to Glenn Ligon’s moving and disturbing Runaway series from 1993 that juxtaposes images of runaway slaves with descriptions of Ligon written by his friends and colleagues.
“Abstraction,” asserts Goodyear, “permits the expression of identities that are transgressed in some way.” Issues of race, gender and sexuality were alluded to throughout the show—though often, it took more than a cursory glance to see the identity politics that lurked beneath. Throughout the exhibit, the physical body was depicted and explored through various media, yet rarely did visitors see a face. This was a purposeful decision that helped illuminate various elements of identity that are often unseen—the internal, emotional self rather than the public scaffolding of the human face. In abstraction, these artists found a way to approach the subject’s character. “That’s what a portrait is: a way of getting close to the person that it’s depicting,” writes sculptor Janine Antoni about her piece Umbilical. This striking sculpture is made from family silverware and features the negative impressions of the artist’s mouth and her mother’s hand. By calling to mind the process of nourishment, Antoni speaks to the primal bond between mother and child. In this piece, parts of the body come to stand in for a whole, just as parts of a relationship come to stand for the entirety. Umbilical is more than a portrait of a person—it’s a portrait of a specific relationship, the very concept of motherhood and the invisible ties that bind us all.
While visually these abstracted portraits can seem like a dramatic break from the traditional modes of portraiture, Goodyear and Saunders both point toward the history of the art form as a means for understanding its modern iterations. “There are ways in which portraiture has always been a conceptual act,” says Goodyear. “One of the exciting things about portraiture is that it can often provide a way of thinking about the ideal community that one occupies and the ideal individuals that occupy that community.” The very act of creating a portrait deems the individual depicted worthy of sight—it is an act of respect, one that recognizes the sitter as a visible member of society. This is equally true of John Singer Sargent’s Dr. Morton Prince at Tufts and Dan Flavin’s luminous flowerpot sculpture Barbara Roses at Bowdoin.
Rachel Perry, Lost in my Life (fruit stickers), 2010, pigmented ink print. Image courtesy of the artist.
The concept of community plays a crucial role in Mortal Things, an exhibit that draws from Tufts’ permanent collection, loans from donors’ collections and works created specifically for the show by university staff and local artists. “This show is very personal to Tufts,” explains Lissa Cramer, exhibitions coordinator for the Tufts University Art Gallery. Throughout the show, there are nods to members of the greater Tufts University community, including Alice Neel’s Ginny, named for the Tufts medical student who modeled for the painting. Split into three sections—the Invisible Gaze, the Acknowledged Gaze and the Self-Conscious Gaze—the show explores the act of translating a person’s essence into a physical object. Some pieces, like the bust of John Brown, are literal and realistic, while others, like Joe Zane’s Agnosia are highly abstracted. “When I first looked at this piece,” says Cramer, “I thought it was just a tulip. But it’s also a portrait of the artist’s face in profile.” In a sense, the piece reproduces the medical condition for which it is named. It is a portrait of the artist, but it is also potentially a portrait of a rare neurological disorder.
While the Bowdoin show excelled in displaying the abstract, the most compelling pieces in the Tufts exhibit are the contemporary realistic portraits, including Cobi Moules’s Untitled (11-04-2008)—a painting of himself midway through the process of transitioning from female to male. It is a portrait of change—an image of a process. In some ways, it is also an image of a triumph. Like the portraits of the 18th century, which highlighted significant moments in the sitters’ lives, Moules has chosen to capture on canvas a meaningful and profound shift in his life.
“As we become more comfortable moving away from the dominant mainstream, artists have found new ways of reimaging what identity could be,” says Goodyear. “These portraits show how many artists are consciously trying to move away from imposed ideal categories.” Taken as a whole, these portraits—whether they are selfies or abstractions, paintings or sculptures—can be viewed as a timeline of American identity. Each piece illuminates or celebrates the individual, revealing an aspect of character, while offering an opportunity for connection and empathy within the viewer.
When it comes to portraiture, Saunders argues, “there’s always an agenda.” For some artists, the agenda is to paint a wealthy painter in a flattering light. For others, it is to reveal aspects of the hidden self. Even casual snapshots can be viewed as a form of portraiture because they reveal our values and our desires. “Americans, for a long time now, have emphasized the individual,” Saunders says. “All the images we create are reminders of various kinds that we are making it. They help tell that story for us.”
As American culture moves toward a more open and inclusive vision of identity, we will likely continue to see more images that approach the inner self and its complicated, messy, contradictory truths. Portraits allow us to reimagine ourselves, opening up seemingly infinite answers to the ever-present question: How should a person be?
Katy Kelleher is a writer, editor and teacher who lives in a small log cabin in the woods of Buxton, ME. Her first book, Handcrafted Maine, is due out in 2017 from Princeton Architectural Press.