What exactly is a portrait? At its simplest, it might be an attempt to depict oneself or someone else via a painting. But then consider German expressionist Max Beckmann\u2019s masterpiece The Beginning, a triptych of scenes from his childhood, or Cuban artist Wifredo Lam\u2019s \u00cddolo, a melange of forms based around the goddess Oy\u00e1. Rooted more in memory and myth than a mere physical likeness, these pieces stretch just what we might decide counts as a portrait.<\/p>\n
Works such as the Beckmann and the Lam \u2013 as well as cubist abstractions, an ornate hand mirror, and one of Joan Mir\u00f3\u2019s pieces of \u201cpainting-poetry\u201d, \u2014 are all portraits as defined by The Met\u2019s new show The Face of Modern Life, which gathers close to 80 works from the museum\u2019s permanent collection. A boisterous and effusive selection of work from one of the nation\u2019s most storied museums, this show gives audiences a peek into the museum\u2019s estimable archives and a chance to wonder just what defines this seemingly simple but truly elusive form.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, Stephanie D\u2019Alessandro, the curator, has taken an expansive view of portraiture, considering how the form has meant different things in different periods, and has also depended on precisely which artist picks up a brush. In this show she is exploring, among other things, just where the subject ends and the artist begins. \u201cPeople often assume the portrait of someone resembles them, but what is it that resembles them?\u201d D\u2019Alessandro pondered during a video interview about the exhibit. \u201cIs it the physical look? Is it something else? And what of the artist gets injected into that?\u201d<\/p>\n
Marsden Hartley \u2013 Portrait of a German Officer Painting, 1914. Photograph: Alfred Stieglitz Collection<\/p>\n
Visitors to The Face of Life are first greeted by the iconic presence of Pablo Picasso\u2019s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, a work that redefined ideas around portraiture of women and pointed the Spanish artist toward cubism. Of it, Stein memorably wrote: \u201cIt is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the painting of the portrait, Picasso is reported as having said: \u201cI can\u2019t see you any longer when I look,\u201d choosing to blot out the face of Stein rather than continue painting her. Months later he would return to the work and create Stein\u2019s face from memory, making one of the best-known visages in all of western art. \u201cIt\u2019s that grappling with resemblance,\u201d said D\u2019Alessandro, \u201chow do I make this thing familiar to me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Picasso\u2019s portrait is coupled with an excerpt from Stein\u2019s 1923 textual poem If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso, one of four such poetic pieces found throughout the exhibit. As much as Picasso does, Stein questions what precisely is a likeness, letting the words \u201cexact\u201d and \u201cresemblance\u201d slowly mutate across the span of 27 delicious words before simply asserting that a portrait always follows its own logic.<\/p>\n
\u201cExact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another show headliner is \u00cddolo by Lam, a recent acquisition of The Met\u2019s. The painting is partly rooted in Lam\u2019s understanding of Santer\u00eda, a religion that emerged in Cuba through the intermixing of the west African Yoruba tradition and Catholicism. Depicting Yoruba\u2019s majestic goddess Oy\u00e1, Lam reveals her in a state of emergence, making the portrait one of her movement between human and animal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way he painted the work, the media is kind of dripping,\u201d said D\u2019Alessandro, \u201cas if the painting itself is coming into being at the same time as she\u2019s transitioning from one state into another.\u201d<\/p>\n
A second fantastic new acquisition on display is the French painter Francis Picabia\u2019s Elegance, a monstrous portrait of a woman with a parasol that makes evident the artist\u2019s dadaist history. This work has been paired with poet Wallace Stevens\u2019 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, whose lines seem to meet up with Picabia\u2019s bizarre woman: \u201cI do not know which to prefer \/ The beauty of inflections \/ Or the beauty of innuendoes \/ The blackbird whistling \/ Or just after.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paul Klee \u2013 May Picture. Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really about human presence, the drive to connect, proxies or allusions to existence,\u201d said D\u2019Alessandro. \u201cEven works that don\u2019t feel like portraits or don\u2019t look like portraits can function as a kind of portrait, a kind of record.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the spiritual to the abstract, The Face of Modern Life also offers works that are not so much reproductions of a person\u2019s form as they are impressions based on the texture of experience and emotional temperature. Among these are Paul Klee\u2019s May Picture and Vasily Kandinsky\u2019s Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II). Said to be inspired by a garden, May Picture offers an array of dreamy squares in soft colors, while Garden of Love offers vestiges of a central sun and several human figures that have been pushed toward illegibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Klee and the Kandinsky are paintings what we could easily call abstract compositions, not portraits in a traditional way but direct aesthetic experiences,\u201d said D\u2019Alessandro. \u201cIn Kandinsky\u2019s case, it\u2019s all the senses working together, a kind of record of an experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Florine Stettheimer \u2013 The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929. Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York<\/p>\n
D\u2019Alessandro emphasized that although the artistic techniques and philosophical ideas that underlie portraiture evolve with the times, the form\u2019s fundamental concerns are timeless. Portraiture can be understood as an attempt to look beyond what we think we know about someone \u2013 and what the technology of the day pushes to the front \u2013 in order to see more deeply. \u201cThe things that we grapple with today \u2013 like virtual reality or phones \u2013 are technologies that make us see and not see things. These things have parallels with an earlier time. It\u2019s a kind of reconnecting with the past and seeing that all is not always new.\u201d<\/p>\n
D\u2019Alessandro also sees in portraiture the fundamental human urge to, in EM Forster\u2019s words, only connect \u2013 to bridge the gap between the inside and the outside. The works she\u2019s gathered in The Face of Life are a testament to the many ways artists have endeavored to do just that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s something in that human drive that connects us the whole time. There are deeper stories, there are different reasons that things happen. If we take the time to look into a portrait, we can understand something far beyond the subject.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What exactly is a portrait? At its simplest, it might be an attempt to depict oneself or someone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-712265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}