Untitled Document

New Prints 2009/Summer -
Portraits: In Pursuit of Likeness

June 16 - July 30, 2009

Essayist: Monroe Denton

Years ago, my friend B., who would go on to a distinguished career as an art historian and curator, told me her dissertation would be on a minor portraitist in early 20th-century England. Who would ever publish it to establish her career credentials, I wondered. “I don’t care about publication: I want it on Masterpiece Theatre.” Of course: Portraits – that genre of an earlier time. She was attracted to the way her subject would move from country home to country home, acting as confidant to his sitters, living by his wits, by discreet gossip, good manners and the ability and insights of the therapeutic discipline coming out of Vienna and Cambridge at that moment. The portrait is a record of a presence in balance, the balance of power between subject and artist.

John Singer Sargent’s “Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend” reflects the shift in Modernism—from a balance which was achieved despite a socially determined dominance of the patron to the reign (if not the tyranny: viz. Alice Neel or Francis Bacon) of the painter. The presumption of “artistic truth” which Sargent valorized—an aesthetic arrogance—is often a subtext of modernism, whose reign was marked by the shift of portraiture to the domain of photography as the sustained gaze on which traditional portraiture was based was relegated to history, supplanted by the distracted attention which Walter Benjamin noted was a consequence of mechanization. Note the language shift: from the traditional “drawn from life” (with the connotations to “drawn” of “elicited,” “evoked,” ”led”—terms of seduction, of constant power shifts) to “taken” (with implications of brute force—robbery or rape). The intimacy that produced the portrait, over extended “sittings,” has shifted to a single “exposure” (and the recourse to the artifice of the analyst’s space as the only potential safe space for intimacy).

A bit over a hundred years ago, an ambitious American writer in Paris sat for a full season for an equally ambitious Spanish painter. Gertrude Stein’s reaction to Picasso’s limning of her over the erased product of those months of sittings is recounted in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It also (with a brief detour for James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait) marks the end of the great portrait tradition—that belief that the artist looks beneath the surface to analyze and re-present an inner life.

The Picasso/Stein 1906 sessions extended the range of Sargent’s well known witticism: “A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.” The accuracy of the image mattered less than the artist’s “vision.” It was not so much the interior life as the whim of the painter.

After all, what is our inner life? Now, we visit therapists, or better yet, watch them on television—whether in Celebrity Rehab or In Therapy, and who wouldn’t like to sit for hours for Gabriel Byrne? The presentness of the portrait distinguishes it from figure painting. The presence is the absence of narrativity.

Is it any wonder that portraiture has faded in the world of psychodynamics where the past intrudes on the present in a cycle of terrifying abreaction, or in the world of cultivated ADHD in which an anxiety for the future undermines our footing. Michael Fried’s summary “Presentness is grace” (admittedly in another context, but pointing to an important aspect of all art) is relegated to history.

What could International Print Center New York have been thinking when it proposed “portraiture” as the theme of its summer exhibition? It is true that portraits have emerged increasingly in the past two decades. After the triumph of the “Pictures Generation”—articulating issues of identity and figuration (albeit within a framework of narrative, however ironic) —there was the real world challenge of AIDS. Portraits became a tool, of witnessing against the vagaries of time the burglaries of time. The sustained look of the portrait was its own testimony, and an almost lost skill.

Lest portraiture be consigned to an historic category, the request for submissions to this exhibition opened the category beyond the traditional image of a sitter—“drawn from life,” as it were. Moving into the world of the mediated image, itself an object, the concept of “portraiture” was extended beyond the animate, which would seem to venture into the domain of the still life. Is an image drawn from a source centuries removed, an image of a work perhaps known only through reproduction to the artist, conceivably a “portrait”? Can an appropriated image escape what would seem its primary genre, the still life, to participate in some of the means of the portrait—in essence, be re-imbued with the portrait’s “presence”? Questions like these formed the basis of debate throughout the judging process.

A related question is how the concept of the “portrait,” implying as it does a singularity appropriate to its subject, relates to the fact of multiple imagery. The portrait print would seem the very apparatus of celebrity—and celebrity is antithetical to the probing intensity of the portrait. There is a history of self-portraits—Dürer, Rembrandt, Ensor—Mailerian “advertisements” for the self. There was also the idea, closely akin to the profiles of coinage, of the portrait as a sign of imperial or other power and domain. The portraits here do not claim this type of iconic value. Now, how do we gauge the truth of a portrait of an unknown non-famous subject? Technique and manual competence. The need for presentness is met in new approaches, including cell-phone photography printed by an inkjet printer.

Art’s ability to fix time—its immediate intimacy—is its power of transcendence—to draw the viewer into an identification with the moment of making—the Benjaminian “aura,” perhaps. In joining this discourse on the possibility of portraiture in contemporary printmaking, we may at least acknowledge the possibility of grace in our presence. It’s a powerful hope.