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Looking for a model.

Artist, sitter, patron, and viewer
Any definition of portraiture needs to take account of the unique interrelationship of artists, sitters,
patrons, and viewers that characterizes this genre. The methods by which portraits are produced, the
variables of the relationships between artist and sitter, and the way portraits seem to refer to a
specific moment of production are all significant for portraiture as an art form.
One of the special aspects of portraits is that they are often based on a sitting or series of sittings, in
which the subject of the portrait has physical proximity to the artist representing him or her. The
same could be said for studies from the life model, so it is important to distinguish the portrait
subject from the artists model (although in some cases the boundaries between these caregories
are indistinct). From the foundation of art academies in sixteenth-century Italy, artists employed
models as part of their education in life drawing, or to represent fictional characters in scenes from
history or literature. Models were usually hired and paid by the artist or by academies, ateliers, and
other training instructions, and one of their principal roles was to pose in the nude. The identity of
models is therefore often unknown, and even when they can be identified, their identity was
irrelevant to the purpose they served for the artist.
Many portraits, on the other hand, were commissioned or at least the product of negotiation
between the artist, the sitter, and sometimes a patron or patrons. In contrast to the model, the
identity of the sitter is fundamental to the portrait transaction. It could be said that portraits were
produced with the model as the principal subject, rather than as a tool or accessory. The relationship
between the portrait artist and the sitter raises a number of issues. The first of these is the extent to
which the portraitist is required by social or artistic convention to flatter or idealize the sitter. The
process of negotiation over how the work should look could be carried on while the portrait was
being produced, and it was exactly this sort of interference that led some artists to forbid the sitter
view the work until it was complete. William Dickinsons 1781 stipple engraving A family Piece
satirizes the potential problems of an artist-sitter relationship in which the unprepossessing middle-
class family is already being idealized from the first strokes of the portrait painters brush. The
eighteenth-century artist Elisabeth Vige-Lebruns advice to portrait painters concentrates as much
on how to make aristocratic sitters feel at ease than on the technical aspects of the act of painting
itself. Vige-Lebruns experience indicates the extent to which the sitters practical demands or social
expectations could interfere with the creative process. The centrality of the sitters preferences in
the portrait transaction was notably challenged in much avant-garde portraiture from the late
nineteenth century onwards. But as avant-garde portraits could show stylistic experimentation,
bodily distortion, or human ugliness, the type of sitter represented was often a friend or admirer of
the artist, rather than a formal commissioner.
This can bes een in the paintings of Lucien Freud. There is a debate about the extent to which Freuds
grotesque and ungainly naked figures should be classed as portraits, as opposed to nude studies. The
majority of his paintings depict nudes, and although many of these figures such as the Benefits
Supervisor Resting are not specifically identified in the title, others are named. Freuds attention to
details of facial characteristics distinguishes one likeness from another, and there is a strong sense of
character in his nudes. However, he subverts the traditions of portraiture by avoiding conventional
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poses, displaying whole-length figures naked, stressing ugliness and extremes rather than the ideal or
corrected face and body, and stripping the studio background of any signs of the identity or status of
the sitter. The Benefits Supervisor Resting is one such portrait: the title provides a specific occupation
and putative identity for the sitter, who was Sue Tilley an employee at the Department of Health
and Social Security. However , the voluminous nudity, neutrality of the setting, and apparent
obliviousness of the sitter to the presence of the artist give the work the effect of skilfully wrought
painting of nudity. Most of Freuds portraits were produced with the consent and encouragement of
his sitters, and through their uncompromising nudity, voyeuristic viewpoints, and lack of flattery they
remind the viewer of the inevitably intimate relationship between a portraitist and a sitter.
Sometimes this kind of intimate relationship had problematic social implications. Before the
eighteenth century, the majority of those who sat for portraits had a prominent position in society,
the government, or the church, and artists therefore had to deal with an inequality of status between
themselves and their sitter. Although artists like Titian, Van Dyck, or Velzquez received knighthoods
or other Royal commendations, artists were usually considered well beneath their sitters in class
terms. In normal social interaction such classes did not meet, but in the portrait transaction they had
to come together on quite intimate terms.This interaction contributed to an enhancement of the
status of artists, Velzquezs numerous portraits for the court of Philip IV in the seventeenth century
gave him so prominent a place in the Royal Household that he could include his own self-portrait as
the central figure in Las Meninas. Velzquez dominates the centre of this portrait, while the king and
queen (seen in a mirror on the back wall) are symbolically and perspectivally central to the
composition, but physically diminutive in comparison with Velzquez. A century later, this aspect of a
portraitss production also meant that artists who specialized in portraiture were sometimes
required to adapt their studios to accommodate the presence of high-born or wealthy subjects.
Successful artists of eighteenth century Europe, such as Pompeo Batone in Rome, Joshua Reynolds in
England, and Elisabeht Vige-Lebrun in France, therefore had well-located and well-appointed
studios which became fashionable outposts of society as well as workrooms.
*+
The debates surrounding the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in London further indicate
the tensions between the perception of the portrait as a work of art and the sense that portraits
have a broader function. In the mid-nineteenth century, when discussions were underway about the
formation of a gallery of portraits, some argued that only portraits of high aesthetic quality should be
allowed in the collection, but the debate was dominated by those who emphasized the historical
importance of visages of significant people from British history. The founder of the concept of the
National Portrait Gallery, Philip Henry Stanhope, made this clear in a speech to the House of Lords on
4 March 1856, when he indicated that the gallery should include those persons who are most
honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature, or
in science.
*+
The portraits discussed so far represent people who had authority, power, wealth, talent, or fame.
These portraits helped create and perpetuate a public image of leaders, prominent members of
society, creative people, and celebrities. But in considering the question of status and power, it is
also crucial to look at portraits of those who did not have a high position in society and who may
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have had momentary notoiety but were relatively unknown even in their own time. Portraits that fall
under this category may represent the poor, servents, criminals, and in certain periods of history
non-Europeans. Such portraits were rarely commissioned by the subjects themselves but could be
requested by interested third parties, or produced by the artist as a commercial speculation. Unlike
portraits of prominent members of society that were intended to project a message about the power
or virtue of their subjects, portraits of the unknown or members of an underclass did not send such
signals. In many cases portraits of this underclass breach portrait conventions, and in doing so they
give us an insight into how certain societies expressed a fascination wit hor a didain for otherness.
Portraits of lower ranks of society were frequently commissioned by the people for whom they
worked. Among the most famous examples of such a commission was the series of portraits of court
dwarfs painted by Velzquez for Philip IV. Although it was common during the Renaissance for artists
to produce portraits of court dwarfs, Velzquezportraits are unusually striking Works. His portrait of
Calabacillas demonstrates how Works like this abandoned conventions in a way that would have
been unacceptable for higher classes of sitter in the Spanish court of the time.Calabacillas is seated in
a relaxed and casual crosslegged pose, in contrast to the stiff and formal postures of state
portraiture. He is smiling rather than showing the static expressioncommon to most seventeenth-
century Spanish court portraiture. He is also represented with
WEST, SHEARER. (2004) Portraiture. Oxford University Press, P 37-40, 48, 97-98 (Deurne Couwelaer)
GAYFORD, MARTIN. (2010) Man with a Blue Scarf. On sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. Thames &
Hudson: New York. (35106) (Nederlandstalig in Permeke)
Soutine preferred to paint portraits of people that he did not know personally. Thus, he could
partially check his involvement in the sitter and operate more objectively. Only occasionally did he
paint people with whom he was close. Soutines insistence on the physical particulatiry of his
subjects, together with his move towards more anonymous sitters, demonstrates his resistance to
completely losing himself in the subjective aspects of the portrait experience.
TUCHMAN, MAURICE. DUNOW, ESTI. PERLS, KLAUS. (2001) Soutine. Catoloque raisonn. Taschen:
Kln. (30346)
Stieglitzs exposure of his own desire in looking at the human face, though just as artistically self-
conscious, was in contrast a more introspective move. His portraiture as artist and, often, lover,
acted as a diaristic affair and a contest of wills that beg to be decoded. He showed that a portraitist
could have a personal, conceivably hidden, stake in the outcome of the sitting. Whatever their
existence away from Stieglitzs lens, sitters come to life for us above all as presences in the
photographers own time. He studied them in the hope of learning the terms of his relationship with
the chosen other.
Stieglitz himself expressed the matter in terms reminiscent of the poet Walt Whitman: I am the
moment. I am the moment with all of me and anyone is free to be the moment with me. What he
proposed was something more than a collaboration with sitters; a kind of inter-body partnership,
making their wilfulness a part of his own. Self-interested as it was, this regard partook of an intrigue
with the paradoxes of the ego, brought to the worlds attention by the advent of Freudian
psychology.
4

KOZLOFF, MAX. 2007. The Theatre of the Face. Portrait Photography Since 1900. Phaidon Press, New
York.
Since the 1950s, scholars have recognized Marie-Thrse Walter as a crucial muse for Picassos work
of the 1930s. But the precise date of her entry into the artists life and work long remained a
mystery. As the first canvases in which her presence seemed obvious dated from 1932, it initially
appeared reasonable to assume that their relationship had begun the previous year. However, in
1974 Pierre Cabanne published an interview with Marie-Thrse Walter in which she told hem that
she had met Picasso on Staerday, January8, 1927, while shopping on the Boulevard Haussmann. This
information led to a new conundrum, since as several scholars subsequently pointed out Marie-
Thrses image seemed to be latently visible in Picassos work at least a year earlier. The mystery
was resolved in the minds of some specialists by describing such pictures as premonitory, or by
relying on the idea that Picasso had been drawn to Marie-Thrse herself because of her
resemblance to a model generated from his own imagination.
RUBIN, WILLIAM. (1996) Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. Thames and
Hudson: London. P60 (Permeke)
Drawing
MRAZ, BOHUMIR. 1983. Ingres Zeignungen. Verlag Werner Dausien. P 21,31,46 (27145)
FRANCIS, MARK. KOEPPLIN, DIETER. 1998. Andy Warhol. Dessins 1942-1987. Editions de la
Martinire: Paris. Afbeelding nr. 4, 5, 142, 145, 150, 167, 173, 195, 200 (Permeke)
LUCKHARDT, ULRICH. MELIA, PAULA. (1995) David Hockney. A Drawing Retrospective. Thames and
Hudson, London. (30336)
Picasso, Cocteau, George Grosz, Giacometti
Hue and tonality
Yan Pei-Ming
Paula Becker Modersohn
Picassos approach to color and shading remains basically within the model defined for the first time
by the Renaissance master. In a briljant 1962 essay, John Shearman pointed out that Leonardos
handling of chiaroscuro entailed a fundamental revision in the role of color within Western art. While
the masters of the Early Renaissance, from Giotto through Fra Angelico, had refined the use of
shading to model three-dimentional form, their approach to color had remained fundamentally
Gothic in the sense that they tended to use each of the colors available to them typically blue, red,
green, and yellow in its purest, most characteristic hue. Shading was imposed locally for instance,
to model a piece of colored drapery. However, as Shearman points out, they made little attempt to
compensate for the fact that different hues had inherently different values: red, for instance, being
darker than yellow. The sharp shift in value from one colored area to the next created a disjunction
between neighboring forms, undoing the consistency of the three-dimentional illusion. Leonardos
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conceptual breakthrough, Shearman argues, was to define his overall composition a priori through a
consistent system of light-dark shading, to which the colors were strictly subordonated. Adjacent red
and yellow draperies, for example, might be brought together in overall value by lightening the red
with white tints and darkening the yellow with black shading. Leonardos illusionistically consistent
example quickly carried the day, and color remained subordinate to drawing and shading in Western
art from the High Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. Leonardos model begins to lose its
strangle hold only with the rise of Impressionism ; indeed, the story of modern art is in large part the
story of colors progressive liberation from line and shading, in the work of artists from Claude Monet
to Henri Matisse to Mark Rothko.
In this sense, Picasso remains closer to Leonardos essentially draftsmanly and tonal model than to
the coloristic tradition in twentieth-century modernism; in many pictures, Picasso deliberately lets
the tonal underdrawing show through or remain uncovered, as if to remind us that the color
however beautiful or poetic is an add-on to the determining light-dark matrix. A black-and-white
photograph of a canvas by Picasso gives us a fairly clear understanding of the paintings Construction,
since it is primarily the rightness of the light-dark values which accounts for the coherence of the
pictorial scaffolding. In contrast, a black-and-white photograph of a Matisse often communicates
little sense of the pictures real aesthetic arrangement, since his compositional structures depend
primarily on the rapports of hues. Color, Picasso said to Apollinaire, are only symbols. Reality is to
be found in light alone. Not only is the visual scaffolding of a Picasso painting detemined by its linear
structure and accompanying distribution of lights and darks, but the color choices within this
scaffolding no longer dependent upon visual reality become virtually interchangeable structurally
as long as the color at any given point in the composition has the appropriate value. Hence the
artists much repeated but insufficiently understood mot, when I run out of blue, I use red.
This is not, however, to accept the conventional bromide according to which Picasso is not a
colorist. On the contrary, in works such as the 1931 Still Life on a Pedestal Table and the 1932 Girl
Before a Mirror, Picasso established himself as one of the great colorists of the century. But he
employed color to psychological and poetic, rather than structual, ends. There are a handful of
drawings, such as sketch III of the 1936 Rosetta Stone drawing in which Picasso jotted down his
notations of the colors he planned to use in his painting. Virtually all of the indications that can be
determined in this example, such as burnt sienna for the ground, blue for the hats sprig of leaves
and light gray for its brim, light yellow for the edges of the collar/sculpture vase, and black for the
dark mass of hair at the left and bottom right, are precisely those of the finished picture. What this
notational procedure tells us is that Picasso, at least in this instance, chose his hues conceptually, out
of feeling for and in associations with the forms they inhabited. For him, colors primary purpose
was its affective function. Once he had made a drawing to establish the compositional matrix of light
and dark, he could visualize the colors clearly enough to finish the picture without further
modification. He apparently did not feel any need to test colors, to see what they looked like,
though we can be sure that if he had been disappointed by the result he would have changed his
picture, as he sometimes did.
RUBIN, WILLIAM. (1996) Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. Thames and
Hudson: London. P92-95 (Permeke)
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He walked onto the canvas in his stockinged feet, slipped the gloves on, sat on the cushion, and
began to work. I wont know until I put the painting back up on the wall if this first round of scraping
is a preliminary step or the last one, he said. He smoothly brushed some alcohol on the blond-haired
figures face, then waited a minute or two. I could see how the alcohol was beginning to cause the
paint to blur and dissove. At the sight of this, Leon took the cleaver in his right hand, held the figures
face flat and taut with his left (think of an old-fashioned barber giving a shave), and made one long,
clean swipe with the blade. He wiped the knife on a paper towel and made another swipe. And
another. He patted the face with a paper towel, soaking up the paint-muddied alcohol puddled
there. He brushed on more alcohol, waited, scraped, pressing firmly and evenly. With each scrape
the face revealed more of itself. Through the layer of pink, chaffed now and gaining translucence
Golubs way of getting flesh, its certain, indeterminable texture and substantiality, is extraordinary
I could glimpse the drawing and underpainting he had done weeks before, showing through now as
puffiness under the eyes, deep lines in the jowls. And yet there was this, too: The face the image
was actually retreating into the very tooth of the canvas. Strictly speaking, there was very little
substance and pigment remaining where Golub had scraped. Up close, you saw nubby fabric dusted
with color. It was as if the image Leon wanted had been there a very long time, and he was digging,
like an archeologist, to find it and bring it up.
MARZORATI, GERALD. (1990) A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub. Viking Penguin: New York. P81-83
(achtergrondcollectie bib Antwerpen)
Tuymans
Alex Katz
That was the beginning of my lesson. I said, no ones going to knock me off the wall. Period. I like to
make a painting that you can stick anywhere; thats the idea.
There is often a smaller version of the painting in front of me when Im working on the big one. I
know every brush for every stroke, the colours are all mixed in big pots and theres an indication of
the armature. So then its a matter of a technical performance. And Ive been painting long enough
to get it right although you never know what the paints going to do when it hits the canvas. But
you have the enery all built up. Thats the big thing to have the energy.
Over Song (2003) Its got to be inside six hours. I knew that before I started. Its like a piano
performance thats supposed to be twenty-three minutes; If it goes to thirty-five, it isnt good. That
painting was the perfect performance.
Alex Katz Five Hours by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz
RATCLIFF, CARTER. STORR, ROBERT; BLAZWICK IWONA. (2005) Alex Katz. Phaidon, New York.
(Permeke)
Background color
The artist went to some length to create the luminous quality of the blue folding screen (the wall
was painted blue in 1975), writing to the maker of Reckitts Blue whose product had long been used
for brightening clothes. Braun explained: Remember he was experimenting for ages to obtain a
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really translucent vibrant blue. By accident (I think maybe via his mum doing his washing) he hit on a
packet of Reckitts Blue small sachets of blue powder used for adding to the wash to give it a
blueish-white tinge. So he used Reckitts Blue for his background . I still see him in front of my minds
eye mixing the fantastic blue powder with linseed oil. He was absolutely delighted with the result, it
seemed to give a specially luminous quality to the paint (what else he added- i think a touch of white
I dont know).
For the set-up in Striding Figure of 1975 it was rubbed into fairly wet plaster directly onto the wall:
Its in one of the best lights of the studio. I never want to change it. So unless a new demand comes
from another painting, this blue will always be appearing in pictures.
LAMPERT, CATHERINE. (2007) Euan Uglow. The complete paintings. Yale University Press: New
Haven, London
On Riot III : One night, when he turned on the overhead spotlights, the canvas looked as though it
were ready for the movers. The two big figures in the foreground were completely covered with
Brown wrapping paper, taped carefully to the canvas to create what looked at first glance to be big
silhouettes. The smaller figure to the upper right the one with the hat was similarly covered, as
was the body being dragged on the rope. Over the canvas that remained exposed, the ground upon
which Golub had drawn his figures, there were wide, watery slashes of black paint zigzagging every
which way. It was as if the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline had been brought in to do the
pictures ground. Leon explained that this was the last stage before he soaked the background with
red oxide. The red acrylic, which he would apply with a wide brush attached to a long pole (like a
broom handle), would mask all this graffiti-like black, but only temporarily only until he began
scraping it away. Then the black would come through, creating a certain texture and shimmer,
activating the canvas. Actually, Ill get a little white down First, maybe another color or two. I mean,
just a few slashes, like the black you see. It took me a long time to get this right- figure out what
would give me the effect I wanted. And now it still takes me a long time, all this preparation for each
painting, the layering and so on. But I think there is something to the slowness, the way I have to
spend so much time with each painting, that fits in with what it is I am painting. This erosion: a
buildup, then erosion.
A week or so later- the slashes of paint in the background gone now, hidden under coats of red paint
Leon talked with me about how he came to use the essentially monochrome grounds he does in his
big paintings. Already in his Gigantomachy paintings of the 1960s, he explained, he was seeking to
universalize his pictorial space, purge it of any detail that might lead the viewer to read it as a
particular place. He called his backgrounds no spaces in those years the space of existential
action, space emptied of time, history, any realistic mooring. Man, as represented in the
Gigantomachies (uniform, faceless, battling to survive), was to be understood as estranged, alone in
the deepest sense. The space in which they ran, stumbled, fought a washed-out brown, the color of
bare, dirtied canvas was nowhere, or maybe everywhere. The one adjustment he did make to his
backgrounds when he made the transition in the 1970s from the Gigantomachies to the more
realistic, detailed Mercenaries and Interrogations had to do with color he filled in the bare
backgrounds with bold red. He had used red in a few smaller paintings in the 1960s. He liked the idea
of using the same color the Romans in Pompeii and elsewhere used for the backgrounds of their
great frescoes: Ive been attracted to Roman art since the fifties, when I lived in Italy, and really got
8

into the stuff, Leon said. He also liked that red is a heraldic color big and pronounced and thats
what he wants his art to be. But mostly he liked the way it worked once he tried it, the way the
mercs and torturers and goons seem at first to float on the red, then to muscle forward into our
the viewers space. With the red, the figures intervene, Leon said, much as they intervene in real
life, in history.
MARZORATI, GERALD. (1990) A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub. Viking Penguin: New York. P81-83
(achtergrondcollectie bib Antwerpen)
LOPEZ-REY, JOSE. (1996) Velzquez. Painters of portraits.Taschen, Kln. (Permeke)
Portrait Photography
LEWIS HINE
Hine rested his case for social activism on his up-front involvement with faces. I have always been
more interested in persons, than in people. Hine looked into the human face with an attachement
which was all the more kinetic because he viewed his surroundings whether mineshaft, street
corner or renement hallway as an impersonal locale. Sometimes he was sketch about these
backgrounds, or darkened them when he used magnesium flash at night. The face is offered to us as
the one enduring presence that is resistent to, though afflicted by this pervasive social indifference.
A portrait studio is a neutral area, a non-place that operates merely as a backdrop. By contrast,
Hines backdrop is an inimical reality, a flagrantly negative condition that highlights the vulnerability
of his subjects. Hines mordant physical account of environment would not by itself have transmitted
his judgement to the viewer; it is his implicit moral comparison of figures and space that achieves this
end.
ERNEST BELLOCQ
Portraits of whores, taken around 1912 in the netherworld of Storyville, a New Orleans red-light
district. His dusty plates were only found by chance and printed by the well-known photographer
Friedlander around fifty years later.
The young women are sometimes posed before backsheets whose edges show; pet dogs get in the
way of faces; figures are swallowed up by inexplicable shadows, one fashionably dressed lady seems
unaware of the laundry on a line behind her. A commercial photographer of shipping in his day job,
Bellocq took little care or had no idea how to frame his sitters in any accord with their
presentation of self. This makeshift exposition is so blatant that one almost pities it. In his
introduction to Storywille Portraits (1970), the monograph featuring these images, the curator John
Szarkowski recounts how a friend of the photographer, Joe Sanarens, remembered Bellocq snapping
tramcars in the street only as they moved off: he never did get a picture of the whole When we
are touched by his portraits, therefore, it must be through a surprising impression their
unpremeditated disclosures.
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN / EDWARD STEICHEN / ALFRED STIEGLITZ
9

(Pictorialism Belle Epoque (1890-1914) glamour culturele iconen keken naar Whistler en
Japanse prenten)
There is an element of tease in their portraiture. For example, sitters are depicted as almost
bodiless presences, even though popular prejudice runs in favour of them having flesh and blood.
Everything has to be subdued, reduced in value, idealized, made more poetical, but also less real.
Such idealism also replaced the portrait background nominally a locale somewhere in the World
by a shadowy plasma intended to be symbolic of human reflection.
The sitters are not so much placed in the world as related to the edges of the frame, and positioned
with such rigour that any alternative would disturb the poise Stieglitz desired.
KOZLOFF, MAX. 2007. The Theatre of the Face. Portrait Photography Since 1900. Phaidon Press, New
York.
*+ Avedons approach and aesthetic, in which he positioned his subjects in front of a featureless
gray background and routinely included the black borders of his film negative in his prints.
The groundbreaking panoramic image Andy Warhol and members of The Factory, New York,
October 30, 1969), would become one of the signal achievements of Avedons career a work of
aesthetic radicalism that perfectly reflected the preoccupations and ambitions of its subject and
maker. [+ At first Avedon posed the entire Group at full lenght, milling about the set. Above them,
at the top of the frame, he incorporated his studio lights, fitted with umbrella reflectors: I sort of
thought one of the things I would try to do was show the studio, he later explained. This inclusion
a attempt, perhaps, to highlight the Factorys propensity fors elf-presentation was characteristic of
Avedons early sessions for Hard Times, which included a number of experiments with breaking the
fourt wall. As the sitting progressed, the sheer size of the Group seemed to overwhelm Warhols
presence in the frame, and Avedon had the Factory regulars si ton the Floor, at the artists feet.
PANZER, MARY. MENAND, LOUIS. RUBIN, BOB. SHAWCROSS, WILLIAM. (2012) Avedon: Murals &
Portraits. Gagosian: New York. (35516)
Rineke Dijkstra
Sharon Lockhart
PEPPER, TERENCE. (2013) Man Ray Portraits. Fonds Mercator, National Portrait Gallery, London.
(Permeke)
DURAND, REGIS. DABIN, VERONIQUE. (2006) Cindy Sherman. Flammarion Jeu de Paume: Paris.
(35208)
Composition
Cut outs Alex Katz
One day in 1959 Katz realized that a certain painting had begun to resist him. The figure was
successful but would not click into place against its background. Exasperated, he cut the ground away
from the image and mounted it on wood. Katz had invented the cut-out.
10

Gustav van de woestijne
Conceptual portrait
Jiri David (2001) No Compassion series a series of portraits depicting World leaders in the midst of
artificial tears. Through computer manipulation, David superimposes his own tears on the likes of
Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and others. That these World
protagonists are not actually crying becomes a moot point; the portraits are not gimmicks or satires,
they are imaginative glimpses into the humanness of all larger-than-life figures. David selects World
agents without judgements on their relative goodness or badness and affords them an instance of
compassion.
NAIME, SANDY. HOWGATE, SARAH. (2006) The Portrait Now. National Portrait Gallery Publications.
London. (Permeke)
(MoMa show 1972 - that will include 300 400 portraits) In addition to discussing the exhibition
itself, Avedon , Arbus, and Ginsberg talk about the proposed catalogue, a hefty publication evocative
of a phone book, with an image on one side of each page and text on the other. The texts were to be
transcriptions of brief interviews with the portrait subjects by Arbus, during which each sitter would
be given fifteen minutes to say whatever was on their mind. Arbus and Avedon felt there was
something more authentic about this format than giving the sitter license to ponder, edit, and submit
what they want to say about themselves.
PANZER, MARY. MENAND, LOUIS. RUBIN, BOB. SHAWCROSS, WILLIAM. (2012) Avedon: Murals &
Portraits. Gagosian: New York. (35516)

Vaast Colson, the paintings kippenberger couldnt paint anymore
App portraits Sophie Anson
Likeness and beyond
Constructed Identities: Portraiture in World Art
Jean M. Borgatti
Uit: World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches.
Whether representational or conceptual, portraits represent particular people and spring from a
common impulse to remember and be remembered, whether the reasons are personal or political,
ritual or social. It was accepted without question in the court circles of sixteenth century Europe that
one of the chief functions of art was to serve as a weapon against oblivion. When New York gallery
owner Holly Solomon saw Warhols nine-panel portrait of her, she exclaimed: Oh, my God, this is
11

fabulous! Long after Im dead it will be hanging. they give us history, said Iyawo Obamina, an
African woman, in regard to her aunts commemorative mask. *+
The most widespread method of portrayal is by means of a generic human representation made
correct by its attributes of wealth and status but not necessarily bearing physical resemblance to the
subject. Many cultures also use symbolic or emblematic images to evoke the individual through
various associational characteristics as site, clothing, and literary convertion, that is, through visual
reference to the subjects name in acronym or proverbial form. Finally, portraiture includes works
based on likeness, the result of a confrontation between artist and subject- or some facsimile in the
case of posthumous portraits. The three categories of image generic, emblematic, and
representational are not mutually exclusive.
THE LENS OF LIKENESS
Since physiognomic likeness is the strategy most favored historically in Western art, it is the lens that
refracts all views of portraiture as a subject in Western discourse. Such is the persuasive nature of
the lifelike that the distance between the generalized imagery associated with portraiture in many
cultures and the idiosyncratic representational one must be. Our eyes convince us, even though
there may be evidence to the contrary.
The faces of Chinese ancestor portraits display a painstaking realism, making it easy for us to acces
these images as physical descriptions of real people. Yet, we know that professional Chinese portrait
painters made use of prefabricated likenesses to preserve the illusion that the portraits were
likenesses identifying their subjects even though specificity of site (homes or temples), inscriptions
on the paintings or ther association with spirit tablets bearing the ancestors names provided their
actual identifications. Similarly, the furrowed brow, balding head and sunken cheeks of e verist
Roman portrait are conventions to indicate character in a responsible head of Household and are not
necessarily based on the subjects actual face.
SOCIAL ROLE AS A STRATEGY FOR IDENTIFICATION
Most of the rest of the World emphasizes social identity, a more generalizing aesthetic, and
distinctive conventions for construction and conveying personal identity. In the Japanese tradition,
for example, it was the sketch drawn from life that lent authenticity to the final idealized image and
the more sketches, the greater the authority of the portrait as an embodiment of the individual. Yet,
neither a lifelike representation nor a desire to portray the inner spirit of the subject was the purpose
of the portrait. Rather, a portrait was meant to celebrate an individuals achievement, and anyone
worthy of having his portrait painted was worthy of being given perfected form and features.
In the case of Africa, the aesthetic is a generalizing one with a consequent stress on ideals of
expression and comportment. The disfavor with which Africans viewed realistic representation in
portraits is made clear in a story that explains the relative hierarchy of artists guilds in Benin City
(Nigeria), with the upstart but idealizing brasscasters given preference over the senior but verist ivory
carvers by the mid-fifteenth-century Oba Ewuare. Only in rare instances is physiognomic likeness
considered to individuate the traditional African portrait, and even in those instances, the image
tends to be idealized or transformed according to the particular aesthetic of time and place.
NAME AS A STRATEGY FOR IDENTIFICATION
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Naming is an important aspect of identifying the subject of a portrait everywhere, but it is crucial to
particularizing the image in Africa and other preliterate societies. In the West, labels were a
commonplace adding authenticity to the image after the fifteenth century, whether inscribed on the
surface of the picture or attached to the frame. Similarly, portrait practice in both Japan and China
included legible iconographies of identity through inscriptions added over time, and in Mayan
culture, glyphs converted generic images into individuals by giving them names and histories.
In preliterate societies especially, name and context encouraged memory, evoking a presence rather
than simulating it. At the risk of digressing, it is worth pointing out that memory has its own histories
in Western and non-Western societies, with recent research suggesting that memory, like
portraiture, is a cultural construction. In non-Western cultures it may be seen as active, always in
the present, a transaction or negotiation rather than a reproduction much as African and Oceanic
portrait figures and masks indicate rather than replicate their subjects.
The power of names to particularize images relates to the significance of names in a given culture. In
many African cultures names form an integral part of an individuals personality, often placing a
person socially and giving them historical reality. Traditional Nigerian Yoruba names are biographical,
as they are among the Kongo of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A comparable situation obtained
in Chinese culture, where identifying an individual meant knowing his or her name, although
women often did not have personal names referred to only by birth rank or marital status, and only
mans names charted their paths through life.
Marilyn Strathern notes the particular complex interaction between head, name and individual
among the Asmat, where name equals life force and is transferred by the severed head of its owner
to another, so that a living person stands in for the deceased, although not as an evocation or
memorial, and therefore not as a portrait. The Asmat do create personally referential images to
evoke the memory of the dead, however, immortalizing in sculptural form community members who
have died. Asmat canoe prows, paddles, paint vessels, sago bowls, drums and headrests, and other
more pedestrian objects are often named after ancestors. Sometimes they are carved with
representations of specific ancestors, or schematic motifs representing individuals. However, the
most important of these memorial sculptural forms are ancestor poles, shields, and free standing
figures. All serve as constant reminders that a death needs to be avenged. Men have been known to
carve the likeness of an unavenged relative into the knob on the end of ther canoe paddles, so with
each stroke, the reminder is staring them in the eye.
Names themselves may have a concrete value or be so intrinsically a part of the individual that they
may not be shared indiscriminately, if at all. In southwestern New Britain among the Rauto, the word
anine signifies name, meaning both personal name and social status. That ones name is an
important part of ones identity is confirmed formally by the belief that a person should not touch or
go near someone who shares his name. A person who takes the same name as a fellow village or
hamlet resident is thought to be taking something away from that person, for by sharing his name, a
person loses a bit of himself. Elsewhere in New Britain, the word for name is the same as the word
used for soul and shadow, and the son of a recently deceased man will impersonate with mask and
dance his dad father, evoking him through performance and saying that he is dancing in his dead
fathers name.
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The spoken word attributes a name to a person. Text or glyphs lend form to the name, as do masks,
figural sculpture, paintings or assembled goods.They give physical reality to the reference and
therefore (in the case of portraits) to the identity it represents. Such was the power of the inscribed
name that in Egypt, the identity conferred by name on a pharaonic image could be altered by
changing the name. The physical object, like text or glyph, is a more efficacious name than the
spoken word because it is less ephemeral. The Kalabari Ijo of southen Nigeria say that the spirits
come and stay in their names, meaning their particular sculpted figure or headdress. It is the name
itself that invests the image with identity, substituting for physical resemblance, in many African
contexts, endowing the image with reality and evoking the presence of the portrayed to those who
knew the individual. Thus , the living elders of Okpella (Nigeria) recognize and greet their dead kin by
name when they return during the Festival of All Souls, using the greeting form for an individual
returning from a long journey.
When name and context are key factors in personalizing a work, not only do human images work as
portraits, but also such widely disparate visual configurations as antelope headdresses and dressed
houses in africa, shields among the Asmat of Irian Jaya or wooden posts wrapped in bark cloth in Fiji.
The Kurumba (Burkina Faso) startle their Western audience by depicting their subjects in the guise of
an antelope totem. Like other African ancestral images, they bear their subjects names and help to
preserve the memory of the deceased by providing a physical reminder of the dead elders
achievements. In Northern Togo, Batammaliba and Moba families honor their deceased elders during
funeral celebrations, evoking them as they were in their prime by portraying them in house form and
draping these symbolic bodies with the garments of initiation. The Moba also portay individual
women through an assemblage of possessions during funeral celebrations.
ICON AND INDEX
Portrait photography itself has had the consequence of moving portraits to a more representational
program in many non-Western cultures and to a less representational one in the West. The
combination of likeness and revelation that characterized the flowering of Western portraiture had
split into discrete phenomena glossed by the terms icon and index. Iconic representations refer to
their subjects mimetically to make that person present. Indexical works dont claim presence, they
evoke it through referential means, as has been the case with much World portraiture historically.
Such emphasis on external characteristics, not excluding likeness, on social rather than personal
identity, and an aesthetic preference for the general and ideal have been properties associated with
much Western portraiture as well, even when the portrait resulted from a confrontation between
artist and subject.
Its the circumscribing of literal representation that renders the image not recognizable as in
Picassos cubist portraits or Brancusis portrait of Mlle. Pogany. In such portraits, the use of a single
attribute to identify the subject, the large eyes of Mlle. Pogani , for example, recall the conventions
of African portraiture, which play upon a recognizable feature of the individual portrayed to cue the
audience the heavy browline in African portrayals of Hans Himmelheber, for example, or the
distinctive hairstyle and facial markings in Akan memorials. Thus, the referential becomes a strategy
to evoke individual identity, replacing the mimetic in some portaits. Ernst van Alphen argues
forcefully that Christian Boltanskis portaits of Holocaust victims created by their discarded clothing
are more powerfully evocative of identity and biography than photographs of the children
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themselves. He attributes their success to the exchange of a traditional component of portaiture for
a different semiotic principle. Similarity has gone. Contiguity is proposed as a new mode. It is a mode
of portraiture that has long existed in non-Western cultures as Battamaliba or Moba (Togo) dressed
houses or Kurumba (Burkina Faso) antelope headdresses illustrate.
CROSS-CULTURAL ANALOGUES
A reliance upon literary reference and indirection creates a conceptual and cross-cultural bond
across several traditions: Fon appliqu portraits draw upon the imagery of a proverb to suggest name
and character; Chinese commemorative paintings illustrate literally the characters that spell out the
patrons hao or praise name; and such works as Charles Demuths I saw th Figure 5 in Gold, a
symbolic portrait of William Carlos Williams that refers to his poetry, or Marsden Hartleys portrait of
Gertrude Stein, One Portrait of One Woman, make connections to other media or works.
In still other portraits from these periods, artists evoke the subjects personality through an
assemblage of memorabilia or the clustering of artifacts rather than through recording physical
appearance. Consider Eleanor Antins attribute portrait of Margaret Mead consisting of a directors
chair (with her name on it) and such paraphernalia as a thermos flask, umbrella and binoculars
associated with her in her later years, part of a study entitled Eight New York Woman, Armand
Armans Portrait of Warhol, comprised of characteristic costuming including a hank of white hair, the
tools of his trade, and a visual reference to an idiosyncratic method of accounting, Katherine Dreiers
abstract portrait of Marcel Duchamp that she describes as representing his character in a more
pleasurable way to those who understood than an ordinary portrait, and Tracey Emins confessional
portrait, Everyone I have Ever Slept with 1963-1995, that is oriented towards self-exploration
characteristic of artist self-portraits but through radically different means. Emphasis on name and
personal artifact recall African modes of portaiture, the Dead Mothers of Okpella, for example,
whose generically correct images are identified by name; the effigy portrait in which the person is
evoked by the use of his or her actual clothing; or a style of representation which includes the last
ued goods of the deceased along with his or her image.

ZIJLMANS K. VAN DAMME W. 2008, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Valiz:
Amsterdam, P 303-341 (35972)
Orhan Pamuk
Transformation

RUBIN, WILLIAM. (1996) Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. Thames and
Hudson: London. P67-73
The forms of the figure are manipulated for pictorial resonance. Each distortion has its own formal
logic. The roundness of a back may be exaggerated to counter and echo the roundness of the head.
The scope of the torso picks up the angle of the head and the scope of the nose. The apparent
simplicity of the isolated single-figure image, repeated in only slightly differentiated formats (some
15

frontal, some profile, some three-quarter views, some with hands clasped), is misleading. With most
of the articulation taking place within the field of the human form itself. *+ The distortions are not
solely formal; they serve an expressive functions as well. The unsteady diagonal axes, the stretching
of form to the point of an almost vibrating quiver, the frenzied agitation of the stroking, the fiery
volcanic color, the way the background bites into the human contours and form, all combine to
create a sense of dematerialization and energy removed from the physical world. At the same time
that he stretches the figure to the edges as far as it will go, soutine reaches a more natural
accomodation between the figure and the frame. The figure stands or sits easily just within the
confines of the frame, with neither frame, nor figure pushing against the other.
TUCHMAN, MAURICE. DUNOW, ESTI. PERLS, KLAUS. (2001) Soutine. Catoloque raisonn. Taschen:
Kln. (30346)
Markus Luperz
Archimboldo
De chirico
Dana Schutz
Watercolor
Dryden Goodwin, red watercolor on paper series
Tim Gardner
Christian Schoeler
Yuma Tomiyasu
Lichaamshoudingen
SCHAMA, SIMON. (1999) De ogen van Rembrandt. Uitgeverij Contact: Amsterdam, Antwerpen. P.
354-447 (hoofdstuk 8: lichaamstaal) (bib berchem)
The primary purpose of state portraiture is not the portrayal of an individual as such, but the
evocation through his image of those abstract principles for which he stands. This idea of the
transcendent authority of the ruler was strongly implicated in religious beliefs, and often the ruler
was seen to derive power directly from God. This was particularly true in seventeenth-century
Europe, when the theory of the Divine Right of Kings endowed rulers with a God-given authority.
However, such a legacy can be traced back to the ancient world, when artists depicted Alexander the
Great clad in a panther skin, normally associated with gods, demi-gods, and legendary heroes like
Dionysus or Hercules. This symbolism created a visual association between the ruler and the higher
order of gods. Medieval and early Renaissance artists made similar connections. One of the clearest
ways of doing this was by representing the ruler in a pose normally associated with depictions of
Christ. Portraitists have tended to favour poses that put their subjects in to some sort of partial
profile, breaking up the stark symmetry of a frontal gaze by angling the face and thus preventing the
16

portrait subject from staring too glaringly out of the canvas. However, in portraits of rulers the
frontal pose was used from the third century AD and was associated with Byzantine mosaics of
Christ. Frontality was often combined with a seated pose that further reinforced an aura of divinity
and command, particularly if the subject of the portrait was seated on a throne. This frontal, seated
pose was popular from the fifteenth century when Jan Van Eyck included a monumental figure of
God on a throne gazing forward on the inside top panel of his Ghent Altarpiece. Echoes of this God-
like pose appear in portraits of rulers from Richard II in England to Napoleon. Each of these rulers
was shown seated, facing the viwer and displaying their authority through both the directness of
their gaze and the divine connotations of their pose. Although the stark frontal viw was not
employed frequently in portraiture, the seated figure was commonly used to represent power.
The poses chosen by portraitists to portray rulers have been remarkably consistent and convey as
much about the authority of the subject as the inevitable accompanying symbolic trappings. Other
poses used for rulers include the full-length standing position and the equestrian portrait.
Alegorie/ gensceneerd portret
Paula Rego
Kati Heck

Opzoeken:
BAY, EDNA. 1985. Iron altars of the Fon people of Benin. Atlanta, GA:Emory University
BEYER, ANDREAS. 2003 Portraits: A history. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
BORGATTI, JEAN. BRILLIANT, RICHARD. 1990. Likeness and beyond: Portraits in Africa and the World.
New York: The Center for African Art.
WOODALL, JOANNA. 1997. Portraiture: Facing the subject. Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press.
Clothes
The pale hair band has the effect of articulating the curvature of the head. In later portraits, Uglow
imposed a variety of less conventional scarves and flattened hairstyles to achieve this effect.
(Philippa Cooper)
LAMPERT, CATHERINE. (2007) Euan Uglow. The complete paintings. Yale University Press: New
Haven, London.
The shift to the uniformed figures was significant in Soutines development. A uniform, by its very
nature, classes people by their occupation. On one level, people become types, defined by their
social or economic positions. But Soutine still captures real individuals. The fact that they are cloaked
in these more anonymous and collective clothes only underscores their individuality by contrasts. We
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can distinguish one hotel worker from another, the nerous valet from the shrewed one who wants
his tip.
TUCHMAN, MAURICE. DUNOW, ESTI. PERLS, KLAUS. (2001) Soutine. Catoloque raisonn. Taschen:
Kln. (30346)
Alex Katz reading promotional art
Manet
Profile / frontal view
The 1915 Harlequin includes a rectangular area apparently left unfinished, possibly representing
either a painting or a palette held in the figures left hand; it has been noted that the brushy passages
of paint here hold in reserve the suggestion of a silhouetted profile. If this reading is correct, Picasso
would have insinuated into the scene a disembodied second self, seemingly laten or emergent in
the painting proces sitself ( both Picassos and his avatars). James Scarborough has proposed that a
similar silhouette of Picassos opposite profile is created in negative (light against dark) along the
edges of the brushy shadow area to the left of the head of Olfa in her 1917 portrait. In
eitherinstance, Picasso may have had partly in mind the venerable legend that art began when a
woman traced her lovers features from his cast shadow, to preserve a sign of him when he went off
to war. Resulting connotations of the projected profile as a primal marker of love, absence, and the
menace of mortality thus would have overlain his wartime adoption of this means to haunt one
picture made under the threat of loss, and another enthroning a new mistress. The device took on
still other associations, though, when he used it more explicitly and more frequently in the next
decade.
RUBIN, WILLIAM. (1996) Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. Thames and
Hudson: London. P147
In what would be a historiography of portraiture, the profile emerges as one of the earliest forms of
representation of a subject. On cave walls, large animal profiles have been found alongside prints of
open hands dipped in pigment. According to anciest tradition, the first portrait arose from the
drawing in outline on the wall the contours of a mans profile so as to retain his features before he
departed. The profile would therefore be the image arrested by the gaze of another; an image
offered by the body turning away and leaving. This is not the frontal figure of the subject who looks
at, recognizes, and represents himself or herself: the symmetrical effigy, like the divine image in its
mandorla, inscribed at the center of the World in order to dominate it. Rather, the profile stands out
against the World. It is the mark of alterity: the Sharp, cutout, antagonistic figure of a human
traversing space as well as time. Within the primitive community, the profile thus offered the first
recording of dissimilarity, reviewing the variants of the species before the individual had definitively
constituted his or her self-image.
(Self-Portrait in Profile (1927)photograph muse Picasso
RUBIN, WILLIAM. (1996) Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. Thames and
Hudson: London. P208-209
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