Henri Cartier-Bresson: Portraits of the Artists

Albert Camus

Some people look exactly like you would imagine them to based on their work. With others, putting a face to a name gives you a rather different insight into who they are (or at least how they look). Cartier-Bresson's portraits of a range of artists, writers, and other creators are perceptive and honest. Each one appears to be that iconic shot you forever associate with the name.

Truman Capote

Marcel Duchamp

Henri Matisse

Alexander Calder

Colette with Her Companion Pauline

Any surprises in here? I love the photograph of Matisse, yet surrounded by birds and well-wrapped up is not at all how I imagined the artist. All photographs are from the Portrait section of Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century at MoMA through June 28. This extensive exhibition is a fantastic one to stroll through and remember yet again why Cartier-Bresson remains such a beloved and respected photographer.

Review: Marlene Dumas at MoMA

MoMA Monday Nights gave me the opportunity to pop in after work and spend some time at their retrospective of South African painter Marlene Dumas, entitled Measuring Your Own Grave. Reviews can be good or bad, or sometimes scathing. Although Dumas's works left a strong impression on me, I find it difficult to articulate my thoughts, good or bad. Why is her work so difficult to talk about?

Her figurative paintings focus on bodies in space: women, children, corpses, groups. In blueish hues, she suggests, sometimes quite beautifully, a face as strongly as if you had seen it in a dream. Yet the quality is contradicted by the eyes on canvas meeting yours. They are unreadable and unhappy. From explicit sexual poses to prone corpses, the subjects attempt a gritty realism that wars with the dreamlike style, especially in the her water-based works on paper. The subject challenges it’s own subject-hood through its gaze; the subject matter challenges the style and medium. Is it any wonder I find her work challenging to discuss?

Her works, which are so strong and accomplished, struggle with meaning. Except for her more political/sexual works, which are too literal and graceless for my taste, Dumas paints people whose gendered identity or ethnicity comes forward more than their individuality. As a South African, Dumas's work offers a perspective on apartheid. As a woman painting traditionally feminine subjects of women and children, the artist provides yet another source of conflict by presenting her subjects through a traditionally male lens, both historically and sexually. The manner in which she paints forestalls her making a statement, and these people become ghost or dream people instead of portraits or symbols of social ideas.

Dumas’s people reminded me of Chagall’s, in that they are not grounded to any reality, take on shimmering skin colors, and in their simplified contours seem representative of humanity. Puzzling out both artists' works is more imaginative than logical.

Full of verve without joy, her thinly painted, fragmented style and hallucinatory colors, Dumas’s figures toe a borderline of real and imagined that won’t quite let the viewer make comfortable assumptions, and this disquieting quality illuminates her work with a chill beauty. On view at MoMA through February 16, this accomplished exhibition then moves to The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, from March 26 to June 21.

Portraiture: the ignored step-sister of Contemporary Art

The Old Masters all did portraits in oils as their bread and butter, but that isn't the case with the big names in art today. Damien Hirst is immersed in formaldehyde, and the majority of great talents are swirling in the shapes of abstraction. Who is painting portraits today? By portrait, I mean the old-fashioned, limited definition that focuses on a human subject and depicts their likeness in oils on a canvas with a degree of verisimilitude.

The real question is, does anyone do that anymore? The photograph is many way has taken over the simpler aspect of portraiture, that is, to record a person's appearance. I was struck by the amount of portraits in the Met's exhibition Art and Love in the Renaissance Italy, and by how few I had seen by contemporary artists. That's not to say portraiture is a dead art, but it is hardly a genre that gets a large amount of attention.

There are a few artists of note, however:

Closest to Tradition
Elizabeth Peyton does small, intimate portraits of friends and cultural icons much as the Old Masters would have, that is, with an eye to documenting what the person looks like. She focuses on portraiture, a rarity these days. A successful and well known artist, she is the only one whose oeuvre consists mainly of portraits.

Figurative Painters of Erotic Tendencies
John Currin is well-known for his figurative paintings, albeit of a more erotic nature. Yet he documents people less and less as stylization's based on cartoons and old masters like Lucas Cranach, and more like individuals. For example, see this portriat of Rachel Feinstein, his wife.

Lucien Freud's work tends to be less camp and more fleshy, but he too is known for his figurative paintings. Here we have a self-portrait on the left. This works is a portraits in the sense that it represents him, but most of his figures are anonymous pieces of flesh. Certainly, Freud is a capable portrait artist though.

Like a photograph, but not
Chuck Close made his reputation on photorealism and figurative painting. While it's true the style below in this self-portrait is not one Rembrandt would have used, it doesn't comprimise the viewer's impression of what he looks like. His very large productions that recreate the pixellated effect of prints and photographs while focusing on a realistic face.

A dying style?
Obviously this is not an exhaustive survey of contemporary art. Please tell me if I'm missing something big.

Portraiture of the old style seems to be out of style. Take a look at Art Net's 300 most searched artists and try to find another living artist on the list who does portraits. That's not to say there are no longer artists for hire, should you want to commission a traditional portrait. It's just that the people on this list aren't on the top 300 of Art Nets.

I would have argued that interest in the individual was perinneal, but perhaps I'm wrong. Has traditional portraiture become irrelevant?