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microsoft
art collection
Online Exhibition/s
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Portraits
Chuck Close, Phil Spitbite, 1995, Aquatint and etching, 31 3/4 x 24 inches, Microsoft Art Collection
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Nothing is as appealing as the image of the human face. But a portrait can be more than the face of the sitter; it can be their body, clothing, or an expression that tells us something of who they are, where they are from, or how they live. Contemporary artists are as keen to explore and express the nature of the “face” as those artists from the past. Among the varying works in the Microsoft Art Collection there is a wonderful array of portraits, and on display here is a small selection of works in various mediums that demonstrate the diversity of this theme.
Among the better known artists in this exhibition are Chuck Close, Alex Katz, and Vik Muniz. Though of very different generations and backgrounds, their models are quite familiar to them. For Close it is his long-time friend, composer Phil Glass; for Katz his long-time partner and companion, his wife Ada; for Muniz it is himself. Once the model is selected, the process of creating a likeness or of translating the subject to paper and ink or pencil or film begins. Close is renowned for his black and white prints, which also incorporate wide ranges of grays. Katz has always been a great colorist, no less so here in this work entitled Reclining Figure (1987). Muniz seems to combine something from both older artists: Close’s use of black and white and grays relegated to a rubberstamp and Katz’s color fields.
Several of the works in this exhibition are photographs, but with each image there is a different sense of how the artist worked. For example, Cindy Sherman has turned her persona into a model for various types of characters. Her portraits are fictions, stories not about herself but how she envisions herself as the other, how someone else dresses and behaves in their life or their work. Here Cindy is posed at her desk in the office of Artist’s Space, an alternative exhibition space in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. She is Cindy, gallery assistant. Lee Friedlander, on the other hand, snapped this image of his long-time friend, the pop artist Jim Dine. Dine is at the easel in his studio in New York; Friedlander manages to snap the picture capturing Dine in the act of thinking, or dreaming, or brooding...you decide.
Mike Disfarmer’s portrait photographs date between 1939 and 1946. The subjects were not necessarily known by the photographer but most came from the communities near Disfarmer’s Heber Springs, Arkansas, portrait. In those days a portrait cost 50 cents. Like many itinerant rural painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, Disfarmer’s job was simply to create portraits, in many cases family portraits. But in so doing he also managed to become something of a social historian, leaving modern audiences with a glimpse of the faces and characters from America’s post-Depression era. In these images one sees farm laborers, athletes, school mates, and soldiers; this remarkable untitled black and white photograph is of a young girl in a flower print dress.
Leon Levinstein and Vivien Cherry combed Manhattan for their subjects. Like Disfarmer, the portrait is anonymous. Nevertheless, like Disfarmer, there is much to be gleaned about the sitters from the picture: age, class, even occupation. There is a striking contrast in mood, however, between Levinstein’s strong male profile and Cherry’s trio on a park bench. Nonetheless, each in his or her own way is able to tap the root of the sitter’s humanity.
Other portraits, from Lucien Freud’s etching of his aging friend and Enrique Martinez Celeya’s colored silhouette to Akio Takamori’s portrayal of a young geisha and William Johnson’s dramatic lithograph of a head, illustrate the disparate interpretations that the term portrait can suggest.
Further Reading
Face Value: American Portraits, The Parrish Art Museum, 1995
Brilliant, Richard, Portraiture, London, Reaction Books, 1991
- Michael Klein
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