‘A kind of reconnecting with the past’: the Met celebrates the art of the portrait

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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’s masterpiece The Beginning, a triptych of scenes from his childhood, or Cuban artist Wifredo Lam’s Ídolo, a melange of forms based around the goddess Oyá. Rooted more in memory and myth than a mere physical likeness, these pieces stretch just what we might decide counts as a portrait.

Works such as the Beckmann and the Lam – as well as cubist abstractions, an ornate hand mirror, and one of Joan Miró’s pieces of “painting-poetry”, — are all portraits as defined by The Met’s new show The Face of Modern Life, which gathers close to 80 works from the museum’s permanent collection. A boisterous and effusive selection of work from one of the nation’s most storied museums, this show gives audiences a peek into the museum’s estimable archives and a chance to wonder just what defines this seemingly simple but truly elusive form.

Needless to say, Stephanie D’Alessandro, 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. “People often assume the portrait of someone resembles them, but what is it that resembles them?” D’Alessandro pondered during a video interview about the exhibit. “Is it the physical look? Is it something else? And what of the artist gets injected into that?”

Marsden Hartley – Portrait of a German Officer Painting, 1914

Visitors to The Face of Life are first greeted by the iconic presence of Pablo Picasso’s 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: “It is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I.”

During the painting of the portrait, Picasso is reported as having said: “I can’t see you any longer when I look,” choosing to blot out the face of Stein rather than continue painting her. Months later he would return to the work and create Stein’s face from memory, making one of the best-known visages in all of western art. “It’s that grappling with resemblance,” said D’Alessandro, “how do I make this thing familiar to me?”

Picasso’s portrait is coupled with an excerpt from Stein’s 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 “exact” and “resemblance” slowly mutate across the span of 27 delicious words before simply asserting that a portrait always follows its own logic.

“Exact 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.”

Another show headliner is Ídolo by Lam, a recent acquisition of The Met’s. The painting is partly rooted in Lam’s understanding of Santería, a religion that emerged in Cuba through the intermixing of the west African Yoruba tradition and Catholicism. Depicting Yoruba’s majestic goddess Oyá, Lam reveals her in a state of emergence, making the portrait one of her movement between human and animal.

“The way he painted the work, the media is kind of dripping,” said D’Alessandro, “as if the painting itself is coming into being at the same time as she’s transitioning from one state into another.”

A second fantastic new acquisition on display is the French painter Francis Picabia’s Elegance, a monstrous portrait of a woman with a parasol that makes evident the artist’s dadaist history. This work has been paired with poet Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, whose lines seem to meet up with Picabia’s bizarre woman: “I do not know which to prefer / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.”

“It’s really about human presence, the drive to connect, proxies or allusions to existence,” said D’Alessandro. “Even works that don’t feel like portraits or don’t look like portraits can function as a kind of portrait, a kind of record.”

From the spiritual to the abstract, The Face of Modern Life also offers works that are not so much reproductions of a person’s form as they are impressions based on the texture of experience and emotional temperature. Among these are Paul Klee’s May Picture and Vasily Kandinsky’s 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.

“The Klee and the Kandinsky are paintings what we could easily call abstract compositions, not portraits in a traditional way but direct aesthetic experiences,” said D’Alessandro. “In Kandinsky’s case, it’s all the senses working together, a kind of record of an experience.”

Florine Stettheimer – The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929

D’Alessandro emphasized that although the artistic techniques and philosophical ideas that underlie portraiture evolve with the times, the form’s fundamental concerns are timeless. Portraiture can be understood as an attempt to look beyond what we think we know about someone – and what the technology of the day pushes to the front – in order to see more deeply. “The things that we grapple with today – like virtual reality or phones – are technologies that make us see and not see things. These things have parallels with an earlier time. It’s a kind of reconnecting with the past and seeing that all is not always new.”

D’Alessandro also sees in portraiture the fundamental human urge to, in EM Forster’s words, only connect – to bridge the gap between the inside and the outside. The works she’s gathered in The Face of Life are a testament to the many ways artists have endeavored to do just that.

“There’s 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.”