Contemporary Portraiture's Split Reference

Author(s): Terrie Sultan

Source: Art on Paper , March-April 1999, Vol. 3, No. 4 (March-April 1999), pp. 38-42
Published by: Art in Print Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24555997

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 Contemporary
Portraiture's
Portraiture s Split
Reference

by Terrie Sultan

exchanges and are freighted with psychological and

Pictures of friends
strangers, candidlyor
or family,
carefully celebrities or total
posed, are inti
mate invitations to look directly and deeply. What
are we really seeing when we look at a painted por
trait? Naturally, our responses differ depending on
how the figures are presented to us. But our ability
to take in at a glance how a sitter has been depict
ed and to surmise why relies on the subtleties of the
portrait's identity as determined by the gaze of the
artist and that of the sitter—penetrating, fixing
gazes, which are normally not allowed in daily
symbolic implications. The viewer's interpretation
of the portrait is always conditioned by the artist's
interaction with the sitter and completes the trian
gulated nature of representation in portraiture.
Portraits by artists as stylistically diverse as Chuck
Close, Marlene Dumas, Till Freiwald, Franz
Gertsch, and Susan Hauptman chart a contempo
rary course through the traditional artistic terrain of
the directed gaze, whether they capture their sub
jects obliquely through a preliminary photograph,

Marlene Dumas,
Dumas,
Betrayal, mixed
mixed
media on paper,
paper,
installation
installation view.
view,
1994. Courtesy
Jack Tilton
Gallerv, New York.
Gallery,

38 March-April 1999

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Chuck
Chuck Close,
Close,Leslie,
Leslie,
watercolor
watercoloron
onpaper
paper
on
on canvas
canvas(72-1/2x57
(72-1/2x57
in.),
in.), 1973.
1973.Courtesy
Courtesy
PaceWildensteiu,New
PaceWildenstein, New
York.
York.

engage in a real-time interaction with the sitter, or logue fleeting expressions that she then universal
use a mirror for rigorous self-reflection. These izes, creating portraits of emotions rather than a
artists manipulate scale and a variety of composi record of physical attributes. Some artists choose
tional and conceptual devices to structure the por not to work from photographs, preferring a differ
trait as a series of conversations withheld or prof ent kind of artistic temporality and relationship
fered. Freiwald, Gertsch, and Hauptman work with a sitter. Freiwald and Hauptman eschew pho
exclusively on paper; Close and Dumas on both tographs because of the barrier the camera creates.
paper and canvas. In working on paper, however, all For them, making a portrait is an introspective
exploit the tactile immediacy of ink, watercolor, or endeavor that requires a considerable degree of
graphite to extract the visual nuances of their rep direct emotional involvement with their subjects.
resentation. The artist's representational choices and strate
Basing a painting or drawing on a photograph isgies can often dictate our reception and under
something we take for granted, yet it strongly standing of the subject. It is significant that each of
these artists portrays favorite sitters repeatedly, con
affects the relationship between artist and subject,
and by implication, the viewer's understanding structing
of a reading of individual personality that is
the artist's subject. Under the camera's unblinkingcolored by time and the shifting nuances of human
relations. For viewers, serial representation creates a
influence, the artist becomes interested in flattening
facial planes and perspectives, and in providing circontext for the portrait's many allusions, necessari
cumstances that mitigate the emotional immediacyly limited and fixed in time when rendered as an
isolated image. Serial self-portraits by Chuck Close
of a living subject. Such artists as Close and Gertsch
initially embraced photography not solely for the and Susan Hauptman note the obvious physical
verisimilitude it offered but also for the emotional
changes that accumulate with age; more subtly, they
distance from and control over the subject that itrecord how the artists choose, over time, to see
themselves and be seen by others.Till Freiwald and
afforded. Artists were free to approach their subjects
Franz Gertsch also revisit their subjects. Freiwald,
with the rigorous neutrality of an abstract painter.
working first from observation and then from
Dumas, by comparison, uses photographs to cata

Art On Paper 39

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Franz
Franz Gertsch,
Gertsch,
Nine
Nine Large
Large Scale
Scale
Woodcuts,
Woodcuts, instal
instal
lation
lation view,
view, 1990.
1990.
Courtesy
Courtesy Hirsh
Hirsh
horn Museum and
Sculpture Garden,
Washington.

memory, recalls and then distills his essential
impressions, painting multiple versions of the sitter.
In his wood engravings Gertsch changes our per
ception of his subject by presenting his model's
image in a series of monochrome imprints ranging
across the color spectrum. Dumas's version of mul
tiple representation takes the form of classes or
groups of sitters. Assembling smaller portraits on
paper into large wall installations that depict
"types" of subjects, Dumas's expressionistically
painted images personify an aggregate rather than
an individual perspective.
Chuck Close's paintings offer a unique intersec
tion of emotional intimacy and process-driven
abstraction. When he began painting portraits in
1968, Close insisted on calling them "heads" in
order to distinguish his work from traditional rep
resentation. His monumental paintings and more
intimately scaled photographs, drawings, and prints
question the nature and limits of representation, as
he creates a massive edifice of himself, a family
member, or a friend. The photograph is his essential
starting point. Gridding large-format Polaroids of
his subjects, Close plots the facial structure of his
sitters into squares, which he then translates onto
paper or canvas as a meditative soliloquy of invent
ed forms. The photograph may afford Close a visu
al and psychological distance, but his printing and
painting techniques constantly reinforce the inti
macy of touch. His topological mapping strategy is
based on individual bytes of form and color that
somehow result in a highly personalized image. In
fact, Close's portraits only assume a complete iden
tity through our willingness to upend the normal
rules for perceiving a photograph.
Franz Gertsch, who emerged in the 1960s as one
of Europe's preeminent photorealist painters, has
since 1986 devoted himself exclusively to produc
ing large-scale wood engravings. For Gertsch, as for
Close, the idea of spectacle is inherent in his
enlargement of a portrait head into a panoramic
vista. Gertsch stages theatrical photography shoots
of his subjects—friends or people randomly
encountered or recruited through model searches.
Projected onto paper or a wood block, their images
are mapped by the artist with daubs of translucent
paint (in his early gouaches) or minute gouges (in
the wood engravings). Neither amalgams of line
nor clearly individualized forms, Gertsch's pointil
listic marks coalesce into shimmering likenesses.
Reinforcing an unsettling sense of identity with
held or obliquely displayed, Gertsch's subjects rarely
address us frontally. Their faces are often presented
in three-quarters view, their expressions immobile.
Despite the portraits' enormous scale, they seem to
deny the viewer any possibility of knowing their
sitters. Instead, these exist as subjects "fixed by the
objective of the camera."1
If the presence of the sitter is initially an imper
ative for Till Freiwald, the sitter's eventual absence
is just as essential, for in Freiwald's vision it is mem
ory that sustains retinal perception. He feels that "a
photograph can never keep the intensity of real life,
and the view through a camera would give me the
sensation of being separated from the subject."2
Freiwald first makes small watercolors in the studio

40 March-April 1999

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Susan
Susan Hauptman,
Hauptman, with the sitter present. Afterward, working exclu
Self-Portrait,
Self-Portrait,
charcoal
charcoal and
and pas
pas
sively from memory, the artist creates monumental
tel on
on paper
paper ly scaled watercolors that distill his experience in
(54x40 in.), front of the sitter. One could say that it is Freiwald's
1996-97.
Courtesy Forum ability to project his inner gaze onto the subject's
Gallery, New York. physical being that makes his art so eerily powerful.
In fact, Freiwald says, "Working with a sitter can be
like the view into a mirror; my view to the sitter is
enclosed in his view." While the features of the sit
ter vary from depiction to depiction, they also
become curiously generalized, leading one to won
der if Freiwald's memory is like that of Marcel
Proust, an unavoidably poignant vision of the heart
made fonder, the senses more intense, through
absence.

Susan Hauptman's gaze, always trained on her

self, is both a confrontation and an entreaty, as she
invites us into a scrutiny that is equal parts confes
sion and theater. Unlike the other artists discussed
here, who focus exclusively on the face—to the
point where it fills the picture or becomes an
expansive, nearly abstract field—Hauptman metic
ulously renders the entire body, often clothed in
symbolic garb and posed in psychologicallyis holding.3 Hauptman's special brand of magical
realism requires months of fetishized self-study and
charged settings. In Self-Portrait (1998), she inverts
the hierarchical preferences of 15th-century profileobsessive rubbing, smearing, and manipulating of
portraits by presenting herself in three-quarter
charcoal, graphite, and pastel. Her drawings exploit
view, traditionally reserved for the man, and assignthe vagaries of the reflected gaze both in its factu
al introspection and its invitation to metaphorical
ing the demure profile view to her husband, who is
depicted much smaller than herself on a pitcher shedistortion.

(Both images) Till

Freiwald, Untitled,
watercolor on
paper(30x20 in.
each), 1998.
Courtesy Jack
Shainman Gallery,
New York.

Art On Paper 41

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Marlene Dumas,
Wishful Thinking,
mixed media on paper
(10-1/4x9 in.), 1997.
Courtesy Jack Tilton
Gallery, New York.

Rather than seeing portraiture as a keystone of ing, but build barriers, make assumptions, even dis
individual identity, Marlene Dumas explores howregard what is before our eyes based on our own
the individual identifies within a larger group. For belief systems. Occupying what poet Anne Carson
Dumas, the portrait is not so much specific,has described as a "split reference," we are "caught
attached to a concrete likeness, as an identity between distance and proximity, between sameness
achieved through shifting social, political, and aes and difference."4 In looking at the portrait, we take
thetic contexts. Dumas makes photographs her the place of the artist—but we bring our own eyes.
point of departure, but unlike Close or Gertsch, she
In the most effective portraits, artists have factored
aims for a certain form of expressionism. Created in this ambiguous position, opening their subjects
with washy, translucent brushstrokes that intimateto a range of meanings even as they fix them in a
finely condensed character impressions withoutspecific time and place.
providing much specific detail, they dovetail indi
viduality into a larger, more universal statement.'Ulrich Loock, "Time of Painting, Time of
Representation," Parkett 28 (1991), p. 33.
Her wall-mounted installations recall the pages in
Treiwald's quotes
American high-school yearbooks, where each stu2Freiwald's quotes are
are taken
taken from
from an unpublished letter
unpublished letter
from the artist to the author, December 10, 1998.
dent, while maintaining an individual identity, is
Tor the
3For theconventions
conventions of of Renaissance
Renaissance portraiture, see
see
presented as part of a specific class. Dumas works
Patricia Simons, "Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye,
with great immediacy, especially in her mixedthe Profile in Renaissance Portraiture," in Norma
media works on paper, with a characteristic gestureBroude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Expanding
that is both economical and freighted with power. Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992), pp.
As hot in personality as Gertsch's are cool, Dumas's38-57.
painterly people challenge and seduce us with the 4Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet (Normal, Illinois,
directness of their gaze. 1998), p. 73.
The triangulation of perception in a portrait is
essential to its expressive force. Balanced among
subject, artist, and viewer is the external and interTerrie Sultan is curator of contemporary art at the
nal identity of a portrait. How we understand the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. She most recent
portrait depends on how our gaze has been ly authored Ida Applebroog: Nothing Personal,
defined, refined, and informed by our own experi Paintings 1987—1997, co-published by the Corcoran
ence and social milieu. We strive to know by look
and D. A.P. /Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

42 March-April 1999

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