Face Off: Anti-Portraiture in Contemporary Art

Face OffAnti-Portraiture in Contemporary Art Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Miguel Vallinas Prieto, Root Number 47, 2018. © Miguel Vallinas Prieto. Courtesy of the Ráiz collection. End Page 69 Click for larger view View full resolution Julie Cockburn, Dyad, 2023, hand embroidery on found photograph. © Julie Cockburn. Courtesy of Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. Pablo Picasso's 1906 Cubist painting Portrait of Gertrude Stein, considered the archetype of anti-portraiture, was created out of frustration and anger. Day after day, in the stifling summer heat of his dark Montmartre studio, Picasso perched on a kitchen stool at arm's length from Stein, who sat on a spindly wooden chair. The noise of families and fellow artists leaking through the room's thin walls created a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. Picasso kept reworking his rendering of Stein's face but couldn't get it right. After more than eighty sessions, both artist and sitter were growing aggravated by the process. One morning when Stein showed up at his studio, Picasso wasn't there. Abandoning the project, he traveled to Spain, where he spent the rest of the summer studying the simplified forms of Iberian stone sculptures. When he returned to Paris in the fall, he did not contact Stein but finished the painting from memory. Inspired by the simplicity of Iberian art, her body became a configuration of block-like masses, while End Page 70 her face resembled a stiff but powerfully expressive mask. Her heavy-lidded, deep-set eyes offered a vacant stare, conveying a deeper visual truth than mere likeness. Click for larger view View full resolution Julie Cockburn, Focus, 2023, hand embroidery on found photograph. © Julie Cockburn. Courtesy of Galerie Ramakers, The Hague, Netherlands. Portrait of Gertrude Stein was a modernist breakthrough. Picasso had turned away from the conventions of portraiture, in which artistic skill is measured by the accuracy of the portrayal of the sitter's appearance, social status, and emotional makeup. By intentionally distorting Stein's features, omitting revealing details, and depicting her at an angle, he made her appear inscrutable. The artist was announcing he End Page 71 didn't care that the portrait looked nothing like Stein. He believed that it did something better; it apprehended the truth of the individual herself. Click for larger view View full resolution Julie Cockburn, Toffee, 2023, hand embroidery on found photograph. © Julie Cockburn. Courtesy of Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. Picasso's new direction captured Stein's imagination. With his shapes, lines, color palettes, and brushstrokes, he had rendered her unfamiliar, making her far more interesting and artful than she would ever have appeared in conventional terms. Delighted by the painting, Stein said, "To me, it is I." Fourteen years later in his studio on 8th Street in the Village, Man Ray got together with Marcel Duchamp to collaborate on a photographic anti-portrait. Both men had long rejected ideas of traditional art. For Duchamp, painting was over. Instead, he purchased ordinary End Page 72 mass-produced objects—a bottle rack, snow shovel, bicycle wheel, urinal—and reassembled them. His "readymades," as he called them, were conceptual. Their creation didn't depend on the technical skill of the artist but instead on the mind and the selection process. Man Ray followed Duchamp's lead. He had also become frustrated with painting, and with Duchamp's encouragement took up photography. Soon his career flourished. Having your picture taken by Man Ray meant that you were part of "The Crowd." Picasso, Stein, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Jean Cocteau, Sinclair Lewis, Erik Satie, Tristan Tzara, and James Joyce filed through his studio. His new direction introduced the concept of the artist as professional portrait photographer. When Duchamp and Man Ray joined forces in the latter's studio, the goal was to create what they called a "persona project." Duchamp believed that the self is not a coherent knowable entity but multifaceted and ambiguous instead. He constructed a feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, "not to change his identity but to have two identities." He chose the name Rrose because it was overused and slightly corny-sounding, and the surname Sélavy was a...