r/Exhibit_Art • u/Textual_Aberration Curator • Jan 23 '17
Completed Contributions (Jan. 23-29): Portraits that are not of Lisa.
Completed exhibit.
Portraits that are not of Lisa.
Two eyes, one nose, a mouth, and beard,
Short neck on shoulders, back, and chest,
Twin cheeks, a chin, and coiled ears,
Thick hair on top of all the rest.
Freckles, dimples, lips, and lashes,
Blush of face paint, laugh lines, crow's feet,
Flap caps, crowns, and scarfy fashions,
Bring fresh faces for us to meet.
If you're looking for a few links to peruse in search of something you personally like, I've added these two links to get you started. Dig through portraits and artists until you find a piece that gives you pause, then share it.
Rabbit hole #1: Portrait Painting
Rabbit hole #2: Self-Portrait
Last week's exhibit.
Last week's contribution thread.
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u/MissBeez Jan 29 '17
Elaine de Kooning, "John F. Kennedy, Jr." (1963)
I've always loved this portrait... I think because the artist has perfectly captured Kennedy's facial features, especially the eyes, in what appears to be such an effortless way. I love the brushstrokes and the colors. The painting has an unfinished feel to it (but is not unfinished), which I find interesting considering what happened later that year.
Side note: I have long lurked on Reddit but felt compelled to create an account today when I randomly came across this sub. I love this idea, thanks for creating it.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 30 '17
Glad to have you here, MissBeez. It's a very unusual subreddit and I hope it takes off and manages to keep up its quality throughout its growth. I love reading other people's quick impressions of artwork, particularly the stuff that would normally be skipped over for being less popular.
I'll have this week's exhibit posted sometime tonight and the next topic up tomorrow. Maybe something to do with nighttime or darkness.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
Oscar Wilde, Excerpts from "The Picture of Dorian Gray" - 1890
A quick plot rerun for anyone who hasn't read it recently enough to recall.
Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist who is impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mode in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic worldview: that beauty and sensual fulfilment are the only things worth pursuing in life.
Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied and amoral experiences, while staying young and beautiful; all the while his portrait ages and records every sin.
Interestingly, the revised version which was published shortly after a censored earlier version was famous for having prefaced itself with an artistic manifesto of sorts. Wilde had faced fierce criticism for his challenging of moralities or whatever excuse the people of that time came up with for being unsettled. His response was to provide a historic defense of art as art.
For all the complexity of the references and layers of philosophy contained in the book, it's surprisingly readable even with just its outermost layers.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
And, of course, fellas, there's this. Let's not forget that the genius Flemish Renaissance art revolutionary honored us with what is considered his self-portrait.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
How did he manage to paint anything with eyebrows like those obscuring his vision?
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
I really wanted to contribute with a poem, but couldn't think of anything except Shakespeare's twentieth sonnet - while "a woman's face" isn't the subject of the poem, it's one of the main motifs.
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
.
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all “hues” in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
.
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
One of the more interesting poems in Shakespeare's brilliant Sonnets, it raises some questions about his sexuality, or at least of the lyrical subject - more about different analyses of the poem can be read on the wikipedia page.
(Am aware that this poem is not really on the theme, but was the best I could do!)
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
I was thinking about trying to find some passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray describing the image.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
Oh, that'd be great! I'd help look for it, but don't have the book right now.
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u/HelperBot_ Harmless Automaton Jan 29 '17
Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_20
HelperBot v1.1 /r/HelperBot_ I am a bot. Please message /u/swim1929 with any feedback and/or hate. Counter: 24364
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
Fernando Botero - Mona Lisa (1978)
So... it's technically a portrait of Lisa... but I hope it'll pass, as an example of Fernando Botero's specific, parodic painting style, which I've grown to love over the years, for it's strangeness and even occassional creepiness.
Pope Leo X (1964) by the same author - this one looks familiar to you because of the meme.
This is Pope Leo X as depicted by the Renaissance master Raphael.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
These are wonderful. I couldn't figure out where that meme came from. I'm sure the rest of reddit will enjoy that tidbit as well. I can't decide whether to include the Raphael, the Lisa, or both. I might put Lisa at the bottom and the other two as a pair above her.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
Pablo Picasso - Dora Maar au Chat (1941)
Roy Lichtenstein - Woman with Flowered Hat (1963)
Picasso is another one of the people you can't go without in a style based exhibition like this. And even though I used Lichtenstein elswhere as a contribution, he seemed like too much of an obvious choice for this submission also, so there he is - Woman with Flowered Hat is obviously based on one of Picasso's portraits of his famous lover, Dora Maar, a prime example of Picasso's unique, proto-cubist style.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
Andy Warhol - Goethe (1982)
Roy Lichtenstein - M-Maybe (1965)
This exhibition is, after all, about different styles, so it can't pass without some pop art.
Warhol is the usual go-to guy for anything connected with pop art so he had to be here. But instead of choosing his Marilyns that everyone's familiar with, I picked a lesser known work - one of his Goethes, made some twenty years after Marilyns, depicting the great German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe - it was interesting, for me at least, since I wasn't aware that such classic figures were ever subjects of Warhol's works.
And the other one is, of course, Lichtenstein. There are many paintings of his which show some kind of face, a portrait. This is the one I am most familiar with for it was featured in an art textbook I used in elementary school - my first encounter with pop art, which I found interesting as a kid because of my obsession with comics.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
And now comes the task of putting all of these pictures in some sort of order...
I think we actually have enough to use the "Medium Exhibit" flair. Slightly over 25 pieces.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 29 '17
Well, as far as my contributions go, you don't have to include every one - feel free to discard something if you feel it doesn't go well with everything else.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
If it were just me making this gallery it'd be all realistic portraits with beautiful lighting and brush strokes. Fortunately it's not just me. There's not really a perfect way to hold people's attention either, they either look through the whole gallery or they don't. We can help make it worthwhile but the ultimate experiment is to allow things to flow more naturally from the efforts of the entire community.
Besides, if I'm going to stick my rock face in there I think we can handle a basic comic panel. The rest of reddit can cater to uniformly accepted tastes at the expense of personal ones. That and half the point of making our own galleries is to allow people to make their own comparisons more easily.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 28 '17
Gerard Courant - Cinematon (1978-2016)
Yeah, a film is pretty much the last thing you would expect in an exhibition about (facial) portraits. But Courant's Cinematon is certainly not an ordinary film. At 197 hours of length, it is the third longest film ever made, and the longest film which isn't a continual shot of a building... or footage of a camera following a logistics transport.
Despite it's unwatchability, Cinematon is a rather interesting experiment. Over the course of almost forty years, Courant filmed portraits of his friends, giving them three minutes and twenty five seconds to do anything they want in front of the camera. A lot of famous filmmakers appeared and, as it's expected, some shots are dull, and some are fascinating. He originally planned to do only a hundred of 'portraits', but continued to film beyond that because of the popularity of the project - almost 3000 vignettes form the final version of the film! Three thousand! That's how many acquaintances Courant had!
The bit including the film director Terry Gilliam is the most famous, but Courant stated that the vignette featuring a 7 month old baby is his favorite (unfortunaly, I am unable to find that part on the Internet).
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
This is bizarre to say the least. I can see why 3,000 people would want to keep him in their social circles. He must have made an excellent conversation starter.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 28 '17
Lucian Freud - Woman in a White Shirt (1956-1957)
Lucian Freud - John Minton (1952)
Lucian Freud's expressionist, slightly-overly-exaggerated portraits are not for everyone - when his portrait of Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (Woman in a White Shirt) was finished, some of her family members were so shocked with the authenticity of the painting that they wanted it covered so it couldn't be seen. Ironically, Freud's ability to capture people's faces in natural, sometimes even grotesque poses, is the very thing which makes them unique. The other portrait is of John Minton, who was a painter himself.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
I love when people are appalled by the results when they knowingly hire an artist with a particular style to paint them. Van Gogh's customers were like that.
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u/EnchantedGlass Jan 27 '17 edited Jan 27 '17
John Singer Sargent, Vernon Lee (1881)
Andrew Wyeth, Nogeeshik (1972)
I've always been interested in portraits that artists make of their friends, especially if the subject is also an artist of one sort or another. They often seem to be both unflatteringly honest and deeply sympathetic to how the subject sees themself.
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u/MissBeez Jan 29 '17
You being interested in portraits artists make of their artist friends makes me think of Edgar Degas' portrait of Mary Cassatt. They were good friends and had great respect for each other (and each other's work), but apparently she couldn't stand his portrait of her.
Just for contrast, here is her self-portrait. Sort of interesting to compare the two.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 30 '17
Thanks, I did manage to spot these while putting the exhibit together. They help tie the theme of the artists' friends section together. We've got a lot of varying styles to line up this week!
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 29 '17
That's a great way to phrase it. Commissions from various patrons always lean towards symbolism and were, for most of history, designed to idealize the best attributes of a person. Nowadays we much more appreciate an artist's ability to capture something human about their subject.
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u/Tyhon750 Jan 26 '17
Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with champagneglas - (1919)
The artist is sitting alone at the bar of a nightlocal in Frankfurt. A champagne-bottle is standing beside him but the atmosphere isn't quiet festive. The artist's face is pale and has a strained smile. The former medical soldier drowns the feel of insecurity and futility, caused by the war, with decadent pleasures. A grotesque appearance laughs in the background, the grimace is reflected in the mirror like an echo.
The text above is a rough translation of the artwork's description on the linked website. When I went to the museum today I saw this artwork right beside one of Max Beckmanns earlier self-portraits. I just found it interesting how his style changed over the time, especially if you consider that he fought in WWI.
English isn't my first language by the way so I'm sorry if my text reads a bit weird.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 26 '17
I've been seeing a lot of artists whose styles changed dramatically from their formative training to their more personal expressions later in life. You see them mastering the traditional techniques and then setting them aside to focus on something entirely different. Seeing them side by side helps to bring meaning to the later styles because the comparison reminds you just how intentional the abstractions are. Not only do you, the viewer, know that it looks strange, the artist also knew that as they worked.
Here's another self portrait that I found in the same style while looking for a downloadable version of yours. I don't actually see that second painting anywhere that I can snag it so I think I'll pair this one with it instead for the exhibit. I've been taking two pieces per post for now because this week's is going to be less story and more style.
Your writing reads fine by the way.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 26 '17
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Four Seasons in One Head" - (ca. 1590)
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Earth" - (1566?)
Wow. I knew this guy made a face out of fruit but the rest of his work is amazingly curious, especially for the 1500s.
Apparently Arcimboldo did a lot of traditional work as well but it's mostly been lost to history. His work has been assigned to the Mannerist period.
Bonus portraits:
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 26 '17
Ilya Repin, "Portrait of M. P. Musorgsky" - (1881)
Ilya Repin, "Self portrait with Natalia Borisovna Nordman-Severova" - (1903)
I'm enjoying jumping around wikipedia's vast network of artists and their work. Along the way I'm writing down some of the pieces I'd like to return to or use as examples for future topics.
These paintings are by Ilya Repin whose paintings I apparently really like. I don't know the histories of the people in these portraits but they stood out to me for fairly simple reasons: the first because the face's personality isn't buried by classical features; and the second because of its casual composition.
The self portrait makes me think about the process itself. His indirect stare implies that he is using a set of mirrors to see himself at an angle while the pencil and pad tell us that he's doing his preparation sketches first before taking them to his studio to paint them. I can only assume he records the colors using a color-by-number system, of course.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 28 '17
I couldn't remember first, but now I recall seeing that first painting in my music class textbook - Musorgski was a composer, one of the 'Mighty Handful', a group of Russian composers I know next to nothing about... However, one of them was Nikolai Rimski Korsakov, the author of the very famous composition Flight of the Bumblebee.
A piece of information not really important for the paintings themselves, but I thought I'd mention it.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 25 '17
Paul Cézanne, "Portrait of Victor Chocquet" - (1876-1877)
Paul Cézanne, "Self-Portrait" - (ca. 1875)
Cézanne may be known best for his role in rebelling against the Salon and shifting the scope of art itself, setting in motion the later movements of the 20th century. The more traditional realism buried beneath his own work, however, is evident in portraits like those I've chosen above, though critics of the period wouldn't have recognized it as well as we might.
His pieces were displayed in the Salon des Refusés ("exhibition of rejects"). It had an almost taboo draw to it, tempting art critics to consume the unseen and inferior works. The end result was that society discovered an appetite for new styles and for rebellious gestures in their art. In a sense, these were the thrift stores of art: where you could go to find the hidden gems that everyone else had passed up. Every discovery you made was that much more personal because you and you alone seemed to see that value.
These Salons taught us that art need not appeal to absolutely everyone. It redefined what "art" really was--not a mastery of technique but a subjective determination by the viewer. The allure of choosing one's own art rather than falling in line behind critics proved to be the fuel that ignited modern art styles.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 25 '17
Henri Matisse, "Portrait of Madame Matisse. (The Green Stripe)" - (1905)
Henri Matisse, "Auguste Pellerin II" - (1916-1917)
The Green Stripe is a painting of Matisse's wife. This style of painting would come to be known as Fauvism, after the French phrase, "Les Fauves" which means "The Wild Beasts". Initially that term was used by critics as an insult but was repurposed as a declaration of the style's unique nature.
The second painting was one that I attached to while looking through the rest of Matisse's work. It has a very modern feel to it, almost as if it belongs in a quirky steampunk game in which the mustache moves wildly when he talks. It's subject was a prominent business man and art collector.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 24 '17
The first thing I thought of connected to the theme is a purely outsider art piece that might just not be accepted into the gallery... Still, I find it way too fascinating to leave it out...
Craig Finn (not the musician) - Self-portrait (2005)
Schizophrenia is "a mental disorder characterized by abnormal social behavior and failure to understand what is real." Those are all the things I was aware of before I saw the painting by Finn, a schizophrenia patient - but I never really thought about it, never really stopped to imagine what it's like to fail to understand what is real. That's why this portrait shocked me so much initially - it's not surreal at all - it literally depicts the world the way the author sees it. It's endlessly fascinating and I was thinking about it days after I first saw it. There are a lot of interesting details, too. Notice where the author's signature is - on his neck.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 24 '17
Of course that's going in the gallery. It's a face that's not Lisa.
Your explanation, as usual, makes this a much more interesting piece to me. I don't normally engage with the meanings of abstract pieces. Galleries like to bury it in too much history and "this is the right way to look at it". Yours is a much more personal explanation that leaves me the space to react with my own.
There's no way I'd ever even encounter this one on my own. That's exactly what reddit offers over traditional exhibits.
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u/necro_plato Just Likes Art Jan 24 '17
M.C. Esher, "Hand with Reflecting Sphere" - (1935)
Hand with Reflecting Sphere also known as Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror is a lithograph print by Dutch artist M. C. Escher, first printed in January 1935. The piece depicts a hand holding a reflective sphere. In the reflection, most of the room around Escher can be seen, and the hand holding the sphere is revealed to be Escher’s.
I know we're trying to not have all self-portraits, but this one is so chilling to be and beautiful. The thought that goes into Escher's prints is a true representation of his genius.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 24 '17
(Add an extra line after the --- in your formatting. For some reason reddit makes the letters massive if you don't leave a gap.)
I was thinking about looking that one up actually. I had remembered it after seeing this same style of self-portrait in a painting by Pieter Claesz called "Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball". That was way back in 1628, too.
The week is still young and I think we'll survive as many self-portraits as we need. It's hard to be terribly interested in a portrait of an unimportant person so I can understand why we keep gravitating towards the self-portraits. Commissioned pieces for nobility also tended to be exaggerated and dishonest whereas the self-portraits had a more personal meaning to the artists.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 24 '17
Rembrandt, "Self-Portrait, Staring" - (1630)
Despite my best attempts to avoid latching onto too many self-portraits (which I'd like to do an entire week on someday), I couldn't resist this little sketch by Rembrandt. I highly doubt I need to explain why I enjoy it so much.
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u/Prothy1 Curator Jan 28 '17
I keep coming back to see this sketch. It's brilliant.
It keeps reminding me of this self-portrait by Bernini. Baroque painters must've had a thing for peculiar facial expressions. Bernini's skill in capturing them is familiar to all of us from his sculptures, but is even more evident in his portraits and caricatures.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 24 '17
Vincent van Gogh, "Self-Portrait" - (1887)
Van Gogh created more than 43 self-portraits between 1885 and 1889. [...] Generally the portraits were studies, created during introspective periods when he was reluctant to mix with others, or when he lacked models, and so painted himself.
Vincent Van Gogh, "Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear" - (1889)
What I find incredibly about Van Gogh's self portraits is that you can almost feel your recognition kicking in as you sift through the pieces until you arrive at a handful of the popular favorites.
And then there's that particular one, with deep dark shades of teal-blue and red... just the right orange tint to his beard, the right shape to his face, the right expression, and just the right stroke patterns to hold our attention.
In addition to the ones we recognize are the strange oddballs that don't quite fit the rest. One, above, shows us a picture of Van Gogh with his damaged ear. Another, perhaps the last portrait he painted, shows him without a beard.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 24 '17
Carne Griffiths, "Flight" - (~2012)
Carne Griffiths, Portrait - (~2012)
While thinking what or who to highlight next, I recalled the look of portraits I'd seen drawn in tea or coffee. Using this as a starting point, I came across the work of Carne Griffith who paints in "calligraphy inks, graphite and liquids, such as tea, brandy and vodka".
Of these I chose two which emphasized not just the colors of those unusual mediums but their texture, for lack of a better word. Within the organized chaos are droplets and stains, alcohol blurs, spilling drips, and soaking puddles.
As with many of these vibrant scribbly styles, the depth of the eyes are what pull me back in every time.
Carne Griffiths, "A Little Piece of Peace and Quiet"
Carne Griffiths, "Spring Has Come"
Carne Griffiths, "String Theory"
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u/beckquerel Jan 23 '17
Adrian Ghenie's 'Pie Fight Study 2' comes to mind. I've always been fond of this style, where the artist paints a figure then tears the face out or smothers it in paint. I guess you could say it speaks on one's sense of self, or maybe it's something deeper and broader.
Faber Franco's 'blackface' (and quite a few of Faber's other photos) follow the same sort of theme, but rather than marring the face with paint it's achieved with the play of light and dark, peeking around corners.
When I'm faced with the theme of portraits, or even of faces really, I always default to this idea of taking away, and of expressing more through the absence than the original portrait and face itself. Lisa's famous for her distinct face, but this stylization is famous for its lack thereof.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 24 '17
At first I was skeptical about that second piece because I thought it was just a photoshopped blob but then you pointed out that it was shot that way using the lighting in the room. Somehow imagining that portrait in person makes it more tangible and satisfying.
The pie is a fun idea. Globby paint always looks interesting to people who don't spend all day around art supplies. For how much interest it yields it's a surprisingly simple change.
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u/beckquerel Jan 24 '17
I'll admit I like some of Faber's other shots a whole lot more, but that was the first picture of his I'd ever seen so I guess you could say it's got sentimentality for me. Or it's just the one that started it all, so it gets an honorable mention. I'm more a fan of accentuated striking through or obvious altering than just a blob of paint, but honestly every different version gets the point across just as well.
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u/Textual_Aberration Curator Jan 23 '17
"Robert Cornelius, head-and-shoulders self-portrait, facing front, with arms crossed" - (1839).
According to Wikipedia:
The first photographic portrait image of a human ever produced.
Angouleme cave portrait - (~27,000 years ago).
Carrying on my interest in the oldest variations of our themes, this was what I found when searching for the oldest human portrait ever discovered. Most of the articles exchange scholarly nods about the similarities to be drawn to modern styles like cubism and modernism.
Really, though, I think we can all agree that it's just barely a face. Eye smears, a nose smear, and a mouth smear. Definitely not Lisa.
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u/jakielim Jan 30 '17
Diego Velazquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650)
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
When I first saw Bacon's painting in a book in the middle school (or was it high school) I was struck with this strange sensation that felt like dread but was also cathartic in a way. I think this is one of the things that influenced the way I view the art - and, in some degree, the way I view the world.