Category Archives: portrait

Resistance and Success: Career Portraitist Le Brun

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Self-portrait, Paris, 1782 (27 years old)

Resistance and success came in tandem to Le Brun as a female painter in French fin de siecle society. The daughter of a portraitist, Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun (1755- 1842) was painting portraits professionally in her early teens from her parent’s home. As this was illegal without a license, Le Brun had to publicly apply for license and the French Academy (unwillingly) had to display her works as part of the process. This was in 1774, when Le Brun was 19 and a year before she married a painter and art dealer who would help her rise. Soon Le Brun found more success than resistance, as Marie Antoinette invited her to court to paint her portrait. The Queen’s invitation laid the foundation for Le Brun’s great success as the portrait painter of her day.

Self-Portrait with Daughter, Paris, 1789 (34 years old)


Le Brun’s skilled, Rococo style and personal warmth pleased the Queen so much that Le Brun was commissioned to paint many at the royal court. In 1783, Le Brun and another woman were both admitted as members of the French Academy (although only through the political pressures of the Queen).

Self-Portrait, Russia, 1800 (45 years old)


The French revolution upset all social order, and Le Brun fled the country. She spent years painting the heads of state of Italy, Russia, and Austria. Then, Napoleon welcomed her back to France, and Le Brun remained an active painter well into her older years, painted over 800 paintings and wrote memoirs that provide a glimpse into how artist’s were trained. She lived to be 87 years old, and is as remarkable for steady production of work as well as her rise and fall with the tides of national fortune. All the more remarkable for doing it as a woman.

Self-Portrait, 1808, Paris, 56 years old

Portraiture: the ignored step-sister of Contemporary Art

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The Old Masters all did portraits in oils as their bread and butter, but that isn’t the case with the big names in art today. Damien Hirst is immersed in formaldehyde, and the majority of great talents are swirling in the shapes of abstraction. Who is painting portraits today? By portrait, I mean the old-fashioned, limited definition that focuses on a human subject and depicts their likeness in oils on a canvas with a degree of verisimilitude.

The real question is, does anyone do that anymore? The photograph is many way has taken over the simpler aspect of portraiture, that is, to record a person’s appearance. I was struck by the amount of portraits in the Met’s exhibition Art and Love in the Renaissance Italy, and by how few I had seen by contemporary artists. That’s not to say portraiture is a dead art, but it is hardly a genre that gets a large amount of attention.

There are a few artists of note, however:

Closest to Tradition
Elizabeth Peyton does small, intimate portraits of friends and cultural icons much as the Old Masters would have, that is, with an eye to documenting what the person looks like. She focuses on portraiture, a rarity these days. A successful and well known artist, she is the only one whose oeuvre consists mainly of portraits.


Figurative Painters of Erotic Tendencies
John Currin is well-known for his figurative paintings, albeit of a more erotic nature. Yet he documents people less and less as stylization’s based on cartoons and old masters like Lucas Cranach, and more like individuals. For example, see this portriat of Rachel Feinstein, his wife.

Lucien Freud‘s work tends to be less camp and more fleshy, but he too is known for his figurative paintings. Here we have a self-portrait on the left. This works is a portraits in the sense that it represents him, but most of his figures are anonymous pieces of flesh. Certainly, Freud is a capable portrait artist though.

Like a photograph, but not
Chuck Close made his reputation on photorealism and figurative painting. While it’s true the style below in this self-portrait is not one Rembrandt would have used, it doesn’t comprimise the viewer’s impression of what he looks like. His very large productions that recreate the pixellated effect of prints and photographs while focusing on a realistic face.

A dying style?
Obviously this is not an exhaustive survey of contemporary art. Please tell me if I’m missing something big.

Portraiture of the old style seems to be out of style. Take a look at Art Net’s 300 most searched artists and try to find another living artist on the list who does portraits. That’s not to say there are no longer artists for hire, should you want to commission a traditional portrait. It’s just that the people on this list aren’t on the top 300 of Art Nets.
I would have argued that interest in the individual was perinneal, but perhaps I’m wrong. Has traditional portraiture become irrelevant?

Review: Catherine Opie Retrospective at the Guggenhiem

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Catherine Opie’s shocking and raw portraits of herself and friends from the early 90s are what came to mind when I heard of this show on view until January 7, 2009 at the Guggenhiem New York. Her oeuvre on view at the Guggenheim not only disabused me of any notion of rawness in her work, but also opened me eyes to the extent of her subject matter. This classically American photographer came into the limelight for portraying herself and her friends as gender bending homosexuals into body modification and sadomasochism. Beyond horror or titillation, she exposed an underrepresented class of people with political intent and humanity while exploring notions of home and family.


Home and family seem stereotypically female in a way that Opie is not often considered, given her non-traditional presentations of gender. The people we see in her works are homosexual couples posed in traditional ways, of men dressed as women and vice-versa, and of tattoos and piercings that look deliberately painful. Her presentation of them staring at the camera with a direct gaze is agressive in a simple way. Yet stereotypically female too is the self-portrait of the artist holding her baby above, similar to a Madonna and Child scene, except that the luminosity and realism exposes her scarred breast where the word “Pervert” was carved for a previous portrait.


The rawness I anticipated in her work is actually a direct, at times aggressive portrayl of who people are with no apologies. She tends to present her subject–be it a person or a bridge-alone. Her portraits share the quality of formal compisition with the gaze direcly at the viewers, as well as a sense of art historical reference. For example, Opie was influnced by Hans Holbein’s use of luminous color and worldly references for a series of portraits of friends. Opie often uses ornately patterned fabrics as a background. The contrived aspect of scenes and formal aspect to portraiture lend her work a theatrical quality that is in every sense neo-Baroque.

She combines the visually gorgeous with the horrific. Two clear example are the self-portraits that involve cutting into her flesh, in which she intends to shock her message into the consciousness of America. In the first one, pictured above, she takes on what it means to be a lesbian in America in the 90s, by putting a social label on her body. The other work, showing the artist’s back cut in a childlike pattern of two figures holding hands in front of a house. The figures are two girls. This is how Opie communicates about gender and family and home–how sterio-typically domestic, no?

No, Opie is much more than that. I felt her most moving work was done of a friend and performance artist to the performance artist Ron Athey, who had recently been diagnosed with HIV. In 2000, they createded large-format Polaroids to create larger than life images of him based on past performance pieces. One strong and moving work is a lovely composition in which the precarious balance between life and death is presented as the artist lying on a bed of gold with an upraised arm from which hangs a series of neeedles. As image reproduction is severly kept in check, you would have to go to the Guggenheim to see it.

Series of highways, series of portraits, series of homes, series of couples/homes across the United States, Opie hammers home her message through repetition, as if demanding we look not at one individual, but many. The use of series really helps her explore subjects in a more illuminating and thoughtful way–otherwise easy to dismiss as a fluke. She presents a body of examples and says this is America. The importance of Opie’s work is in it’s messages about people, and, in that way, her photography is as American and compassionate as Walker Evans’ photographs during the depression were.