Tag Archives: portraiture

“Pieter Hugo:This must be the place” at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest

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The show at the Ludwig Museum of South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s large, color photographs opens a window onto a side of Africa that few Western museum-goers are likely to have experienced, and it does so with an unflinching, documentary gaze that remains honest. His portraits emphasize the individual’s humanity. Through gaze, the viewer is connected to him or her, often people who they might be separated from by sociopolitical or economic factors.

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Next to the portrait Ashleigh McLean, left, is Hugo himself, a young and successful white man in South Africa. His subjects are often not either of those things, and there is a tension there. More on that in this interview with the artist. Maybe that tension fed into this most recent portrait series, There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends, where he alters his own and his friends’ skin pigmentation, subtly playing with our perception of them through their skin tones.

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The two portraits above, from the “Permanent Error” series, are called Al Hasan Abukari and Aissah Salifu, named after their subjects. In this way, Hugo doesn’t allow the subject to be de-personalized, while posing them in traditional, statuesque ways and with a direct gaze. The two men are among many people who search through an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana for scraps of precious metal. Overall, the exhibition at the Ludwig offers a documentary-esque yet aesthetic experience, which on one could be critiqued as exoticising the other, but I think Hugo escapes that with the personal connection and dignity he treats his subject with, even if never negating the voyeurism of portraiture.

More on the artist’s website.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Portraits of the Artists

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Albert Camus

Some people look exactly like you would imagine them to based on their work. With others, putting a face to a name gives you a rather different insight into who they are (or at least how they look). Cartier-Bresson’s portraits of a range of artists, writers, and other creators are perceptive and honest. Each one appears to be that iconic shot you forever associate with the name.

Truman Capote
Marcel Duchamp

Henri Matisse

Alexander Calder

Colette with Her Companion Pauline

Any surprises in here? I love the photograph of Matisse, yet surrounded by birds and well-wrapped up is not at all how I imagined the artist. All photographs are from the Portrait section of Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century at MoMA through June 28. This extensive exhibition is a fantastic one to stroll through and remember yet again why Cartier-Bresson remains such a beloved and respected photographer.

Review: Marlene Dumas at MoMA

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MoMA Monday Nights gave me the opportunity to pop in after work and spend some time at their retrospective of South African painter Marlene Dumas, entitled Measuring Your Own Grave. Reviews can be good or bad, or sometimes scathing. Although Dumas’s works left a strong impression on me, I find it difficult to articulate my thoughts, good or bad. Why is her work so difficult to talk about?


Her figurative paintings focus on bodies in space: women, children, corpses, groups. In blueish hues, she suggests, sometimes quite beautifully, a face as strongly as if you had seen it in a dream. Yet the quality is contradicted by the eyes on canvas meeting yours. They are unreadable and unhappy. From explicit sexual poses to prone corpses, the subjects attempt a gritty realism that wars with the dreamlike style, especially in the her water-based works on paper. The subject challenges it’s own subject-hood through its gaze; the subject matter challenges the style and medium. Is it any wonder I find her work challenging to discuss?

Her works, which are so strong and accomplished, struggle with meaning. Except for her more political/sexual works, which are too literal and graceless for my taste, Dumas paints people whose gendered identity or ethnicity comes forward more than their individuality. As a South African, Dumas’s work offers a perspective on apartheid. As a woman painting traditionally feminine subjects of women and children, the artist provides yet another source of conflict by presenting her subjects through a traditionally male lens, both historically and sexually. The manner in which she paints forestalls her making a statement, and these people become ghost or dream people instead of portraits or symbols of social ideas.

Dumas’s people reminded me of Chagall’s, in that they are not grounded to any reality, take on shimmering skin colors, and in their simplified contours seem representative of humanity. Puzzling out both artists’ works is more imaginative than logical.

Full of verve without joy, her thinly painted, fragmented style and hallucinatory colors, Dumas’s figures toe a borderline of real and imagined that won’t quite let the viewer make comfortable assumptions, and this disquieting quality illuminates her work with a chill beauty. On view at MoMA through February 16, this accomplished exhibition then moves to The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, from March 26 to June 21.