Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Is likeness essential to portraiture? These works, spanning the past one hundred years, raise this question as they present alternate means for capturing an individual’s personality, values, and experiences. At the twentieth century’s outset, the rise of abstraction and advances in photography spurred many artists to devise new, non-figurative approaches to portraiture. In their paintings, American modernists such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Florine Stettheimer frequently adopted symbols—including abstract geometries, typographical characters, and natural forms—as surrogates for themselves and their closest companions.

Artists have continued to experiment with symbolic portraiture in the decades since World War II, whether hinting at private meanings by depicting intimate spaces and personal possessions or referencing themselves through the tools of their craft. When the face or the body does appear in the works featured here, it is shown at a remove, as a representation within a representation. Forgoing physical likeness in favor of allusion and enigma, all of these works expand the possibilities of what a portrait can be, while also acknowledging that the quest to depict others—and even ourselves—is elusive.

Below is a selection of works from Portraits Without People.

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In Billy Al Bengston’s Kirk, a sergeant’s chevron sits at the middle of a checkerboard field. Bengston liked the chevron’s rigid geometry and simple symmetry, repeating it in his paintings from this period until it became a sort of proxy for the artist’s signature. He painted this work on masonite, a material that Bengston felt was suited for the rigidity of the image, using a spray-paint technique that he discovered when he started riding motorcycles in 1960. The technique lent a metallic sheen and depth of color to the painting’s surface that he thought captured the effect of California light on cars and street signs. Bengston made a number of chevron paintings, each of which he named after a Hollywood film star—in this case, Kirk Douglas. Because the titles were assigned after a work was finished, there was rarely any correlation between the name and the initial concept for the painting.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

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KIRK, 1961

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

2

KIRK, 1961

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection