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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A painting of a bull skull and flowers floating over a desert landscape.

Georgia O’Keeffe depicted natural forms with such persistence and intensity that these subjects often are understood as surrogates for the artist herself. Central to her personal iconography was the desert landscape of New Mexico, where she traveled each summer beginning in 1929. In painting the desiccated animal bones she collected there, O’Keeffe developed potent new icons of aesthetic austerity that challenged prevailing sexualized interpretations of her art, especially the vibrant flower paintings that had made her famous during the 1920s. In Summer Days, the juxtaposition of a sun-bleached skull with blooming wildflowers evokes cycles of life, death, and rebirth akin to the creative reawakening O’Keeffe herself experienced in the Southwest. Tellingly, she selected this image as the cover of her 1976 autobiography.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

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SUMMER DAYS, 1936

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

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SUMMER DAYS, 1936

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection