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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0806 is part of a series of photographs that James Welling took of Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House (1949) in New Canaan, Connecticut. Over the course of three years, Welling captured the estate, an emblem of the International Style of architecture and of Johnson himself, from different angles, tinting his photographs with a range of colored filters that he placed in front of the camera lens. The orange filter used for 0806 creates the impression of the summer sun setting through the glass pavilion, the suggestion of late-afternoon light emphasized by the long shadows and reflections off of the building’s glass panes. Welling explained, “When I realized I could make the grass red or make sun flares, splatters, and different types of visual activity in front of this supposedly transparent house, or box, the project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

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0806, 2006

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

2

0806, 2006

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection