Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

All

2 / 15

Previous Next

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.

Back

5 / 17

Previous Next

In Study for September Blackberries, Jay DeFeo superimposed a cutout photograph of her dental bridge and several individual molars onto a photographic detail of her monumental painting The Rose, (1958–66). DeFeo had acute periodontal disease, which she believed might have resulted from exposure to lead paint while working on The Rose. In works like this one, the dental bridge became a kind of surrogate for the artist; she explored its formal and psychological qualities, once describing it as “my subject . . . out of my own head!” Part of a group of works DeFeo made and entitled September Blackberries, after a compendium of poetry by her friend Michael McClure, this photocollage acknowledges a sense of loss—including that of her teeth and also of The Rose, which was at the time inaccessible to her—while representing a bridge, literally and figuratively, to a new stage of her life and career.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 383 works

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

2

STUDY FOR SEPTEMBER BLACKBERRIES, 1972

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

2

STUDY FOR SEPTEMBER BLACKBERRIES, 1972

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection