Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Portrait of the Artist

Portrait of the Artist

Floor 7

The American art world grew rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, instilling artists with both confidence and uncertainty. Excited by new opportunities yet pressed to distinguish themselves from their renowned European counterparts, American artists became preoccupied with depicting themselves and their intimate circles of friends, lovers, and collaborators in other fields. One such community was the Whitney Museum itself, along with its precursor, the Whitney Studio Club. Many of the portraits on view here reflect its early history as a magnet for figures such as Edward Hopper at a time when few artists had found institutional support or even gathering places for likeminded colleagues. Other works capture the vital presence of émigrés, such as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Stella, or point to the rising prominence of women artists, such as Isabel Bishop and Georgia O’Keeffe. Alternately styled as virtuoso, hero, technician, bohemian, or everyman, both the creators and subjects of these portraits staked a claim to their authority as artists, addressing themselves directly to an audience increasingly attuned to their endeavors.

Below is a selection of works from Portrait of the Artist.

For two decades, Toyo Miyatake ran a successful photography studio in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Little Tokyo, where he documented the flourishing Japanese-American community and its contributions to the city’s cultural milieu. This vivid portrait of Michio Ito, a pioneering dancer and choreographer known for his distinctive fusion of Eastern and Western traditions, evinces Miyatake’s dual roles as Ito’s staff photographer and lighting designer. Just as Ito and other modern dancers prioritized the body’s raw expressive power over the narrative structures of traditional ballet, Miyatake stresses the artistic potential of photography rather than its technical veracity.

Arnold Newman (1918–2006), Yasuo Kuniyoshi, New York City, 1941. Gelatin silver print, sheet: 7 7/8 × 9 15/16 in. (20 × 25.2 cm); image: 7 3/4 × 9 7/8 in. (19.7 × 25.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Weiss 91.50.5

Photographer Arnold Newman began taking portraits of artists in 1941 because, as he said, he wanted to “work with positive personalities, people who did something with their lives, and with life.” Newman developed what he described as an “environmental” approach to portraiture: instead of posing his subjects in front of a false backdrop, he photographed them in their homes or places of work, often surrounded by their own art. Newman captured the artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi in his Fourteenth Street studio, seated next to several folk art objects. By the time Newman took this photograph, Kuniyoshi had amassed a large collection of Americana. “I picked up all kinds of materials,” the Japanese-born artist recounted, including “cigars and toys and weather vanes . . . I picked them for shapes, colors, textures.” Kuniyoshi incorporated these objects, which he imbued with symbolic meanings, into his still life paintings. Newman’s image offers the viewer insight into Kuniyoshi’s artistic process and his investment in the history of American culture.

Fairfield Porter’s The Screen Porch is an unconventional family portrait. Painted at the artist’s Maine studio during a summer vacation, it portrays his two young daughters and the poet James Schuyler, with whom Porter was having an open affair. Porter’s wife, Anna, looks in from outside, while the viewer observes the foursome from the artist’s perspective. Although Porter’s broad, flat application of paint precludes clearly articulated facial expression, the figures’ divergent gazes imply a lack of engagement with one another. His family jokingly referred to this composition as “The Four Ugly People,” a characterization that may have reflected tension within a nontraditional familial arrangement.

In the mid-1960s, the artist Sturtevant began to make what she termed “repetitions” of artworks by contemporaries such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. She also reimagined numerous works by Marcel Duchamp, whose provocative creations questioned the notion of originality in art and set an important precedent for Conceptual art. Here she has restaged a theatrical 1924 portrait of Duchamp taken by his frequent collaborator, Man Ray. She has replicated the way that Duchamp coated his face and neck in soapsuds, lathering her hair—as he had—into two stiff spikes that resemble the winged helmet of Mercury, the Roman messenger god. Through this recreation, Sturtevant also echoes Duchamp’s ambiguously gendered self-representations, in which he frequently appeared in the guise of his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. None of Sturtevant’s works look exactly like the originals (in this instance, to begin with, she didn’t physically resemble Duchamp). They are not copies but interpretations, alternative versions of “masterworks” that undercut conventional ideas of originality and authenticity.

Paul Cadmus made this drawing of José Martinez, also known as Pete, as a study for a painting; both men were part of an intimate circle of artists, friends, and lovers. Born in Mexico, Martinez was a professional ballet dancer who was a member of the School of American Ballet and Ballet Caravan, a company organized by Lincoln Kirstein. Martinez and Kirstein were lovers; when Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma, married Kirstein in 1941, she moved in with her new husband and Martinez. The group also included photographer George Platt Lynes and fellow artists Jared and Margaret French, who along with Cadmus formed the photographic collective PaJaMa.

Walker Evans is perhaps best known for his direct and unembellished photographs of Depression-era tenant farmers, but in the early 1930s he also made numerous photographs of his friend Lincoln Kirstein. Evans’s images of Kirstein are nearly all close-up shots. Some, such as this one, feature Kirstein posing as if for a mug shot, while in others he assumes the role of a gangster. Kirstein was not a criminal; rather, he was an influential force in twentieth-century American culture. In addition to cofounding the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet with choreographer George Balanchine, Kirstein also engaged with many notable literary and visual artists. He promoted Evans’s photography, and in 1938 he helped to organize the artist’s first major exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Although Edward Hopper drew and painted numerous self-portraits in his early years as an artist, this is one of the few he completed during the mature phase of his career. Around 1918, Hopper made an etching in which he portrayed himself wearing a hat. Self-Portrait preserves the pose of this earlier image, while his heavier features and laugh lines suggest the effects of time’s passage. Dressed in a suit and tie, Hopper gives no indication of his profession; indeed, he appears as the antithesis of the stereotypical bohemian artist. Though the interior space he occupies is nondescript, his hat suggests a moment of transition—that he is on his way somewhere else. Like so many of the people he portrayed on trains and in hotels and waiting rooms, Hopper looks as if he has been captured in a contemplative, in-between moment, engaged in a scene that hints at narrative possibilities but remains mysterious.

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View 382 works

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Portrait of the Artist

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1912

SELF PORTRAIT, C. 1940

PORTRAIT OF ANDY WARHOLA, C. 1948

UNTITLED (SELF-PORTRAIT), 1945

SELF PORTRAIT, 1929 (PRINTED 1988)

JOSEPH STELLA AND MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1920

MICHIO ITO, 1929

YASUO KUNIYOSHI, NEW YORK CITY, 1941

THE SCREEN PORCH, 1964

DUCHAMP MAN RAY PORTRAIT, 1966

ELSIE RUBIN, 1958

PORTRAIT OF THOMAS HART BENTON, 1945

EDWARD AND JO HOPPER, 1933

JOSÉ MARTINEZ, 1937

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN, 1930

SELF PORTRAIT, 1925

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Portrait of the Artist

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1912

SELF PORTRAIT, C. 1940

PORTRAIT OF ANDY WARHOLA, C. 1948

UNTITLED (SELF-PORTRAIT), 1945

SELF PORTRAIT, 1929 (PRINTED 1988)

JOSEPH STELLA AND MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1920

MICHIO ITO, 1929

YASUO KUNIYOSHI, NEW YORK CITY, 1941

THE SCREEN PORCH, 1964

DUCHAMP MAN RAY PORTRAIT, 1966

ELSIE RUBIN, 1958

PORTRAIT OF THOMAS HART BENTON, 1945

EDWARD AND JO HOPPER, 1933

JOSÉ MARTINEZ, 1937

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN, 1930

SELF PORTRAIT, 1925

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection