Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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The years surrounding World War II in the United States witnessed the meteoric rise of abstract painting and a widespread abandonment of traditional figurative approaches. Portraiture seemed hopelessly outmoded to many artists, yet some could not relinquish their interest in representing themselves and others. The body, they maintained, was vital in an era marked by unprecedented human catastrophes, including the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. As artist Leonard Baskin proclaimed: “Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. I hold the cracked mirror up to man.”

The works in this gallery bear witness to portraiture’s crucial role during this period. Combining figurative imagery with restless brushwork, distorted forms, and flattened color, they invoke the psychic impact of the era’s global conflicts and dislocations, exuding a sense of anxiety, foreboding, and raw intensity. Many of the artists whose work is featured here, including Beauford Delaney and Stephen Greene, sought refuge in enigmatic explorations of the self. Others such as Arshile Gorky and John Wilde instilled images of loved ones with meditations on mortality, while Grace Hartigan and Ben Shahn explored the human condition in portraits of archetypal figures.

Below is a selection of works from Cracked Mirror.

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In this painting, Grace Hartigan combined the slashing brushwork of Abstract Expressionism with imagery from contemporary life. She based the composition on the shop windows she encountered on Grand Street’s “Bride’s Row,” a cluster of stores located near her Lower East Side studio. For Hartigan, the lavishly costumed mannequins displayed in the windows embodied empty social rituals. Their eerily lifeless, alienated gazes offer a subtle critique of the stifling gender roles and complacent attitudes of the 1950s. The poet Frank O’Hara, a friend of the artist, described them as women who “face without bitterness the glassy shallowness of American life as their showcase.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Cracked Mirror

6

GRAND STREET BRIDES, 1954

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Cracked Mirror

6

GRAND STREET BRIDES, 1954

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection