Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Cracked Mirror

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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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AUTO-PORTRAIT, 1965

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Auto-Portrait, 1965. Oil on canvas, 24 × 19 3/4 in. (61 × 50.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Wilfred P. and Rose J. Cohen Purchase Fund, the Richard and Dorothy Rodgers Fund, the Katherine Schmidt Shubert Purchase Fund, and the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund 95.2  © Estate of Beauford Delaney

For Beauford Delaney, color was a vehicle for emotion, and the dramatic tonal contrasts in this self-portrait animate its surface and invite speculation about the subject’s state of mind. Delaney’s vacant expression and the heavy lines on his face suggest uncertainty or anxiety, and indeed this work was painted in the wake of a nervous collapse. Made in Paris—where the artist lived for decades—during a fruitful period of his career, it is nonetheless an unflinching portrayal of the inner turmoil that characterized his life.

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On the Hour

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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