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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Young boy standing next to a seated woman

Arshile Gorky based this portrait of himself and his mother on a photograph taken in his native Armenia in 1912, when he was eight years old. Three years later, during the Ottoman Turk campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Armenians, Gorky, his mother, and his sister all survived a death march. But his mother never recovered her health. She died in 1919 from starvation—a victim of what is now widely held to be the Armenian genocide. The following year, at the age of 15, Gorky emigrated to the United States with his sister. As he established his career as an artist in his new homeland, he became preoccupied with the photograph; it offered a haunting symbol of his roots in a tragedy that had killed between one million and one and a half million Armenians. This painting, made over a span of ten years, does not reproduce the camera’s image precisely, but instead reduces it to broad areas of muted, softly brushed color. The masklike faces and undefined hands of the figures at once suggest their loss of physical connection and the difficulty of accessing memories over time.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Cracked Mirror

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THE ARTIST AND HIS MOTHER, 1926

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Cracked Mirror

6

THE ARTIST AND HIS MOTHER, 1926

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection