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

Joan Semmel: I’m Joan Semmel. I’m an artist, and I live in SoHo.

Narrator: Semmel painted Touch in 1974.

Joan Semmel: It’s a representation of a male and female figure in a post or precoital situation. And I was at the time interested in showing the images from a female point of view. So I took photos of the couple—of myself and a partner—from my own point of view.

I was being confrontational, and I wanted the painting to confront the audience with an image that was different than the way they normally saw this subject. Our softcore porn pictures are essentially the same of images that are in the history of art, where the women are usually placed as a kind of seductive lure to the male eye as much as possible. Which, I don’t have any problem with, except that it doesn’t turn me on [laughs]. And I was interested in finding an erotic language that would be interesting for women. So for me the whole idea of the touch is very important, and one feels the flesh as the most important part of what’s happening.

Narrator: Semmel was part of an early generation of feminist artists, who wanted their art to have a personal and political impact on their contemporaries. To hear more from Semmel, please tap your screen.

Narrator: Antepartum is one of a group of works the artist Mary Kelly made that documents the experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

Mary Kelly: I was concerned with something that a lot of artists were at that time, which is the body as a site. I wanted this to be an extreme close-up, so it’s just the shot of the abdomen at a full term pregnancy, and you can see the movements, of the unborn child very subtly. And I just run my hand slowly over the surface, and there’s a kind of, I suppose, pre-linguistic, form of interaction between the mother and the child.

Narrator: Kelly looks back to 1973, the year she made Antepartum.

Mary Kelly: At that time, strangely enough, there was no work that focused on the woman, as mother. There’s plenty of painting in the past that would take that as their subject matter. But actually, very few women had approached this. And, it was, if you remember a period of, you know, the high modernist, masculine renunciation you could say, of anything that smacked of the feminine, so it seemed you know, an absolutely crucial thing to do at that time.

Deana Lawson: I’m Deana Lawson. I’m a photo-based artist. This image is taken in D.R. Congo; it’s in a small town called Gemena.

We often think of countries in Africa, especially D.R. Congo as a site of crisis or a problematic place. I was interested in switching that dynamic. Instead of seeing it in terms of a place of crisis I wanted to imagine it as a paradise or Eden. Robert Farris Thompson talks about Congo being the center of the mother continent, almost like the veins coming out of Congo. The center of humanity, in general. And my idea with The Garden was that the subjects would pose as the first human beings on earth.

Narrator: Lawson modeled their poses after the images of Adam and Eve in Hieronymous Bosch’s sixteenth-century painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Deana Lawson: I found the female subject, who worked at a local restaurant in Gemena, and the male subject was my taxi driver. So they’re not a real couple, but it’s completely staged to look as though they’re a couple.

The male subject has his hand on her belly. Often people ask if she’s pregnant; she’s not pregnant, but I don’t mind that being a possibility of the imagination.

I’m really looking at these two individuals and trying to imagine or put out an image in the world that represents a divine intimacy, which I think is needed right now, particularly when so many of popular culture images and media put forth a divisiveness, a lot of times, between black men and black women. So to me this is about asserting this, somewhat of a love story.

Narrator: Catherine Opie took this photograph of the performance artist Ron Athey in 1994.

Catherine Opie: He's just a very incredibly amazing, giving, lovely person who has pushed the boundaries with his own body.

Narrator: This photograph came from a time when Opie had just started making studio portraits of her friends in the San Francisco leather community. She used brightly colored backdrops intended to recall the northern Renaissance painter Hans Holbein, who is known for the intense humanism of his portraits. Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie: By using bright colored backgrounds, I was able to reference Hans Holbein as a painter and begin to create these very loving, political portraits at a time in which my community was decimated by AIDS, and really wanted to talk about the idea of identity politics in relationship to being an out queer person. I wanted to kind of redefine the notion of my own documentary practice, so that the site became the body.

Narrator: Alvin Baltrop took this photograph in one of the warehouses on the Hudson Piers, during the 1970s. Until the mid-twentieth century, the piers had been the center of the largest port in the world. But by the time Baltrop took this picture, they had been largely abandoned. They became important sites for artists, and for gay men cruising for sex.

Jonathan Weinberg: In this photograph, probably taken in Pier 46, at the foot of Christopher Street, Baltrop focuses on a beautiful naked man stretching.
Narrator: Jonathan Weinberg is a painter, curator, and art historian.
Jonathan Weinberg: His lithe, muscular body and his pose on one foot suggest that he is a dancer, and therefore, like Baltrop, an artist, drawn to the dilapidated waterfront structures for their sublime beauty, but also the freedom they afford to spread out, to be brazenly naked, to escape the strictures of moral decorum.

Taken before the advent of the AIDS epidemic, such an image speaks for a time in the 1970s when expressing the homoerotic in such an uninhibited way was emblematic of the so-called sexual revolution, and the breaking down of political control and social repression. At the same time, Baltrop’s characteristic cityscape is in ruins, caused by profound economic displacements. The dancer’s freedom only exists in the midst of urban poverty and neglect, just a few blocks from some of the most real estate in the world.

As a queer man myself, who painted and sunbathed on the same pier at that time in my late teens, I look at Baltrop’s photograph with a great sense of nostalgia and wonder. Was there really such a time when we were so free? 

Trevor Fairbrother: My name is Trevor Fairbrother. I’m an independent curator and writer.

Narrator: Fairbrother discusses Alice Neel’s 1970 portrait of Pop artist Andy Warhol.

Trevor Fairbrother: It’s an interesting year for both of these artists. Alice Neel was actually seventy years old when she painted it, and in a sense was just hitting her stride as an important American realist. She’d had an incredible career since the thirties, but she hadn’t really had much recognition until the wave of feminist interest in the arts in the sixties. And suddenly she was a forebear for a whole new generation of feminist artists and writers.

Narrator: The late sixties were much harder on Warhol. He’d been shot two years before Neel painted this portrait—an attempted assassination by a member of his artistic circle. In posing shirtless for Neel, he exposes the corset that he was required to wear for the rest of his life. He also bares his aging body, his chest sagging so that he almost appears to have breasts.

Trevor Fairbrother: She shows him—I think it’s this kind of essence of loneliness and vulnerability, but at the same time I think she knows that he knows that everybody is looking at him. He was very much invested in famous artists. He wanted to be a kind of brand-name Pop artist, and he certainly is that now, long after his death. He, Warhol, in a sense is rising to her challenge to sit for her, to be painted and to take his clothes off. And so in a sense he’s doing a brave thing, but he’s also―he’s getting through it by shutting his eyes and being very focused internally.

I think part of the soulfulness of this picture is the fact that it might seem unfinished. I wouldn’t say it’s unfinished. I think she decided she had what she needed, and she stopped where she was ready to stop. The picture doesn’t need more.