Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

A black and white photograph by Dawoud Bey. Two young African American boys wear scout uniforms, with somber faces.

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand.

Portraits are one of the richest veins of the Whitney’s collection, a result of the Museum’s longstanding commitment to the figurative tradition, which was championed by its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Yet the works included in this exhibition propose diverse and often unconventional ways of representing an individual. Many artists reconsider the pursuit of external likeness—portraiture’s usual objective—within formal or conceptual explorations or reject it altogether. Some revel in the genre’s glamorous allure, while others critique its elitist associations and instead call attention to the banal or even the grotesque.

Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Readily reproducible and ever-more accessible, photography has played a particularly vital role in the democratization of portraiture. Most recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have unleashed an unprecedented stream of portraits in the form of snapshots and selfies. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is curated by Dana Miller, Richard DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Permanent Collection and Scott Rothkopf, Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator with Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; and Sasha Nicholas, consulting curator.

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is sponsored by

Major support is provided by Anne Cox Chambers and Helen and Charles Schwab.

Generous support is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.

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The nude is one of the most time-honored subjects in Western art, but for centuries it was used to depict unnamed generic figures or mythological subjects rather than specific individuals. Since the turn of the twentieth century, however, artists have increasingly challenged this convention by producing frank, highly particular nudes, often with the sitters identified in the works’ titles. From Joan Semmel’s monumental self-portrait in bed with a lover to John Coplans’s unflinching document of his aging body, most of these works subvert expectations about how a nude should look, pose, and engage the viewer. Photographs by Katy Grannan, and Catherine Opie, among others, unabashedly question cultural assumptions about gender, beauty, and power, giving voice to groups and individuals who are often marginalized by both the traditions of portraiture and mainstream American culture. By transforming nudity from a classical ideal into something decidedly personal, contemporary, and idiosyncratic, these artists compel us to confront the complex and often contradictory feelings elicited by the human body: fascination and repulsion, pleasure and shame, freedom and inhibition.

Below is a selection of works from Body Bared.

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Joan Semmel, Touch, 1975

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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.

In the early 1970s, Joan Semmel began painting nude figures engaged in explicit sex acts, and soon she was incorporating her own body into her compositions. In Touch, Semmel depicts erotically charged imagery from her perspective as a participant. By painting herself next to her male lover, Semmel subverts the long accepted artistic tradition of presenting women’s passive bodies solely for the spectator’s enjoyment. Instead, she offers an image of intimacy and sexuality on her terms. Some feminist artists objected to her work; they argued that representations of overt sexual content objectify women, even when the images are made by women. In defiance of this criticism, Semmel joined an initiative called the Fight Censorship (FC) group. Founded by artist Anita Steckel in 1973, the collective described itself as “women artists who have done, will do, or do some form of sexually explicit art.”

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Audio guides

This audio guide highlights selected works in Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection, with commentary by students from PS 33 Chelsea Prep and Whitney Museum educator Melanie Adsit.

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