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

Dawoud Bey, Two Explorer Scouts, Brooklyn, New York, 1988 (printed 1999). Gelatin silver print, sheet: 23 7/8 × 20 in. (60.6 × 50.8 cm), image: 22 1/16 × 18 3/16 in. (56 × 46.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Arthur and Susan Fleischer  2012.194 © Dawoud Bey

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

Delta

Max Mara

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

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

Back

6 / 15

Previous Next

Cracked Mirror

6

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.
Young boy standing next to a seated woman
A shirtless man poses in painting with a red background.

Artists

Events

View all

Audio guides

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

Dawoud Bey, Two Explorer Scouts, Brooklyn, New York, 1988 (printed 1999). Gelatin silver print, sheet: 23 7/8 × 20 in. (60.6 × 50.8 cm), image: 22 1/16 × 18 3/16 in. (56 × 46.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Arthur and Susan Fleischer  2012.194 © Dawoud Bey

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.

View guide

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 381 works

In the News

“Astutely geared to the selfie age, it might well have been subtitled 'Americans Are Strange to Look At,' which, in the two-hundred and fifty images here, we sure are: funny-strange, beautiful-strange, crazy-strange, dangerous-strange, inscrutable-strange.”
—The New York Times

“In Conversation: Barkley L. Hendricks with Laila Pedro”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“This 8-Foot Candle Portrait Mesmerized Me”
—New York Magazine

"The Whitney's Extraordinary Human Interest Exhibit is the Ultimate Portrait Show"
—NJ.com

"The mixed media show, grouped by era or thematically, includes a variety of perspectives that challenge who we are and how we perceive and record those around us"
—Blouin Art Info


“A collection that proves that more than just the faces of people can constitute portraits.”
—Chelsea News

"[Human Interest] delves into the art form in an unprecedented way."
—InStyle

"The Whitney Museum’s wide-angle collection show Human Interest reminds us that the democratization of portraiture started more than a century ago, and encourages us to think more broadly about what is or isn’t a portrait."
—Artspace 

"There are magnetic images everywhere."
—The New York Times

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.