Portraits - A Snapshot

“Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.” This from Jonathan Franzen’s essay, “Why Bother?”, reprinted in his book, How to Be Alone. What caught me here was not his lament for the novel, but the assumption that serious portraiture is dead. It’s true that the paintbrush as a tool for social reportage has mostly been displaced by cameras in the hands of everyone from your dad at Thanksgiving to Annie Leibovitz. But serious portrait painting has been and continues to be practiced by Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Elizabeth Peyton, in ways that comment on contemporary society and on the personality of the sitter. The fact that Elizabeth Peyton often works from photographs, not life, intensifies rather than diminishes her insights into the psychological makeup of her subjects. Instead, it’s reflective of the ways in which information is delivered these days – at several removes from reality. And the bright, harsh color juxtapositions mirror our secular world in the same way that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portraits mirrored the darks and lights of the Reformation in Saxony. That's his Martin Luther upper left.

Elizabeth Peyton’s exhibition Live Forever is on view at the New Museum through January 11. There’s an excellent slide show/interview online.

In another portrait story, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne believes it has identified a Dosso Dossi portrait of Lucrezia Borgia.

And to follow up on my November 17 blog about Relational Aesthetics, John Perreault’s Artopia blog has a great tour of the show at the Guggenheim, theanyspacewhatever, with commentary on the artists and the RA movement, or absence thereof.

Two Painting Shows and the Old Guard

Last week I wrote about the Olafur Eliasson show at MOMA, my disappointment in which set me up for the pleasure of the Merz installation one floor above. As I continued on into the Modernist collection, the vibrancy of the paintings and the engagement of the viewers were palpable. Even the old guys – Pollock, De Kooning, Warhol – flashed a freshness that I had become been inured to, what with all the hoo-hah about politically and environmentally correct work that holds sway these days.

Painting of course will never die, it just has to compete with a much expanded set of offerings. The knockout show of the season is at the New Museum, where on the top floor Tomma Abts exhibits a group of small acrylic and oil on canvas paintings, each eighteen and seven-eights by fifteen inches. She says this is for her an inherent size, and that she works on each one for a long time, making changes to color and spatial definition. As you read the paintings, you can almost follow her decision process, and though these the paintings have no direct subject, their purity most reminds me of Vermeer’s luminous renditions of perfect space and light. This show continues through June 29.

Here’s another show and I regret that it has just closed. Claire Seidl’s exhibition at the Painting Center in Soho is still on-line if you’re quick, and there’s more on her website. Seidl’s work is abstract but appears to me to be landscape-based. The overlays of semi-opaque paint remind me of the outer wall of forests where you literally can’t see the forest for the trees. But beyond the wall, and behind these overlays, lie worlds of colored secrets, slowly revealed by slowly looking. The more time you spend with them, the more you will discover