There was a new flowering of portraiture after the end of Abstract Expressionism. The painters involved were representational, and so not like De Kooning at all, in that they did not want their figures to disappear into the swaths or streaks of color. But neither were they realists, in that their object was not to accurately portray those they represented but to develop new ways of representing people so that each painter had his own signature style, that not just what happens because a painter paints in the way he knows how to paint, but because the creation of a distinctive style was the basis of his accomplishment: his models served his style rather than the other way round. The inspiration for this movement was Andy Warhol who did not enhance our understanding of the figures he portrayed, like Mao and Marilyn Monroe. It was, rather, that the figures were already popular icons and what he did was to industrially produce a large number of copies through a silkscreen process that allowed each of the standard images to be produced in different colors. Warhol’s imagination rested on standing aside from his images to note that they were images rather than on enhancing the images, and so what he produced seems to me very cold and devoid of the life of the people who lend him their images, but that may be what he was, after all, out to do, postmodern art, now included in what is called contemporary art, prizing coldness and irony rather than depth of feeling or character analysis as its primary virtue. Now those who entered this common project of making the art more important than its subject did not see Warhol as their inspiration and one, Alex Katz, thought that Warhol had stolen from him, but artists throughout the centuries view with their competitors for stature and are most upset with those who would claim to be their betters. Consult Vasari to see professional competition at play, or consult any biography of Picasso. Let us consider the different ways some contemporary artists did their number on the artistic presumption they shared that the model served the artist rather than the other way around.
The aforementioned Alex Katz is a good example of this school. His paintings are deliberately cartoonish, which is also an appeal of Warhol’s. Katz uses bright colors in broad swatches, very little shading, and exotic features bordering on caricature, as will carton artists, to paint his portraits of people, as if they were little more than cartoons, just barely filled in memory slots for our encounters or memories of our encounters with the world, that all we have been able to retain of people from the world outside us. And yet he is also able to capture character, sometimes of a poignant moment, as in his “The Red Scarf”. There is a bit of shading on the cheeks of the woman portrayed. This gives her face some definition but mainly she is the flat creation akin to his others. There is just a hint of a chin and her neck is not modeled but descends directly from her face. The title indicates what is supposedly distinctive: the narrow band of red color around her neck. What Katz does is allow just one feature to give her away. That feature is her eyes which are drawn in a way that makes her sad and grave, pondering something, and that feeling pervades the painting even if it is attributable only to that one feature.
It should be said, however, that Katz is able to do so many things even within the limitations of the conventions of cartooning. Ama, his wife and the model for “The Red Scarf” is shown to have narrow eyebrows, even if these are drawn in simple lines and do not give a hint of individual hairs. She has straight hair, something “easy” to depict, and yet there are bits of hair that drift off and the cut of her hair is uneven. There is a cleft under her nose and there is some darker color to give her face some depth, and her neck shows signs of age, but her skin is smooth and she has no cheeks and even the tell tale eyes are done with a few strokes to give them their shape. A quite astonishing performance given the limitations Katz has set upon himself which he may have felt to be forms of liberation in that they allowed him to see people freshly and also as they are, Katz regarding Rembrandt and other portraitists as also abiding by conventions rather than showing people to be what they are in the objective world.
Lucian Freud is another postmodern portraitist. He is also a cartoonist, but at the other end of the spectrum. Rather than depict people in a flat way with smooth skin and little molding of their faces. Freud simplifies people by showing their flesh overhanging itself, the discolorations on a body, the disproportionate relation of their parts, the deep and ugly crevices in their bodies, all this far beyond and opposite to what a classic view of beauty, as that has come down to us from the Greeks, would proclaim. Freud is so good at this in fact, ever inventive in showing how bodies are distended and made ugly through their biological nature, that there seems no end of the ways people can be disfigured. He is like that other cartoonist, R. Crumb. who also showed his characters to be ugly or disfigured. So there is reason enough, beyond an audience’s initial shock at seeing a Freud display of flesh, to think that he has gone too far, deep into a very particular insight into people concerning their biological nature, and so not at all accurate in his depiction of people, in that people do not look like that, but what is offered to us is a singular vision of what people look like, suitable to a cartoonist. Sure, people have blotches and warts and crevices, but most of their skin is smooth and attractive to someone or another. Cartoonists exaggerate, offering their over the top take, and that is what Freud does, as in his “Naked Man, Back View”, where the model, who is a dandy usually all dressed up to hide what he looks like, is revealed as all too human, with narrow buttocks, as well as dark patches on his skin.
Chuck Close is not a cartoonist. He finds another way for a particular style to overwhelm the representation implied in portraiture. He breaks the canvas down into a grid where he places dots of various colors, as happens in his “Leslie”, or else he fits little shapes inside small boxes, as he does in his “Self Portrait, 2015”. A Chuck Close face is seen through those little boxes or else, one could say, the face is made up of those little boxes. So one could say that he is “deconstructing” or “assembling” a face, and that is a kind of metaphysical inquiry. Which of these two things is it? But such inquiries do not have anything to do with the face that is represented. You could do the same with a tree or a building, faces just being more complex and so a viewer, always thirsty for information about a face, is either tantalized when a painter gives us an obscured face or becomes satisfied when a painter provides his viewers with a fully displayed one. The point, to me, is that, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how the conventions which Close has invented, and he is to be given full credit for that, enhance our understanding of faces. They have no symbolic meaning in themselves since the individual boxes have no bearing on the psychology or the social situation of a face, while Cubist representations of faces, for example, can be said to present the angularity of faces as well as a new way of seeing through angles and planes. So I don’t get what Close is driving at other than having introduced his own gimmick, which is what all the portraitists so far discussed are doing. What else is there?
The most successful of the postmodernist portraitists is, I think, David Hockney, who went on to do many different kinds of things and has constructed a body of work likely to last. One of his earlier works of portraiture, from 1974, is “American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)”. It is a dual portrait, both of them standing on their concrete patio on which are displayed a number of sculptures of the human form, such as the pile of rocks and slabs that are the elements of a human body, and a totem pole in the background. The Weismans stand stiffly and without expression. They are, however, neither totems nor abstract. They are what might be considered human topiaries standing in their own sculpture garden, their shadows making them solid just as is the case with the other works of art that they have collected. So they capture the spirit of their place by having that same spirit, they a moment in time in the life of a well to do couple whose faces are not carefully molded nor given much individuality, yet clearly present, grounded by their shadows, as in other Hockneys, and the couple seems to be suspended in space, as if they were painted by Goya.
I think of Hockney as the John Updike of painting. Updike’s “Couples”, which was about philandering married people, and was published at about the same time the Hockney painting was created. Both the painter and the novelist are deeply suspended in their time. They both present people who are comfortable and engaged in the pursuits that occupy their class and setting, whether that is art collection or philandering, activities that have always gone on but which takes on the aura of being part of the way things get done in the present moment, a moment which will have passed as a concern of the well to do, but seems inevitable to these people however much that may not be, while that moment is going on. The Wisemans collect art in the way it is done in their time, putting it on the patios that are behind their modern homes. They are a modern couple, which means an up to the minute couple. Both Updike people and Hockney people live their lives as they choose but definitely not under cultural circumstances of their own choosing. They are part of their age, and all the braver for trying to make sense of how their lives exist for them. So Updike has few remarkably memorable characters any more than Hockney has particularly memorable faces because they are so much creatures of their time and so bound to fade away with those times, leaving behind the residues of and the memories of their ways of life for those who come later, even if infidelity and art collecting as activities in themselves go back a very long time. This is the way these activities were pursued in those times, the Seventies, now long past, these pictures and novels works of historical record, ready for any new generation to reclaim that experience. Hockney has therefore adapted portraiture to his own purposes, as have the three other postmodern portraitists. In his case, his gimmick is to tie people to their settings, to see them through the haze of what will become history, and that is, to me, a greater accomplishment than seeing them through a cartoon or through some uncartoonish painterly invention.