Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Is likeness essential to portraiture? These works, spanning the past one hundred years, raise this question as they present alternate means for capturing an individual’s personality, values, and experiences. At the twentieth century’s outset, the rise of abstraction and advances in photography spurred many artists to devise new, non-figurative approaches to portraiture. In their paintings, American modernists such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Florine Stettheimer frequently adopted symbols—including abstract geometries, typographical characters, and natural forms—as surrogates for themselves and their closest companions.

Artists have continued to experiment with symbolic portraiture in the decades since World War II, whether hinting at private meanings by depicting intimate spaces and personal possessions or referencing themselves through the tools of their craft. When the face or the body does appear in the works featured here, it is shown at a remove, as a representation within a representation. Forgoing physical likeness in favor of allusion and enigma, all of these works expand the possibilities of what a portrait can be, while also acknowledging that the quest to depict others—and even ourselves—is elusive.

Below is a selection of works from Portraits Without People.

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On an extended stay in Berlin before the First World War, Marsden Hartley fell in love with a young German cavalry officer named Karl von Freyburg. The freedom and optimism that Hartley experienced in imperial Berlin—where he was inspired by the lively military pageantry as well as a gay subculture that thrived despite laws against homosexuality—were rapidly cut short when von Freyburg was killed at the war’s outset. This painting evokes a physical and psychological portrait of Hartley’s lost companion. Combining Cubist fragmentation with German Expressionism’s dramatic palette, the image includes motifs from German flags, a chessboard recalling von Freyburg’s favorite game, the Iron Cross he was awarded for bravery, and regalia from his uniform. The result is both an energetic abstraction and a veiled memorial to the artist’s experience of love and tragic loss.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

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PAINTING, NUMBER 5, 1914

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Portraits Without People

2

PAINTING, NUMBER 5, 1914

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection