Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Portraits Without People

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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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RACING THOUGHTS, 1983

August 3, 2015
Scott Rothkopf on Racing Thoughts by Jasper Johns

In 99 Objects

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August 3, 2015
Scott Rothkopf on Racing Thoughts by Jasper Johns

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Lying in the bathtub one day, Jasper Johns contemplated what he described as a series of images that ran “through my head without any connectedness that I could see.” Racing Thoughts contains elements of this scene, such as the hanging khaki pants and running faucet. It also features the subjects of Johns’s musings, including a puzzle-portrait of his longtime dealer Leo Castelli, a pot by ceramicist George Ohr, a lithograph by Barnett Newman, and a reproduction of the Mona Lisa—all influences on Johns’s artistic development. By arranging these images in this way, seemingly affixed to the faux-wood-grain background with trompe l’oeil tape, thumbtacks, and a protruding nail, he links them to his career-long preoccupation with illusionism and perceptual ambiguity. Disparate though the composition’s elements may be, they are united by a complex web of art historical and personal associations that conjure an image of the artist himself.

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On the Hour

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

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