A lovely looking stenographer from Prague who presented herself in Paris as a movie star, Maria Lani invited likenesses, such as "Portrait of Maria Lani,” 1929, a sleek, admiring homage by Ukrainian native Chana Orloff. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.
:Painted and sculpted portraits have been around for a very long time, and they remained generally realistic and flattering through numerous stylistic and cultural changes. A major shift came early in the Twentieth Century with the onset of the avant-garde in Paris, with their new ideas about how art should be created. While traditional likenesses continued to be created in the French capital, bold, energetic Modernists — Fauvists, Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Expressionists — began to produce portraits the likes of which had never been seen before.
The cult of personality that fueled the careers of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Foujita and others required new forms of human portraiture. The avant-garde responded with an outpouring of Modernist work that changed forever how we look at likenesses.
All this came in the wake of French painter Paul Delaroche's famous statement in 1839 after he saw a daguerreotype for the first time: "From today painting is dead." He seemed to be declaring the end of not only the medium but of portraits in general. Why paint or sculpt a likeness, people asked, when photographs could make more lasting records more cheaply, with greater ease and increased accuracy?
Nonetheless, by the turn of the Twentieth Century, avant-garde artists, overcoming doubts posed by the new medium, rose to the challenge with remarkable new styles. In effect, contrary to Delaroche's conclusion, Modernist painters and sculptors believed photography had freed them from making portraits that simply mimicked the appearance of sitters, allowing them to depict their contemporaries and themselves in new ways.
Although painted on commission for the German embassy in Paris, Max Beckmann's "Paris Society,” 1931, injects a note of caricature into this depiction of German residents of the French capital. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
This fascinating chapter in art history is documented in "Paris Portraits: Artists, Friends and Lovers," on view at the Bruce Museum through January 4. Astutely curated by Kenneth E. Silver, professor of Modern art at New York University and adjunct curator of art at the Bruce, it is the first museum show of this "group portrait" of the Parisian avant-garde. It comprises some 50 works.
Ego, introspection and self-promotion, common traits among Modernists, inevitably led to a spate of self-portraits. Many were anxious to depict themselves as observed in the mirror or in the mirror of the mind. "Paris Portraits" features a number of idiosyncratic self-likenesses, some rarely seen.
Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) created a deft pencil "Self-Portrait" in 1906, before she became the lover of poet Guillaume Apollinaire and launched herself as a Parisian art star. At age 23, she looks sensitive and vulnerable, as though uncertain where her career is headed. An interesting comparison is offered by Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller's calm terracotta "Head of Marie Laurencin," circa 1920, as she was about to become "firmly established as the one and only major woman painter in Paris, a position she would maintain for decades to come," in curator Silver's words.
