By Jessica Skwire Routhier
BRUNSWICK, MAINE — There is something about the word “portrait” that, for many art lovers, can trigger the yawn reflex. We think we know, just from that word, what we will encounter, and that we will have encountered it a thousand times before, and that we will find it mostly duplicative of everything that came before or after. We would be wrong in any case, because the history of portraiture is in fact as richly diverse, intellectually challenging and legitimately fascinating as any genre in Western art. But we would be especially wrong in the case of the new exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the first exhibition dedicated to “non-mimetic” portraiture in American art. This is portraiture like you have never seen it before, on view through October 23.
It is an odd word. In old French, it is the past participle of the verb portraire, to portray. A portrayal, of course, might be literary or dramatic as well as visual, and yet in American English we tend to think of the word “portrait” almost exclusively in visual terms. In its evolution to a noun in both languages, it has retained that association with past action — a thing that has been undertaken and completed and whose significance is forever affixed to that moment of creation. But in the visual arts, at least, meaning is more fluid in non-mimetic portraiture — that is to say, portraiture in which the depiction looks nothing like the subject.
The paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and installations in the Bowdoin show are not abstractions in the true sense of the word, for they all represent something: each in some way is a portrayal of a real person or persons. Some, in fact, are not abstractions at all. Rather, the works on view find means other than facial likeness to reflect their sitters’ identities. Through the use of meaningful objects, words, unconventional materials, color, gesture and even analytical data, the artists take a broad view of identity as a concept that may evolve over time and can be constructed, manipulated and deconstructed as well as faithfully transcribed.
Anne Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin museum and one of the exhibition’s three co-curators, dates the genesis of the show to her time at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. It was there that she first came to know Jonathan Walz, who later wrote his dissertation about Charles Demuth, a major presence in the Bowdoin show. After Walz returned to the Smithsonian for a fellowship, the two began to conceptualize the exhibition as a project for the NPG. Kathleen Campagnolo, another Smithsonian fellow and an expert in Walter De Maria, learned of the project and was quickly “welcomed into the fold,” in her words. When Goodyear, along with her husband, Frank, accepted the position of co-director at the Bowdoin museum, the project went with her, with the NPG’s support.
Both the exhibition and the accompanying catalog are organized into three main time periods that each represent, in Campagnolo’s words, a “flurry of activity” in non-mimetic portraiture: 1913–29, curated by Walz; the 1960s, curated by Campagnolo; and the 1990s, curated by Goodyear. Yet broader themes also unify the sections of the show, presenting each as less a break from than an evolution of what preceded it. Among those unifying themes is the idea of interconnected relationships.
Just as show itself evolved out of “highly developed professional friendships,” to quote Walz, so did much of the work in the show. The very title of the show is taken from such a work: Robert Rauschenberg’s famous telegram, offered as an official submission to a 1961 exhibition honoring gallerist Iris Clert: “This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So.” Mel Bochner’s portrait of artist Eva Hesse, Eleanor Antin’s portraits of artist Carolee Schneeman and dancer Yvonne Rainer and Walter De Maria’s portraits of musician John Cage further represent the interconnections among creative people involved in different kinds of portrayals in this era.
In the earliest period of the show, the interpersonal connections around dealer/photographer Alfred Stieglitz act like neural pathways from one artwork to another. Stieglitz himself portrayed painter Katherine Rhoades in a series of highly abstracted views of clouds; Francis Picabia captured Stieglitz as a complicated, cameralike machine; Marius de Zayas’s geometric depiction of activist / journalist / educator Agnes Meyer appeared both in Stieglitz’s gallery and in his magazine; Stieglitz circle member Marsden Hartley created a symbolic portrait of Gertrude Stein, who in turn dabbled in portraiture of the literary variety; and Hartley himself was the subject of portraiture, after a fashion — Edward Steichen’s affectionately tongue-in-cheek “Mushton Shlushley, the Lyric Poet and Aestheticurean” of 1922.
Another example is Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s found-object portrait of Marcel Duchamp. The original, exuberantly decadent work is now lost but is known to us through a photograph by Charles Sheeler, himself a trailblazing artist and a member of the tight-knit Stieglitz circle. The work is especially meaningful because Duchamp, a pioneer of the avant-garde art movement known as “Dada” and the acknowledged innovator of “readymade” sculpture, is a touchstone for artists in each section of the exhibition. It may seem ironic that portraiture was such a fundamental concern for this artist who was utterly committed to toppling earlier traditions. But central to many of Duchamp’s interrogations was a reckoning with the concept of identity, both in the abstract and in terms of his carefully cultivated persona.
Duchamp’s own work is represented here by a metaphorical self-portrait, one of his famous boîtes, or boxes, containing miniatures of his most famous artworks. But the Dada master’s presence is just as palpable in the section of the show dedicated to the 1960s, when many artists identified themselves with a “Neo-Dada” movement that was similarly concerned with absurdity, puns and merciless deconstruction of the art-world establishment.
Duchamp’s influence can be seen in Rauschenberg’s telegram as well as his fingerprint self-portrait, a clear allusion to the earlier artist’s 1923 self-portrait in the form of a “Wanted” poster. Eleanor Antin’s use of found objects in her assemblage portraits also echoes Duchamp’s legacy of the readymade as well as the baroque excesses of Baroness Elsa’s portrait. And in the 1990s, Duchamp’s influence is strong in, for example, Glenn Ligon’s suite of lithographs likening himself to a runaway slave — a wanted fugitive.
In the catalog introduction, the three curators write that “in a nation dedicated to reinvention,” non-mimetic portraiture offers unique opportunities “to critique and confront restrictive political and social conditions.” Jonathan Walz further observes that, throughout the 80 years covered by the exhibition, “people who are from the margins themselves are using this strategy that is itself sort of marginalized.”
This is true of artists like Ligon, Byron Kim, Hasan Elahi and others who deal directly with race; Hartley, Demuth, Robert Indiana and others who were or are gay; L.J. Roberts, who is transgender; and Eleanor Antin and Janine Antoni, among others, whose work grapples with the cultural expectations placed upon women and how this affects the identities they absorb and reflect, in the arts and beyond. This last point is particularly topical, as the Bowdoin show appears in Maine at the same time as “Women Modernists in New York” at the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) through September 18, which highlights the work of four members of the Stieglitz circle.
Goodyear sees the tandem exhibitions as a fortuitous continuation of the synergy among Maine’s art museums. Visitors who see the two exhibitions in sequence, Goodyear says, will get a sense of the “degree to which artists … from the early Twentieth Century to the present day are developing very progressive, even avant-garde approaches based on their exposure and the communities that they find here in Maine.”
Maine’s influence has long been recognized in the work of Modernists like O’Keeffe and Hartley, as well as Indiana; and in the later sections of the Bowdoin show the broad reach of Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture embraces fully one-third of the artists on view. (The PMA has also mounted a Skowhegan anniversary show, “Skowhegan at Seventy,” on view through October 10.)
The work on view is deeply intellectual, and all three curators acknowledge that it may be difficult for some viewers to parse. Campagnolo points to another recurring theme, wit and wordplay, as an accessible point of entry for many. Walter De Maria’s portraits of John Cage — which are literal cages, either drawn or constructed, with no obvious way in or out — are “pretty funny,” she says. She also points to Eleanor Antin’s stationary bicycle, rigged with a rear-view mirror and a horn “as if the rider is going to confront obstacles” while clearly going nowhere.
Goodyear agrees that humor, as well as the larger idea that identity that is fluctuating rather than fixed, is a way into the work. Visitors, she says, will be invited to ask themselves, “Is this a portrait if I say so?” “The title suggests that there is an active role to be played by every creative, interpretive spirit who comes to the exhibition,” Goodyear says. “Which is to say, everyone.”
With the readers of Antiques and The Arts Weekly particularly in mind, I asked all three curators to consider ways to look at non-mimetic portraiture in the context of earlier American artistic traditions. The responses were enthusiastic and varied, but all three mentioned the work of L.J. Roberts (who prefers the gender-neutral pronouns they and their) in this context.
In “Portrait of Deb from 1988–199?,” Roberts used traditional embroidery techniques, learned from their mother and grandmother, to stitch together a collection of objects — mostly political buttons related to LGBT issues — and thus create an object-history of the person who owned them. “The work wouldn’t exist,” says Goodyear, “without a very profound respect on L.J.’s part for antiques, preservation and the way these intimate objects connect back to people we love from generation to generation.”
The exhibition at Bowdoin is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated, 250-page catalog from Yale University Press, featuring substantial scholarly essays by Walz, Campagnolo and Goodyear, along with a historical introduction by Dorinda Evans, professor emerita at Emory University, and full catalog entries.
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is at 245 Maine Street. For information, 207-725-3275 or www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum.
Jessica Skwire Routhier is a writer, editor and independent art historian based in South Portland, Maine. She has held previous positions at the Saco Museum, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Her current research is focused on Hudson River School painter Jesse Talbot.
