Posts Tagged ‘portraiture’

In art history, there are only a few things you can count on.  We argue and debate everything from dating ancient Greek statues to the definition of post-modernism.  But the Norton Simon Museum shows that there is one thing you can count on: portraiture.

To accompany the installation of Jean-Augustine-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville, the Norton Simon Museum presents Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres.  Curated by Leah Lehmbeck, the exhibition contains close to 150 paintings, sculpture, and photographs from their collection.

The concept is simple, but the execution is quite rich and a great excuse for the Norton Simon to bring out great works from their inventory.  Starting from portraits that were directly influenced by Ingres in the early to mid-19th century, we see this genre develop from those academic, commissioned paintings of Ingres’s era to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work to the portraits of 20th century masters and eventually pure abstraction.

The exhibition succeeds using portraiture as a case study of not only the development of this genre, but also it delineates both the apparent and subtle stylistic changes in art of the past two hundred years.  It includes such artists as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigiliani, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol among others.

Portraiture.  When light installations and performance art fail you, it’s one thing you can count on.

Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres at the Norton Simon Museum closes April 5th, 2010.  Click here for more info.

Image: Pablo Picasso, Woman with a Book, 1932;

The Norton Simon Foundation;

© 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York