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 Between the Art Object and the Human Subject Stella Pelše, Art Historian Exhibition Artist. Portrait. Self-Portrait 05.11.2009.–17.01.2010. Exhibition Hall Arsenāls, Latvian National Museum of Art | |
| The portrait is undoubtedly one of the most important genres in art history. Even though its flourishing is most directly associated with the Renaissance, traces of portraiture are sought and have been found in Neolithic sculptures, the art of Egypt and in many other early periods. Possibly the longevity of the portrait genre is based in the imagined (but not at all fictitious) special link and interaction between the image, the depicted person and the viewer: “And yet, the oscillation between art object and human subject, represented so personally, is what gives portraits their extraordinary grasp on our imagination. (…) Portraiture challenges the transiency or irrelevancy of human existence and the portrait artist must respond to the demands formulated by the human wish to endure.” 1 Self-portraiture owes a great deal to the spread of affordable, good quality mirrors since the 15th century, nonetheless its history is considerably more longstanding, as is often the case. The mythological hero Narcissus comes to a bad end because of gazing at his own reflection for too long (although this could be interpreted otherwise), and there are accounts that more concrete historic figures have not fared much better. According to legend, the Greek sculptor Phidias, who created sculptures for the Parthenon, is said to have been jailed in 438 B.C. for leaving a small self-portrait of himself on the shield of Athena – his bald head and wrinkled features were easily recognizable among the idealized images of Greek heroes. Evidently the Parthenon was not a place for human representation, and a sculptor should not take credit for a work of pure divinity. 2 Yet when several centuries later the movement of Romanticism established the concept of the independent and creative individual whose highest goal is self-expression, both portraiture and self-portraiture transformed into a revelatory representation of the subject’s inner world, character and psychological trials (the fame of the self-portraits of Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh and other artists rests precisely with this aspect), leaving in the periphery the fixation on the external attributes of status of countless rulers, aristocrats and other paying customers. | |
 Jevgenija Nesterova. An Artist's Life is Wonderful. Water-colour on paper. 39x28,5cm. 1933. Photo: Normunds Brasliņš | |
| Turning to our times and portraiture in Latvia, on the one hand exhibitions featuring various genres were gradually crumbling the official canon of ideological figurative art already in the Soviet period (the exhibition ‘Portraits and Self-Portraits of Artists’ took place as early as 1980), although the portrait did have an important role in the hierarchy of Socialist Realism. On the other hand, already in the 1970s critics began an active discussion about the fusion of genres and intergenre occurrences, this being firmly being ended in the 1980s with the radical expansion of art boundaries and means of expression which did not fit into the framework of conventional easel art. However, an artist’s personality and creativity can scarcely become out-of-date. “It seems that in the time when the most varied (technologically complex and primitive) media are used, when the most distinct abstraction can be found next to the fixation of a precise sensuous reality, the portrait, also when it’s done by colours and brush, which distinctly unites the general and the specific traits, can stand as a separate genre.” 3 Curator Dace Lamberga has restricted the selection of works for the exhibition by including only self-portraits of artists and portraits of other artists. This has made the exhibition somewhat more comprehensible, for the portrait in itself would require a narrower chronological framework, and would not permit the inclusion of the time period from the 19th century to the present. The concept of the exhibition also provides for a consistent dissociation from ideological works, thus leaving out both the ancient Latvian chieftains painted by Ludofs Liberts, and the numerous heroes of the working class and Soviet state leaders. Left aside are also the issues of artistic quality and idealisation attendant with 19th century commissioned portraits. Before photography became widely available, the wish of the paying customer to leave their image for posterity in a suitably respectable, yet recognizable manner (the two not always coinciding) was a significant source of income for artists. On the other hand, if it is a self-portrait or a portrait of a fellow artist/colleague/friend/authority, then it is enough to cite creative necessity and the power of inspiration. But even using these criteria the quantity of the works is enormous, with many fluctuations of styles and tendencies, approaching towards and moving away from visual reality and other trends in the local evolution of portraiture. There are, for example, variations of the romantically exalted and eccentric artist types (portraits of Pēteris Krastiņš, Kārlis Padegs, Jānis Pauļuks), compromise variants between painterly expressive realism and certain elements of representation (self-portraits of Anšlavs Eglītis, Jēkabs Bīne, Augusts Zauers, Kārlis Siliņš, Arvīds Egle) and others. Although self-portraiture is more usually associated with two-dimensional art, there is an interesting exception – the sculptural ‘Self-Portrait’ (1924) by Konstantīns Rončevskis, which due to its elongated proportions anticipates the existentially fragile figures of Alberto Giacometti. The first hall of the exhibition takes the viewer up to the time shortly before WWII, leaving portraits from the Soviet period as well as contemporary works in the second hall. This allows the viewer to spend time in special “pockets” devoted to certain personalities (Jēkabs Kazaks, Konrāds Ubāns, Kārlis Miesnieks, etc.), where these artists can be seen as depicted by themselves in self-portraits, as well as portrayed by other artists at various periods of time. For example, the painting by Ilze Avotiņa Es un Vilhelms Purvītis – latvju daļinieku ciltstēvs (‘Vilhelms Purvītis – the Forefather of Lettish Artists – and I’) (2009) in its luminescent brightness outdazzles the tonally more staid versions of Purvītis’ contemporaries. Another example of a portrait of a classical artist done by a successor is the well-known portrait of Jēkabs Kazaks (1982) by Edgars Iltners. The issues of definitions and boundaries must be always kept within sight. There are several possible scenarios with regard to portraiture, taking into account the development of European art and the radical changes in the 20th century, nevertheless overall the main markers of the definition of portraiture can be localized somewhere between naturalism, idealisation and the extremes of abstraction. As authoritative portrait theoreticians have emphasized, the likeness between the image and the sitter definitely should not be exaggerated, because in most cases the viewer won’t be able to compare the portrait with the model. That is why the most useful is likely to be the concept of “sufficient individualisation” 4 which leaves the measure of sufficiency for subjective perception. The exhibition leads one to contemplate this concept on viewing the water-colour painting Penza (1916) by Konrāds Ubāns, where images of young Latvian artists can be recognized only by their attributes – canvases and artists’ palettes, or the painting by Pēteris Kalve Interjers (Burtnieku pils) (‘Interior (Burtnieku Castle)’) (1913) which does not contain any portrayed individuals at all, perhaps only space as the extension of an individual. Other examples of minimum individualisation include the well-known painting Pašportrets ar lelli (‘Self-Portrait with a Doll’) (1921) by the metaphysician of smooth planes Niklāvs Strunke, where only the profile of the face shows any individuality of facial features, as well as several works created in the second half of the 20th century – ‘Self-Portrait’ (1987) by Inta Celmiņa, with a figure approximating a silhouette wrapped in twilight, or Gaidot (Pašportrets) (‘Waiting (Self-Portrait)’) (1984), by Aija Zariņa, which for its part is devoid of any poetic painterly haze, instead “undressing” the colours and lines to their naked essence. Several more radical definitions of the portrait are possible as well, for example, the metaphorical self-portrait which would allow the inclusion of Jackson Pollock’s colour drippings and splatterings, or Mark Rothko’s meditative bands of colour. 5 The exhibition does not go that far, however, although there is a considerable level of abstraction in some works. Rita Valnere’s Pašportrets telpā (‘Self-Portrait in a Room’) (1968) and next to it the benchmark of “associative pictorialism” Sarunas par glezniecību (‘Conversations about Painting’) (1974) transparently demonstrate the coexistence of various European art traditions in the Soviet cultural space – a mix of indirect reminiscences of classicism, romanticism and realism as the official version, to which in parallel flow the colours and lines of a life profoundly influenced by cubism. The portrait is in many senses connected with the awareness of self as an autonomous and inimitable being. That is why in those cultures where the individual is first and foremost part of a collective existence, chiefly structured by rituals, the portrait has not developed to the same extent. “The very idea of individuality is thus socially and historically constructed and contingent, and portraiture both grows from and reinforces this particularly Western concept.” 6 Inevitably, there are parallels between the decline of the portrait genre and various schools of thought which declare the autonomous individual to be a “constructed” myth (although that doesn’t mean that alternative constructions aren’t even more of a dead end, which may border on, for example, the schizophrenic splitting of personality – if we were to go into psychological parlance). There are works which play on the global mainstream concept of the individual as a transitory constellation of an unstable and variable assortment of identities. For example, Jānis Mitrēvics’ ironical work Personālizstāde (Pašportrets) (‘Personal Exhibition (Self-Portrait)’) (2000), which features the romantically modernist idea about the exhibiting of art as a public demonstration of the artist’s “essence”, the female body as an object to look at, as well as hypothetical crossbreeds of female and male identities. Similarly in Juris Petraškevičs’ work For Man (2004), a sequence of fleeting grimaces and ephemeral emotions with an amusing perspective: any remnants of seriousness and representativeness are lost in a slideshow of separate frames, where none of them is more important or truer than the other one – as if emphasizing the significance of each passing moment. (1) Richard Brilliant. Portraiture. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2002, p. 7, 14. (2) userpages.umbc.edu/~ivy/selfportrait/back.html (3) Kļaviņš, Eduards. Latviešu portreta glezniecība 1850-1916. Rīga: Zinātne, 1996, p. 9. (4) Ibid, p. 10. (5) userpages.umbc.edu/~ivy/selfportrait/metaphor.html (6) West, Shearer. Portraiture. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 17. /Translator into English: Vita Limanoviča/ | |
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