Taking Portraits At "Face" Value

(1966) Rene Magritte, Paysage de Baucis, Gravura 94/100, 37,5 x 27,5 cm, anteriormente em William Weston Gallery.

"We are so used to recognizing people from their faces that we feel disoriented when they are absent, or delusive, or otherwise insufficient.

How specific such facial indicators must be has been put to the test by Magritte's etching, Paysage de Baucis, which is considered to be a form of self-portrait because of its resemblance to portrait photographs of the artist and because it includes the bowler hat that Magritte always wore. Without this prior knowledge, however, a viewer would have difficulty recognizing the image as a portrait, let alone a portrait of the artist. Unlike the faceless Roman statue, there is nothing about this image that calls for such a specific classification among the genres of art. The viewer must integrate the typical features of the human face into the shape of a human head and provide the enclosing outline, thus defining the image of himself mentally; he also has to find some reason for believing that the image refers to someone in particular. The artist's metaphisical concept addresses the process of becoming a person rather than the attainment of a fixed state of being. This allows Magritte to comment on the way in which identity is given to a person from the outside and to modify the conception of a visible likeness, so long tied to the idea of portraiture.

Paul Klee has explored the challenge to personal identity perhaps more than any other modern artist. He has also used the mask to investigate its potential for concealment and revelation. The masks in his work express his uncertainty as to whether visible faces have any continuous and true connection to their bearers and whether there is any core of self to which specific faces might be legitimately attached. His 1932 watercolour, Ein neue Gesicht (A New Face), shows two ghostly intersecting forms - vague visages - in the process of change, a theme repeatedly explored by Klee in his ironic response to the world's masquerade. The concept of individuality was then receding in art and literature, and perhaps the vagueness of this image was Klee's metaphor for that changing attitude. With this erosion of the sense of self, only the vestigial autonomy of the person - the dark shapes within the lighter shapes in the watercolour - could survive, if namelessly. In Robert Musil's words:

'The center of gravity no longer lies in the individual but in the relations between things.'

Historically, portrait artists have often sought to discover some central core of personhood as the proper object of their representation. They have done so not because tghey doubted its existence, as did Klee, but because they wanted to capture, unmistakably, the special quality or qualities of their subject. That invisible core of self was always hard to grasp and even harder to portray, so various solutions were invented that would extend the metaphorical nature of the portrait in a manner consistent with the subject's own behavior or patterns of self-representation. This mode of portrayal has, as its ruling principle, the presentation of the individual in some special, personal capacity, however extreme that might appear." *

* Brilliant, 1991: 65-67.

Fashioning The Self

(1962) Andy Warhol, # 204 Marilyn Diptych, Acrílico sobre Tela, 205,4 x 144,8 x 2 cm,

Tate Gallery - Londres.

Segundo Richard Brilliant,

"The effective combination of mechanical or electronic reproduction and tendentious redudancy has been deliberately exploited by Andy Warhol in a number of Pop portraits of the 1960s, such as his huge Marilyn Diptych in the Tate Gallery. Fifty identical images of the actress-celebrity, Marilyn Monroe, slightly modified by colour and tone, are deliberately shown together in a single work, almost fourteen feet wide, to make a statement about the banality of popular imagery, about the insistent stereotyping of such images, about figural and non-figural pattern formation, about mechanical printing - but very little about Marilyn Monroe (itself an alias). Warhol's Marilyn is about image-making rather than portraiture because the work so clearly emphasizes the mechanism of popular representation in the modern age but not the person represented.

Here, and elsewhere, Warhol seems to deprive the portrait of much of its deeper referential content in order to suggest both the artificial confection of her public personality and the relative invisibility of the person behind the public image, the latter offered as a commodity for the viewer's consumption. Yet his Marilyn retains her identity in the public consciousness despite the fact that her image has been reduced to her smiling face with its crown of blond hair, unsupported by the voluptuous figure that was no less an essential part of her persona. Warhol's concentration upon Marilyn's image-sign, and his replication of it, forces the viewer to connect this art work with the broader phenomenon of mechanical reproduction that inevitably erodes the status of an original, even the original in the portrait. Yet, the viewer has no difficulty in providing the name of that original because the artist has retained enough of her synthetic image to make identification certain. So familiar have her features become through repetition that the denotative power of her image is absolutely firm, even without a label." *

O que eu acho interessante nesta obra de Warhol é o fato dela ser um díptico, ou seja, não é por acaso que o artista escolhe colocar lado a lado um conjunto de "retratos" coloridos de Marilyn Monroe e outro em preto-e-branco. A análise de Brilliant me parece estar correta, mas é preciso enfatizar este aspecto dual da obra. É por meio dele que se constrói a idéia da obra ser sobre o fenômeno da produção imagética (que, em última medida, fabrica personalidades...) e não um mero retrato da artista-celebridade. Sem esse elemento que contrasta os dois padrões distintos de reprodução da imagem o sentido da obra permaneceria vago.

*Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 47-49.

Para Minhas Colegas Antropólogas...

(1970) Irving Penn, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Burgund