Portraits again

Some months ago I did a couple of posts on portraiture, inspired by a new book by the philosopher Cynthia Freeland. Last evening I read an article about the portraits of the painter Lucian Freud, which made me think about this subject again. The author of the article, Ian Marcus Corbin, writing in the current issue of First Things, traces the "gruesome sort of candor" of Freud's style to the 19th-century French realist Gustave Courbet. A major difference between the portraits by Courbet and those by Freud is that the latter's subjects generally have their eyes closed. These closed eyes refuse to reveal the inner life of their subject, and indeed that may be Freud's point. The article is entitled "The Heavy Eyelids of Lucian Freud."

Corbin stresses Freud's relentless focus on the physical, biological body. And, while Freud was "in theory at least, deeply committed to capturing the flesh of his subjects, where flesh meets consciousness, he stepped lightly, if at all." Corbin traces this approach to Freud's profound anti-metaphysical attitudes, which the artist shared with many of his contemporaries. Thus, he is "commended for his courageous willingness to look grim reality, again and again, in the cheeck, navel, and nipple. His mature work is a modern memento more, a hard-eyed stare at the way of all flesh."

I have never cared for Freud's work and quickly passed by the recent homage now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His attitude toward his subjects was too unsparing for me, as if they were being attacked by the very brushwork Freud wielded. But, to return to portraits and especially to Freeman's ruminations in her book: we are drawn to portraits because of what they reveal of the person. As Corbin writes, Freud failed to answer the question: what is the particular point of painting humans? His decision to paint his subjects with their eyes closed was "philosophically weighty, because, for a portraitist, the eyes are not just one organ among many. They are where the psyche, or soul, can seem most visible." Ultimately, Corbin gives Freud credit for avoiding a "homogenized fantasy world," even if his work is plagued by the "postmodern taste for what Saul Bellow called 'the harshest or most niggardly explanation' of human phenomena."

In describing Goethe, his contemporaries frequently alluded to his eyes. His fellow student Heinrich Stilling in Strassburg, in 1771, spoke of Goethe as an excellent man with "big bright eyes, splendid forehead and fine build" who, moreover, dominated the company he was in. (By the way, Stilling's autobiographical novel, Heinrich Stillings Leben, is a precious and revealing document of this period.) Heinrich Christian Boie, who met Goethe in Frankfurt in 1774, spoke of "a heart as great and noble as his mind," and of the intelligence revealed by his "bright brown eyes." In Karlsbad in 1785 Goethe was said to stand out at the spa because of his beautiful eyes.

Picture credit: Art History Archive; Recherche

Goethe in Portrait

I wanted to add a couple of my thoughts on portraits since my last posting. In the meantime I have also had an opportunity to look at Cynthia Freeland's book Portraits and Persons. In the second chapter, entitled "Contact," she discusses Roland Barthes' book on photography, Camera Lucida, which he was prompted to write after his mother's death. Reflecting on the past, he claims that photographs "preserve the past, bringing us into the direct presence of people who are long dead."

When looking at photographs of 19th-century people, especially ethnographic photographs like the one of Arapaho Indian men below, I have indeed felt that one "knows" them in a way that one doesn't know people from paintings, drawings, or any other earlier visual document. I have so often wished that photography had been invented a decade earlier; then, we might have had a photograph of Goethe.

Freeland mentions Barthes' discussion of the way a portrait captures a person's "air, which Barthes describes as follows:

The air is not a schematic, intellectual datum, the way a silhouette is. Nor is the air a simple analogy -- however extended -- as in "likeness." No, the air is that exorbitant thing which induces body from soul -- animula, little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.

Got that? Actually, I would reverse Barthes' terms: not "induces body from soul," but "soul from body." And, indeed, Freeland goes on to say that there is something in great portraits from history "that holds our attention just because we do seem to see in them a person's essence, their 'air.'" Barthes himself goes on to say: "Perhaps the air is ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value."

Freeland mentions a couple of paintings that, she claims, reveal this "air," in other words, "someone's essential nature or their character in a very deep sense." One was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth by Lucian Freud. Frankly I find it so ugly that I didn't want to put it on my blog. Another is Velazquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X, who "has the air of someone cunning and ruthless." I think she is onto something there.

The drawing at the top of Goethe, by Tischbein, sketched shortly after Goethe arrived in Rome in 1787, is not a portrait. It is obviously something like a candid snapshot. There is not the "engagement" between artist and subject that, for Freeland, characterizes the true portrait. At the same time, as Freeland mentioned (see my previous post), adult humans are self-enacting, presenting themselves to the world, most of the time. From Goethe's relaxed "pose" here, as he stares out the window onto the Roman scene below, one certainly glimpses the charming young man that so many were attracted to. One has the impression that Goethe is not aware he is being observed; Goethe, however, seemed able to withdraw into himself, even when he was observed, a quality that Tischbein captured in Goethe in the Campagna.

Picture credits: Recherche; First People

Goethe in Portrait

When I am wandering through Central Park I often listen to my iPod, mostly "podcasts." One of my favorite podcasts is "Philosophy Bites," a really cool program of short (15 minutes) interviews with philosophers. The subjects range from Plato to Nietzsche. Some people will talk about anything, and my only complaint is that the program features too much contemporary stuff: just war, vegetarianism, cosmopolitanism, etc. I would like to hear about Dun Scotus or Augustine or Boethius! Still, it is a great program, and recently it featured an interview with Cynthia Freeland, a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, who talked about the relevance of portraits to philosophy, especially what they might tell us about the human self. If that seems like an odd connection, she reminded Nigel Warburton, who was interviewing her, that philosophers interested in personal identity often cite novels or other literary sources.

Professor Freeland finds that the neglect of portraits by philosophers is puzzling since portraits "represent the serious efforts of some of the world's best artists to study people (others or themselves). Hence, portraits might reasonably be though to embody accumulated cultural wisdom about what it is to be human."

What is a portrait? She works up to the subject by discussing animals, which are often depicted in art, and arrives at three criteria: a portrait is a depiction of an individual living being; the being has internal emotional states; and the being poses. Animals, however endearing they are and even possessing internal emotional states, do not "enact self-representation."

She was asked about candid photographs. Adult humans, according to Freeland, are self-enacting most of the time. Even in a candid shot you can find this self-representation to the rest of humanity, which would make it portrait-like. A candid shot, however, lacks the element of engagement between the portrait artist and the sitter. Portrait artists have often described this situation as one of conflict and tension, since the artist wants one thing, the subject something else. Warburton suggested that the subject puts on a "theatrical mask," but Freeland insisted that that is not a bad thing: we are like that as human beings, self-aware creatures, and it is natural and ineveitable that we present ourselves in a variety of ways.

The discussion sent me to looking at portraits of Goethe. First off, one must admit that, while there are many portraits of Goethe, he was never portrayed by a truly great artist, one of the caliber of Van Gogh or Rembrandt. How great it would be to have a portrait of him by Caspar David Friedrich. Perhaps the best one and even the most representative is that by Johann Heinrich Tischbein at the top of the blog. I will try in the coming days to focus on a few portraits that I particularly like.

The one at the top of this post is by Georg Melchior Kraus (1737-1806). Like Goethe, he was from Frankfurt and got to know Goethe in the latter's "Sturm und Drang" phase. Kraus even went to Weimar at about same time as Goethe, becoming director of the drawing academy there in 1776. He was also Goethe's companion on the third Harz journey and prepared many of the drawings of rock formations that Goethe wanted for his geological investigations. Thus, he knew Goethe quite well from early on. The dress and style in this portrait is definitely "Genie" period. Note that Goethe's hair is not powdered.

Goethe seems to be studying a Schattenriss (shadow cut) that he holds in his lifted right hand, alluding to Johann Caspar Lavater's work on "physiognomic fragments," which was published with Goethe's assistance. According to Lavater our physiogomy was a key to our character, and to illustrate his theory he had his friends make silhouette portraits.

Goethe is very engaging in the portrait by Kraus, and one gets a sense of why people were so captivated with him in this period. Note the similarity in the pose with the one in the portrait by Tischbein. The relaxed pose might indicate a lack of the kind of artist-sitter tension that Freeland mentions as often characteristic of great portraits. In the latter portrait, however, Goethe is not studying anything that we can see. Indeed, his eyes appear to be contemplating some inward prospect. One also can't help but feel that in both portraits Goethe is very reserved and self-contained, qualities that will continue to be seen in future portraits.

Picture credits: Recherche; Paint My Dog; Artblart