Art History News: Portraiture: From Cassatt to Freud

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Portraiture: From Cassatt to Freud, a group exhibition exploring portraiture, with paintings and sculptures spanning over a century and different styles of representation, from Impressionism to today. Artists include Billy Al Bengston, Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Dominic Chambers, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Nicole Eisenman, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Laurens, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Susan Rothenberg, Tom Sachs, Wayne Thiebaud, Édouard Vuillard, Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, and Dustin Yellin. The exhibition will open at the gallery’s Palm Beach location November 20, 2024, and travel to New York in January of 2025.

Portraiture: From Cassatt to Freud brings together works that delve into the techniques and methods that artists have utilized to represent their subjects in portraiture. Showing works by artists across the spectrum of the Impressionist, modern, and contemporary periods, the exhibition reflects the disparate ways of seeing and portraying, with a particular focus on the relationship between painter and model. Through these varying perspectives, the simulacrum undergoes shifts and transformations that illustrate the breadth of portraiture while delving into the genre’s inherent intimacy.

Among the selection of artworks is Andy Warhol’s iconic Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) (1986). Created during the penultimate year of Warhol’s life, the silkscreen painting ranks among the artist’s most recognized and familiar images. Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) is complemented by an earlier self-portrait by the artist, Self-Portrait (1964), offering two starkly different representations of the artist at different moments in his life. Created in the early years of his career, the 1964 painting marks a starting point for Warhol’s career-long engagement with the construction of identity as it pertained to composing his public persona. The 1986 work, from his final series of portraits, continues Warhol’s enduring conflict between self and icon, private and public. In Fright Wig, Warhol embodies the kind of constructed self-projection that was crucial to his public façade.

Matisse’s Tête de femme penchée (Lorette) (1916-1917) is one of nearly fifty paintings the artist made of Italian model and muse, “Lorette,” between 1916 and 1917. During World War One, the artist began to veer closer than ever before into abstraction, until his series of paintings of Lorette ushered in softer, warmer tonalities and a return to representation, qualities that had begun to disappear from Matisse’s practice for a brief period following 1913. Lorette was a pivotal figure for Matisse’s career, awakening newfound energy in the artist and transforming his work back to a naturalistic mode reinvigorated by a close attention to rich colors and dynamic forms. Lorette’s influence on Matisse’s change in artistic style exemplifies the reciprocal relationship between artist and subject.

Among the contemporary examples of portraiture included in the exhibition is Nicole Eisenman’s painting Groundsweller (2014). Recalling the formal geometric vocabulary of Russian Constructivism and Cubism, the central figure is winking and smoking a joint, a characteristic use of humor and tragicomic figuration typical of the artist’s practice. The figure itself has a certain “gender agnosticism,” a term utilized by Eisenman, allowing for an inclusive reading of the subject. Like other work in her oeuvre, Eisenman uses portraiture to explore the complexities of the human condition and social issues. In Groundsweller, the artist shows how the genre can be at once universally familiar and intimate.

Portraiture: From Cassatt to Freud opens to the public November 20, 2024, and will run through January 5th in the gallery’s Palm Beach location.