Figures and Faces

Portraiture is the art of depicting a person, whether painted, drawn, sculpted or photographed. Some of the earliest expressions of portraiture include ancient Egyptian tonal portraits, painted on the lids of mummy cases, and the life-size sculptural busts or death masks made in ancient Rome. Both examples describe an enduring set of ideas central to the genre: to memorialise a subject and to capture a likeness.

Across Western art history, portraiture has functioned as a record of powerful and important people, as well as illustrated biblical or mythological figures. Portraits were often commissioned – in other words, the artist was paid to make the portrait – and so artists long grappled with the idea of representation. Portraiture was thus frequently used as a symbol of power, wealth, importance, authority, virtue, status or beauty. 

From the mid-1800s, the advent of photography changed the nature of portraiture. Artists no longer needed to accurately record their sitter’s likeness as this could be more easily be achieved with a camera. As a result, a new world of expressive forms appeared and portraiture became more deeply involved in the psychological dimensions of the subject. The sitter changed too, with artists now representing their friends and family members, even strangers on the street. 

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The study of the human figure was central to a formal nineteenth-century art education, whereby anatomical exactitude and lifelike dimensions were emphasised. The foundational modes of study at the celebrated art academies (for example, the Royal Academy, London) were, first, learning by drawing from casts, followed by drawing from life. These were considered the skills through which all artists honed their craft. By the early twentieth century, new artistic currents and the ever-proliferating experiments in abstraction pushed the boundaries of how bodies and faces might be represented. While the previous generation had often looked to new subjects to enhance the modernity of their work, many artists in this second wave of artistic experimentation turned to figurative artistic traditions – portraits, self-portraits, and nude or minimally dressed models – which they subverted and transformed with radically innovative painting styles.

A groundbreaking and profoundly influential movement of the early twentieth century was Cubism, conceived by Spanish-born Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque, both of whom departed from single-point perspective to depict the human figure as dynamically multifaceted – as if the subject could be seen from multiple sides simultaneously. This departure from the established tradition, while broadly viewed as radical and shocking, inspired other artists to adopt this approach of dissolving the borders of human figures, some as a way to express their own complicated connection to the emerging modern world; others sought to depict not merely the exterior world of their subject but rather to expose their subject’s psyche and inner world through outward expression on canvas.

Depicting their subjects in varying contexts represents yet another component of artists’ experimentation with the human figure. These figurative works are not concerned with presenting a heroic vision of humanity; instead, they aim to peel back the layers of society to reveal the good, bad and banal. Take, for example Matisse’s dancers, who no longer perform for their audiences, or Max Beckmann’s strange and distorted circus forms.

Text by Tansy Curtin, Assistant Director, Artistic and Collection Programs, Catalogue for Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition