What You Know & Who You Know

[slideshow]

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906.
Federico de Madrazo de Ochoa, Portrait of Jean Cocteau, 1910-1912.
Rudolf Schlichter, Portrait Bertolt Brecht, 1926.
Damian Byrne, Beckett, 2007.

Well I tried to find artwork of each of our playwrights this year and only succeeded with Stein, Cocteau, Brecht, and Beckett (there will be a whole post on the portraits of Beckett by Louis le Brocquy, because he did over 20). I believe this to have the following causes.

1. These early playwrights were major players in their respective creative scenes and many took part in salons, Gertrude Stein in particular held a famous salon. This meant that they were busy rubbing elbows with famous or promising artists of the day, artists who might have been inspired by these enigmatic playwrights. It is a sad set of facts that artist salons are pretty much non-existent in this day and age(along with the excellent etiquette of the calling card), and in general not as much cross pollination occurs between the fields of theater, fine art, music, and writing anymore.

2. You will notice there is a gap in the art between 1926 and 1979 (the le Brocquy portraits, not shown, start in 1979) This has a lot to do with art history, and use of the figure in art. Portraiture has always been an important genre of painting in the Western world (and the East too, but I’m not going into that tangent) and well respected, second only Historic painting in the hierarchy of genres. Then the 20th century happened, and stuff got kind of crazy. Artists began to question the old hierarchy and experiment with abstracting forms and eventually creating completely non-representational forms. So between 1930 and 1960 portraiture was seen in many art circles as old hat (Andrew Wyeth is a great exception to this, he continued in the vein of regionalism and realism and some of his stuff is just gorgeous). Then in the 1960’s you get Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and le Brocquy making portraits cool for everyone again. And ever since the whole art world has kind of been an anything-goes-no-style-post-post-modernism-ism, and reactions to that and everything…it’s complicated.

So that’s why I believe that we don’t have excellent (non-photographic) portraits of Breuer, Shange, Kennedy, Carlos, etc. etc. Sad, no? But at least if you bothered to read about all that stuff you learned about some neat art history that I guarantee they didn’t teach in high school, and you probably didn’t take modern art history in college, but if you did then…well, I don’t know, you have a better idea about Chuck Close before clicking on the wikipedia link, that’s about it 😀