What a Face Can Be: Portraiture Beyond Recognition

Vivienne Kessler ◹

The Aperture Review · Formalist critic

The premise is sound: watch the portrait's contract with likeness erode across five centuries. The wall text sets up the argument cleanly. Then you walk into the room and the show collapses into a chronological procession that proves nothing.

Start with Portrait of Maria Kitscher, Frau von Freyberg. Mielich's panel is small, densely worked, nearly miniaturist in its finish. The face sits centered, symmetrical, presented like an inventory of features: the precise line of the veil, the small mouth, the hands folded in lap. It is descriptive painting. Competent. Airless. That clarity is the point, and the painting makes it without sentimentality. But standing in front of it, the eye has nothing to do except confirm what it sees. Likeness is the entire transaction.

William Forsyth (1749–1814) arrives next and the hand becomes visible. Raeburn uses the brushwork itself as a kind of portraiture, gestural strokes that read as confidence rather than precision. The fabric of the coat loosens into suggestion. The face remains legible but the paint assertively asserts itself. This is the first real move in the argument, and Raeburn executes it with actual control. The brushwork never lapses into expressionism for its own sake. It serves legibility while claiming the right to be seen as paint.

Then the American realists stall the momentum. Alice Pike Barney, in Wedding Gown and My Daughter Gladys maintain the fiction of likeness without advancing anything formal. They are technically proficient but intellectually inert, neither committed to Mielich's precision nor to Raeburn's assertion of the artist's hand. Elbridge Ayer Burbank's Che-ke-ah-pe-kee sits in the same register: rendered with fidelity but without any real investigation of what that fidelity costs or conceals. The show lists them in order and the wall text tells you they are important, but the paintings themselves do not argue for their inclusion. They fill time.

Modigliani's Portrait of a Woman is where the actual fracture happens. The neck elongates. The nose becomes sculptural, almost carved from the canvas. The eyes sink into shadow. The paint is spare and the face is no longer a face you would recognize in the street. It is a psychological object, a formal investigation into how much of the human can be abstracted before it ceases to function as portraiture at all. Modigliani does not soften this. The painting is austere. The elongation is not decorative. It is a real refusal of the conventions that Mielich took for granted.

August Macke's Male Nude, rendered in brush and black wash with gouache accents, pushes further into expressionist distortion. The anatomy buckles. The musculature reads as emotional rather than anatomical fact. The green-yellow gouache cuts across the form without describing it. But here the show begins to lose the thread. Macke is not making a portrait. He is making a study in gestural abstraction using the male body as its occasion. The distinction matters. The show's central argument is that portraiture can abandon likeness and still function as portraiture. Macke is abandoning portraiture itself.

By the time we reach Lucius Kutchin's Girl with Cards, the title is all that anchors the work to the portrait at all. The painting reduces the figure to rectangular planes of color stacked with no particular concern for the body's logic. It is a formal composition that happens to have been called a portrait. The same collapse occurs with Untitled (Brown and Gray), where Rothko's color field has nothing to do with the human head and everything to do with chromatic relationships. And Jasper Johns' Target, made of encaustic and newspaper, is not even pretending to engage with portraiture. It is Johns making a sculpture-painting about perception and reification. To call it a portrait because it has a title is to abandon the show's own argument.

The curatorial move is to treat this dissolution as a natural progression, a logical continuation of the portrait's refusal of likeness. But there is a hard formal difference between Modigliani's deliberate distortion of the face and Rothko's complete abandonment of figuration. One is still a portrait. The other is not. The show elides this distinction by relying on wall text to make the argument rather than allowing the formal evidence to speak. Each work is presented as a step in an inevitable march, but the eye does not experience it that way. The eye sees a portrait tradition and then, eventually, a series of paintings that have stopped being about the face altogether.

The technical execution varies wildly and not always productively. Mielich and Raeburn are both fully in command of their materials. Modigliani's spare oil paint is disciplined and exact. But the American realists are pedestrian, and by the time we reach the late modernist works, the show is asking you to accept conceptual arguments rather than formal ones. The wall text is doing the work. The paintings are not.

What a Face Can Be has a legitimate thesis. The evidence for it is incomplete. The show would have been sharper if it had stopped with Modigliani, or if it had been willing to acknowledge that Rothko and Johns are making something other than portraits. Instead, it insists on a unified argument that the work itself does not support. That is a failure of curatorial precision, not a difference of opinion.