Portraiture is one of the first genres of art that young children produce. As soon as age three, toddlers begin to grasp the concept that the scribbles they make on paper can symbolize real-world objects and experiences. The most recognizable form they begin to draw is the human figure, consisting at first of just a circle for the head and two vertical lines for legs. As preschoolers’ fine motor skills improve and their cognitive and emotional capacities mature, they add more expressive, descriptive attributes: arms, hair, facial features, clothing, and accessories. Through their choice of colors and their inclusion of variable details, young children are not only expressing themselves and experimenting with their sense of identity; they are actively processing their emotions and making sense of social interactions.
The portraits in The Face of Life, an ongoing exhibition that opened this spring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, push viewers to grapple with the complexity of human experience. The show’s title comes from American artist Alice Neel’s insistence on the importance of depicting people “in the face of life that comes crashing about you.” Neel’s quote implies that human existence is fundamentally relational: looking closely at portraiture nurtures solidarity, making us more aware of the conundrums that others face in their own particular circumstances. As we witness others, we also see ourselves and learn to trust that others see us just as keenly. “I see you” becomes “I am seen.”
Organized by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Destinee Filmore, the show brings together eighty works from the museum’s Modern and Contemporary collection. The majority of the art on view dates from about 1900 to the 1960s, but a special adjacent gallery highlights a handful of more recent acquisitions from the 1990s to 2020s. The organizers adopt an expansive approach to the term “portraiture,” showcasing not only paintings and sculpture but also pieces of furniture, forms of human adornment, and prosthetics. Some works feature no visible faces or bodies at all, but through subtleties in form, content, or context they all respond to the central theme of human presence. Installed across several intimate galleries surrounding a skylit atrium, the works are displayed in a peaceful setting, conducive to contemplating topics as vast and weighty as personhood, human existence, and the conditions of life.
Before the twentieth century, portraits were made primarily to honor or promote a significant individual’s power and status, whether social, political, or spiritual. Characteristics of the sitter’s outward appearance—including posture, attire, belongings, and property—impressed upon viewers how they should relate to the person depicted. Modernism, however, led to a notable shift in the genre. The first half of the twentieth century was marked by monumental events and influences, among them two world wars, the rise of mass and urban culture, and the embrace of new technologies like photography and new fields of inquiry such as psychology. Combined with avant-garde styles of visual art more broadly, the look and content of portraiture evolved correspondingly.
Some mid-twentieth-century portraits thus began to visualize the interior dramas of the human psyche. In Untitled Self-Portrait (circa 1949), British artist Eileen Agar (1899–1991) presents us with a pair of eyes floating among a riotous sea of dripped and poured paint. On the right side of the composition, frenetic trails of yellow and beige hint at a human face and breasts. Above and to the left, denser pools of green, blue, and black frame the humanoid form as it fluctuates between figuration and abstraction.
Agar experimented with automatism, a surrealist strategy of allowing the unconscious to direct the creative process. Tracing the idiosyncrasies of the paint is like tracking the intuitive, unpredictable maneuverings of its subject’s mind: there is the elastic dynamism of swirls and loops, the irregular shapes and spacing of splashes, the exhilarating intermediary zones where two or three colors bleed into each other to form new chromatic variations. There is even wrinkling in the thicker puddles of light green, which yields subtle three-dimensional rivulets that resemble the undulating lines of human fingerprints. Created in the aftermath of World War II, Agar’s painting makes visible the inner theater of a sensitive and imaginative psyche touched by the upheavals of postwar society.
But The Face of Life also includes portraits that look more traditional. One of the conventions of the genre is the depiction of seated individuals. Nestled in their hands or placed on the furnishings beside them are items that signal their achievements or other notable facets of their biography. In this exhibition, however, all such works bear a spirit of modernity that proclaim their place in the twentieth century: they are forward-looking in their vision even as they pay homage to earlier customs of portraiture.
One of the loveliest among them is Girl with Pomegranates (1938) by American artist Laura Wheeler Waring (1887–1948). Though she’s unnamed, the seated young woman is rendered with such individuality that she was undoubtedly a real person, not a fictional figure devised for the sake of the composition. The style of the composition is pointedly modern: the profusion of sharp angles in the flaps of the young woman’s collar, the square mouth of the porcelain vase, the slanted arrangement of the overlapping pieces of paper and canvas in the background.
Like the crisp edges and pointed nose of a paper airplane, these light-colored angular motifs evoke a sensibility of boldness and clarity—a willingness to pierce conventions, to view matters from unusual perspectives, to take flight. The landscape painting-within-the-painting propped against the wall behind the young woman may have been inspired by Waring’s travels in Europe, a pivotal time in her artistic training and professional development that occurred as she made a name for herself as a leading portraitist of the Harlem Renaissance. In Girl with Pomegranates, however, the European scenery might also suggest the sitter’s own aspirations for travel in the near future. Traditionally emblematic of fertility, the pomegranates in this case might gesture toward the abundant possibilities that lie ahead for this young person.
Waring’s forward-looking optimism is reciprocated by a backward-looking moment in the show’s inclusion of several works by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Today, Boccioni is best known for Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), a bronze sculpture of a human figure striding forward. The figure’s silhouette is broken into multiple planes and contours, imparting an illusion of continuous motion. With its metallic surface and blade-like units, the figure wavers between human and machine. Boccioni was a principal proponent of futurism, an international cultural movement that first emerged in Italy around the years of World War I. It championed the impact of new technological power on society, with futurist artworks showcasing the speed, force, and movement that mechanization brought to modern life.
While the forward-leaning stance of Unique Forms invokes a future-oriented spirit, the sculpture’s placement just a few feet away from an earlier Self-Portrait (1905) by Boccioni invites us to approach it from a retrospective angle. Painted eight years prior to the creation of his now iconic sculpture, the self-portrait displays a softer, more impressionistic aesthetic. Dressed in an all-black outfit that seems to be from an earlier era, the then twenty-three-year-old Boccioni gazes out at us, his knit brows echoing the knot of the bow around his neck. Behind him is a white wall, brightly lit by the sun. To the left, the dark green leaves of a fruit tree caress his head and shoulders.
At the time, Boccioni was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and focused mainly on landscapes and portraits. At first glance, the calm atmosphere and naturalistic colors of this composition seem to have little to do with the futurist techno-dynamism that Boccioni would later embrace. There is, however, the gentlest foreshadowing of his later fracturing of forms in the texture of the wall: its white surface is not uniform, but instead built up from individual brushstrokes loaded with a spectrum of pastel tones.
Boccioni died at the age of thirty-three, succumbing to an injury incurred while serving in the Italian army during World War I. He had designed Unique Forms just two years earlier. The show’s positioning of Boccioni’s lesser-known Self-Portrait just a few steps away from his now iconic futurist sculpture heightens its poignancy: we see the artist’s youthful face squinting out at us in the shadow of an epic masterwork he created shortly before his death.
While the juxtaposition of the two works by Boccioni underscores the brevity of life, a painted wood relief sculpture by German-French artist Jean Arp (1886–1966) turns our attention to life’s earliest stages. Titled Torso, Navel, Mustache-Flower (1930), Arp’s piece features three carved biomorphic forms within a rectangular shadowbox. Although the three shapes are abstract, their wavy outlines and the subtle shadows they cast make them whimsically animate: they appear to be facing out toward us, the leftmost form reaching up to give viewers a wave.
Arp was a founding member of Dada, a cultural movement that sought to reveal the absurdities and nonsensical dimensions of modern life in the wake of World War I. Given that Arp’s creative process involved chance and play, it is not surprising that this work alludes to infancy and childhood: the oval at the center recalls our origin as eggs, the bellybutton hole in the leftmost shape brings to mind our earliest caregivers, and the mustachioed flower on the right suggests our youthful efforts at drawing the world around us. Even the palette of dull gray with a splash of red seems to resonate with the fact that infants in their first few months have muted color perception, with red being one of the first high-contrast colors they can distinguish. Considered within the context of portraiture, Arp’s piece fittingly offers itself as a portrait of us at our most nascent, and reminds us that we have been engaging with portraiture since our earliest years of childhood.
The Face of Life encourages us to keep at it: looking at others is how we grow and develop, but also keeps us young as our gaze matures. Portraiture, the art of being seen and seeing others, is a lifelong practice.
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