Why Small Is BIG

A detail of Air Stream, 2005, by Rob de Mar, who uses a variety of materials, including model-making supplies, to create his miniature landscapes.
COURTESY CLEMENTINE GALLERY, NEW YORK.









From Tom Friedman’s eraser shavings to Rob de Mar’s minuscule waterfall to Adia Millett’s tabletop dollhouses, intimately scaled sculptures are making a large impact
by Linda Yablonsky
There isn’t much in contemporary life to encourage anyone to think small. This is the era of the Hummer, the McMansion, and the 10,000-square-foot apartment. Even the bagel has been affected, swelling from a hard, palm-sized ring to a puffed-out, chewy blob. What can artists do but reflect and respond in kind?

In recent years, photography has distinguished itself partly by gigantism, and drawings have consumed entire walls. By assuming the scale of museums, commercial galleries effectively equate the intimate with the insignificant, motivating artists to grow their work to suit and compelling institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty, and Tate Modern to build ever larger, whatever the cost.

Sculpture has not merely kept pace with this growth but has led the way—at least since the 1960s, which brought us such macro-minded Minimalists as Donald Judd and Tony Smith; massive Earthworks like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah (1970) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) in the Nevada desert; and Christo’s 1976 California project, Running Fence. Mary Ceruti, director of the SculptureCenter in New York’s Long Island City, puts it most succinctly: “In sculpture,” she says, “the whole idea of small is anti-modern.” All the same, a variety of sculptors are devoting some portion of their creative lives to working in the land of the wee.

Take the process-oriented Tom Friedman. His materials are not just small—they’re trifling. He has coaxed beautiful sculpture out of such things as eraser shavings, pillow stuffing, and plastic cups; once he carved his portrait into an aspirin tablet. Recently he made a Styrofoam figure that is 12 feet tall, but he paired it with another that topped out at only four inches.

Friedman describes his largest work as “a wall piece covered with tiny white Styrofoam balls that you don’t really see. You only see the dots, but you look for the edges and it broadens your sense of space.” That quality is not peculiar to Friedman’s art. It is the nature of much small-scale sculpture to disorient the viewer, inducing a Gulliver-like self-consciousness and a sense of having lost one’s way. In other words, by focusing the viewer’s attention on the space around it, an artwork’s diminution of scale can actually give the piece greater resonance.

George Stoll, a Los Angeles artist, works small partly because it gives him more control over the process. In the past, he has made uncanny replicas of floral-printed toilet paper in hand-embossed silk, richly colored Tupperware vessels in beeswax, and trompe l’oeil painted balsa-wood kitchen sponges. “I’m attracted to the sensuality of the handmade object,” he says. “I’m not interested so much in the craft as the presence.” Nevertheless, Stoll also wants the evidence of his hand to show. “When something is really refined in its manufacture,” he says, “it kind of loses its spirit.”

Stoll works solidly in the camp of Pop conceptualism, best exemplified by his “Holiday” series, on view in a show opening on the 27th of this month at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. It includes embroidered organza “porch flags,” streamers made of plaster, pearls, and nail polish, and encaustic versions of dime-store Halloween masks. Taken together they serve as both a commentary on, and amused appreciation of, the way Americans celebrate holidays. “If any of my works were bigger, they would look the same from far away,” Stoll admits. “But they wouldn’t be the same.”

Stoll’s sculpture may be small next to most artists’, but it’s actually life-size. Richard Pettibone, on the other hand, has spent decades making minuscule reproductions of works by Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. If made to scale, his sculptures would be no more than clones.

Several recent group exhibitions have helped to focus attention on work of human scale or smaller. A magnifying glass certainly would have come in handy for a 1999 show at the Laguna Art Museum titled “At the Threshold of the Visible: Minuscule and Small-Scale Art, 1964–1996.” A historical survey organized by Ralph Rugoff, it included an image of Mount Ararat carved on a grain of rice by Hagop Sandaldjian (creator of microminiatures for the Jurassic Museum of Technology in Los Angeles), chewing-gum sculptures by Hannah Wilke, and Michael Ross’s thimbleful of dust. Rugoff says, “It intrigued me that you could walk in a room and think there was nothing there, unless you got more involved. It’s art that exists only in relation to everything else around it.”

Curator Jessica Hough’s “Model World,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2002, focused on miniature environments, such as Rob de Mar’s minuscule alpine waterfall and Charles Simonds’s interlacing towers constructed out of impossibly tiny “smears” of handmade bricks. Viewers definitely needed a guide at “None of the Above,” curated by the artist John Armleder at Manhattan’s Swiss Institute last year. The gallery appeared to be empty; hidden in plain sight were nearly 50 artworks, from a blip of rubberized horsehair to a few lone polyurethane peanuts.

Historically, sculpture has tended to be heroic: think of Michelangelo and Rodin, of Maillol and Moore, or even of Jeff Koons and his flowering Puppy. Richard Serra, Nancy Rubins, Claes Oldenburg, and Mark di Suvero are among this country’s best-known contemporary sculptors, and all of them are known for work of outsize proportions. Other artists, however, have built big careers on very small art, with distinct consequences for sculpture today.

In the early 1970s, when sculpture was ruled by modernist monuments and Minimalist hulks, Joel Shapiro caused a sensation when he placed three-inch-high bronze or cast-iron domestic objects—a chair, a dollhouse, a coffin, a bird—on the floor of Paula Cooper’s SoHo gallery. “Shapiro is the patron saint of small,” says Tom Finkelpearl, director of the Queens Museum of Art, home to a 1:1200 scale model of the entire city of New York. “He was the anti-Oldenburg, taking big things and making them little.”

Better known today for tall, blocky, figural bronzes, Shapiro was only doing what most sculptors do: exploring the effect of form on space. And, he says, “I didn’t think it had to be big to do that.” His child-size chairs and houses were recognizable archetypes that projected both vulnerability and authority. They were at once seductive and impregnable. While they could almost disappear within a space, they could dominate it as well.

Shapiro explains, “If I made a table large, it would just be a table. If I put it on a base, that would remove it from the actual world, so it wouldn’t have to function in the space around it. It would be another precious object. But by putting it on the floor or extending it from the wall in an architectural setting, it became a discourse on space or scale. If a sculpture isn’t doing anything to alter the space around it,” he concludes, “it isn’t interesting.”

In his extremely modest, nearly invisible art, Richard Tuttle tackles the same issue head-on. By cutting what he calls “crummy materials” such as wire, plywood, and cloth into small, sad, irregular shapes and insinuating them into walls or attaching them just above the floor or below the ceiling, he creates works of great deliberation but negligible craft, impossible to apprehend apart from their surrounding environments.

“I was interested in the image as a reference to another world,” says Shapiro. “Richard’s work never had any such reference. It was more about discovery.” Tuttle’s 3rd Rope Piece (1974), for example, is a three-inch bit of cord nailed to a wall three feet above the floor, in the manner of an insect specimen. The work involves not just the rope, the nail, and the shadow it casts, but also the volume of space around it, thus immersing a willing viewer in the very act of seeing. As Madeline Grynsztejn, curator of the retrospective “Richard Tuttle: The Presence of Simple Things,” currently at the Whitney Museum (through February 5), has said, “He really does flirt with nothingness.”

Finkelpearl, a former director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, points to a similar trend toward unobtrusiveness in public art. For that, he credits the debacle over Serra’s Tilted Arc, which was removed from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1989 after a ten-year lawsuit. “There was a reaction against the monumentalism of the Serra,” which led to “a more integrated approach,” says Finkelpearl. He mentions the goofy, money-grubbing bronze dwarves by Tom Otterness installed in a park near the World Financial Center in New York. “They’re whimsical,” Finkelpearl admits, “but they’re also a fairly readable critique of capitalist enterprise.”

Simonds, master of the unfired clay miniature, may have made the most invisible public art in the most visible locations, placing the architectural “remains” of an invented civilization of “little people” on the windowsills of buildings all over the world. His three-part Dwelling has been on view at the Whitney Museum since 1981, permanently installed in the museum’s stairwell, and on the second-story windowsill and the chimney of a building across the street.

Some of Simonds’s tableaux are situated on pedestals or in holes that the artist has cut into walls. In 1983, one of his pieces grew large enough for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. For the most part, however, his sculptures have stayed within the scale of his own body. Yet the size of his work is more a byproduct of his creative process than its starting point. “When I’m making these dwellings,” he says, “I don’t actually think in terms of scale. I’m more in its space than the one around it, so in a way, to me it seems full scale: it’s a fantasy place and I’m walking around in it.”

In fact, there are many reasons for a sculptor today to favor the domestic scale over the monumental. One is real estate: artists who cannot afford studios outside their apartments, or who simply prefer to work at home, only have room to do so much. Cynics may also point to the influence of a market that prizes the collectible over the colossal—few collectors can accommodate a Serra-size work—though bigger sculpture generally commands bigger prices. Technology can also exert an influence; the digital revolution and the invention of new materials have made not just small but infinitesimal sculpture possible.

Karin Sander, a contemporary German conceptualist, has produced eerily realistic, Thumbelina-size versions of actual people with the help of a laser scanner, a machine used for making industrial prototypes, and an airbrush. Chris Caccamise makes painted-cardboard models of used consumer products (a squeezed tube of toothpaste is one) as well as happy rainbows, clouds, and other items more usually associated with nursery decor. He also seeks out subject matter in the history of art. For an exhibition last month at Brooklyn’s Sixtyseven Gallery, Caccamise made a tiny replica of a Tony Smith L-shape work, adding bright color. “It’s an exact-scale copy,” he says, “but it looks more like a house.” Caccamise, who works for Matthew Marks Gallery, is not the least bit interested in graduating to large-scale sculpture. “I like the idea that I’m making something perfectly collectible that is small and precious,” he says. “It’s kind of an ideal commodity.”

Of course, many artists create or assemble small objects as components of large sculptural installations, another kind of endeavor. Evan Holloway, based in Los Angeles, works somewhere in between, skewering sickly pink or yellow synthetic-plaster heads the size of lollipops on steel rods or incorporating them into small mechanized sculptures. His work is a wry, anarchic, and often unsettling reflection of a society with a self-destructive gene.

Overall, Ceruti has observed a move away from the Minimalists’ rigid formalism to a more fragile or ephemeral conceptualism. “The younger generation is definitely looking more toward Richard Tuttle than Donald Judd,” she notes.

“Perfectionism makes my hair stand on end,” says Nancy Shaver, who has a predilection for the small, the cheap, and the accessible. Working out of her antiques shop in Hudson, New York, she refashions decrepit wooden boxes into wall reliefs that measure less than 6 by 12 inches and enlivens them with roughly geometric, abstract paintings. For Shaver, this small, unassuming form has proved limitless. “I like the idea that these pieces exist somewhere between sculpture, painting, and drawing,” she says. “They also command space disproportionate to their size, with room enough for all the things I’m interested in.”

For Kiki Smith, who is known for sculpture that evokes the conditions of the human body (particularly the female body), “small things are what last. Big things tend to be taken apart or recycled, as in war, when bronze and metal is melted down.” She points out that we relate to the world more readily through small objects we handle than large ones we can’t pick up. Smith, whose work is the subject of a traveling retrospective now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January, does not limit herself to any particular material, scale, or even medium. “Most of nature exists in things we don’t see,” she says, “and I make decisions based on the real world. Essentially, I work at my kitchen table.”

John Newman, too, prefers to work at a table. Until the late 1980s, when he started traveling in Africa, India, and Asia and meeting local craftsmen, Newman made large metal sculpture and masklike wall reliefs. “I realized that intimacy was something we hadn’t seen in New York in a long time,” he says. “So I started working at my desk. I wanted to make things without trucks and cranes—that were lightweight and not toxic. That was the practical side of things.”

Newman defines a small-scale object as “an imaginative idea about space.” He mixes materials like glass and string or paper and stone, achieving a balance of volume, weight, and form that allows his lyrical abstractions to stand alone, but would be impossible to achieve at any larger scale.

For other artists, the table is both workbench and pedestal. Vincent Fecteau, based in San Francisco, exhibits his foamcore-and-papier-mâché collage works on the same kind of tables he keeps in his studio. “That way they can interact with each other,” he says. “I’m not that interested in installation, but you have to show them somehow, and people have a real resistance to pedestal sculpture.” He adds, “I’m almost envious of painters who can just hang their work. A discrete object somehow has to have a relationship to space to have any content.”

Using model trees, wire, and flocking, de Mar creates entire ecosystems on lily pad–like platforms. He suspends them well above the heads of most viewers, essentially affording them the panorama of a distant landscape. “It’s an imaginary journey,” he says, “a mental leap.” Growing up in Maine, de Mar, who is 6 feet tall, says, “I was always looking out across a valley, fascinated that I could store this huge environment in my brain. I can’t work at the scale of nature, so I make it human scale.”

The living space as repository of family history is what interests Adia Millett, a New York artist still in her 20s. Her tabletop dollhouses, just large enough to allow viewers to peer inside, are melancholy interiors in which the class and religious beliefs of the imaginary occupants are evident. Her rooms feature working lights, furniture, and much decorative detail, but they’re missing certain functional items, like doors. “I want people to remember they’re just miniatures,” Millett says, “so they can never really get inside, except in imagination.”

One danger of small-scale sculpture is its appeal to sentiment. Its often lonesome or neglected appearance can induce a powerful sense of longing for things lost or never realized. It is the sort of nostalgia that most artists take pains to avoid, but Jeanne Silverthorne welcomes it with open arms. “I’m interested in nostalgia as a subject,” she says, “partly because it’s a forbidden area. Anything that everyone else is dead set against seems to me a good place to investigate.”

In the past, Silverthorne has replicated full-scale items in her studio in sculptures of miniature proportion and enlarged the most transitory matter of all—sweat, tears, and ulcerous bacteria—into cast-rubber pieces. For a recent show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, Silverthorne made phosphorescent, cast-rubber portraits three or four inches high of elderly people—real people from whom she took DNA samples and hair. “They have this up-to-the-minute scientific reference,” she says of these works. “But they are also like voodoo figures that seem magical.”

If this appears ghoulish, consider the work of Charles LeDray, who makes exquisite—and very tiny—versions of everyday objects (a chair, a ladder, a shaft of wheat) out of hand-carved human bone. (He doesn’t reveal its source.) It is one way to keep viewers from regarding his work as cute.

LeDray started out in the early 1990s, making tiny men’s suits stuffed with even smaller suits, hand-sewn and strung along a clothesline above the viewer’s head, or stitched together to form a rope that dangled from the ceiling. “I’ve been called a teddy-bear artist, a craft artist, a boy who sews, a man who does women’s work, a clothing artist,” he says. “But I think I’m an artist who makes art, at whatever scale it needs to be.” For LeDray, “Scale is a bouillon cube that can condense and hopefully enrich a concept.”

“Charles does not think he makes small art,” says Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the organizer of LeDray’s 2002 midcareer retrospective. The show included Oasis (similar to his Untitled, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), 1996–2003, a large glass case containing six glass shelves supporting no less than 2,000 tiny, glazed ceramic vessels that LeDray had made one by one. “I don’t work in small scale,” LeDray insists. “Everything is the scale it needs to be within my esthetic or conceptual judgment. It’s more about how things find their gravity.” As Gould says, “We think we’re all giants or that we’re all very tiny. Whatever the perception is, it’s not the truth. That’s what Charles calls into question.”

Ultimately, of course, one experiences art in the space of one’s own mind. It can expand to the breadth of the universe or narrow to focus on a single idea, object, or view. Where large pieces can be read at a distance, small ones, like Fabergé eggs, demand slow, close-up examination, and hold the promise of surprise. In this fast-paced world of what Rugoff calls “the drive-by art experience,” that can be a virtue.

Waves of Light

Flashlight: I’m not from here, I’m not from there, 2006, by Iván Navarro.
COURTESY HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

From bulbs to neon and fluorescent tubing to LEDs and other electronic creations, artists are using light—as material and subject—to comment on everything from advertising to spirituality
by Hilarie M. Sheets

“One of the attractions of light is the immediate physical, optical quality—it’s going to be the thing that gets your attention,” says John Ravenal, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “Dan Flavin called it the ‘factuality of light.’ It’s bright, it’s commanding, and metaphorically it’s so rich. It’s just basic—there was darkness, and then there was light.”

Of course, the interplay of dark and light has been a theme running from Greek and Roman sculpture to Renaissance painting to experimental film. But as technology advanced from the glow of the electric lightbulb to the computer monitor, artists have been experimenting with actual light as material and subject. The 1960s saw a high point in activity, with artists such as Flavin, Bruce Nauman, and James Turrell creating sculptures and environments out of diffuse light or radiant fluorescent and neon tubing. Today, younger artists are looking beyond their forerunners and taking light in new directions.

Ravenal gathered together some of these emerging artists, including the team of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Spencer Finch, Ceal Floyer, Iván Navarro, Nathaniel Rackowe, and Douglas Ross, in his show “Artificial Light,” which opened last fall at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Anderson Gallery in Richmond and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. It was shown there at the same time as “Elusive Signs,” the first exhibition devoted to Nauman’s neon word and fluorescent light pieces of the 1960s through the ’80s. (The show, which originated at the Milwaukee Art Museum, is at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle through May 6.)

Bridging the generations is “Refract, Reflect, Project,” on view through April 1 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., for which associate curator Anne Ellegood chose 23 pieces of light art from the museum’s permanent collection. The assortment includes work by Flavin, Turrell, and Joseph Kosuth as well as recent acquisitions by Finch, Navarro, and Olafur Eliasson, one of the most prominent artists working with light. The Danish artist, who will have his first U.S. survey show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September, has created immersive environments, including an installation at Tate Modern in London that sought to bring the spectacle of the sun to an interior space.

Finch’s first museum survey, “What Time Is It on the Sun?”, opens at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, on May 26. The artist often seeks to re-create the American sublime through abstraction and science. The rows of fluorescent lights in Sunset (South Texas, 6/21/03), 2003, give the same light reading on a colorimeter as the artist recorded that day.

The first big wave of light-art works in the 1920s and ’30s developed from kinetic sculptures by artists such as Thomas Wilfred and László Moholy-Nagy, whose Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1928–30) created a moving design of light and shadow on the walls (a replica was shown recently at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art). In 1919 Wilfred made the first of his organs that projected lights when played. Examples of his performances recorded in the 1960s are included in the Hirshhorn show “Summer of Love,” coming to the Whitney on May 24. “A lot of it was about the promise of new technology and the way that dovetails with modernism and the utopian thinking of the Bauhaus,” says Ravenal. Flavin, with his interest in fluorescent light as a product of mass production, extended this line of thought in hard-edged Minimal sculptures, adding an ironic twist with the long series of works titled “Monument for V. Tatlin.”

For other artists using light in the 1960s, technology was beside the point. Bonnie Clearwater, director of MOCA in North Miami and former director of the Mark Rothko Foundation, sees the influence of painters like Rothko on this type of work. “A good deal of the interest in light occurred after World War II, when the studies in phenomenology and Gestalt psychology were being popularized,” she says. “Rothko was aware of this. He was interested in creating a physical response of the body to light. Artists like Robert Irwin and Nauman and Turrell, who were in L.A. in the 1960s, picked up this aspect of Rothko’s work rather than the Abstract Expressionist gestures and started creating works in which the viewer becomes, in essence, the performer, and is being made to do things according to the space that these artists have created.”

In “Elusive Signs,” for instance, Nauman’s Helman Gallery Parallelogram (1971) saturates a room with green fluorescent light, spatially disorienting viewers and lending a pink cast to their visual field after they leave. Nauman’s neon pieces, while co-opting the seductive, eye-catching light of street advertising, deal with the same fundamental human emotions embedded in Rothko’s luminous color arrangements, but spell them out for the viewer in figures or words, such as his circle of script Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983). Clearwater notes the influence of Nauman’s neon text works on such artists as Jack Pierson and Jason Rhoades. “Yes Bruce Nauman”—the show last year at Zwirner & Wirth in New York that looked at Nauman’s impact on artists today—included neon pieces by Peter Coffin, Glenn Ligon, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

British artist Julian Opie, who also uses the conventions of advertising, creates rectilinear sculptures lit from within or coated with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Eleven of his outdoor works—including a 16-foot-tall static figure of Canadian rocker Bryan Adams and a four-sided box with lights that turn on and off to illuminate a dancing woman—are on view in the Arts Council of Indianapolis’s “Signs” through September. “It’s using light to throw the image out into the public arena in the way that all advertising tends to do,” says Opie. “Moths fly towards light, and people’s eyes do as well. I admit that it is a bit of a cheap trick, but I like the irony of promoting something where there’s nothing really to promote.”

The spread of digital technology has dramatically expanded the way artists use and think about light. Erwin Redl, who started out making computer art, became frustrated. “Literally, I was sick of hitting my nose against the screen because I wanted to be in that abstract space,” says Redl. After seeing Fred Sandback’s yarn installations in 1997 at Dia in New York, Redl began stringing wires from the floor to the ceiling with countless LED lights that translated the screen’s pixels into a three-dimensional space. He created the widely acclaimed Matrix II, a cosmic grid of seemingly infinite green points of light hovering in darkness, for the 2005 “Ecstasy” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which also included light-based works by Eliasson, Pierre Huyghe, and Ann Veronica Janssens.

Strongly influenced by the visceral quality of Turrell’s light environments, Redl intends for his work to be overwhelming. An elliptical curtain of 50,000 slowly fading red LEDs encircled viewers recently at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. “It produced anxiety when you suddenly realized everything was slowly moving,” says Redl. “But once you went over that threshold, it was a very enjoyable environment.”

Another artist who credits Turrell’s influence is Kira Lynn Harris, but her apparatus is decidedly low-tech. By bouncing track lighting off silver Mylar laid down in marginal architectural areas, such as a decrepit stairwell at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, she creates mercurial reflections that call attention to forgotten spaces. “Light is completely transformative,” says Harris, who also looks to Rothko and the painters of the Hudson River School. “I don’t try to hide what I’m doing, but the result is still kind of magical. A lot of my interest in light came from being from Los Angeles, where the light is just everywhere. You have these huge expanses of sky.”

Harris is one of several artists, including Sanford Biggers and Nadine Robinson, who will be in “Black Light/White Noise,” a show of sound and light art by African American artists curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and opening at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on May 19.

Large installations by such leading artists as Eliasson, who shows at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, and Opie, who is represented in the United States by the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, are generally commissioned works that are carefully placed in public collections, but smaller pieces have come up at auction. Opie’s LCD animation Sara Walking in Bra, Pants and Boots (2003) sold for $32,400 at Phillips de Pury and Company in 2005. The prices for smaller works by established artists can vary widely. Rackowe’s installations of animated geometric forms made from electroluminescent wire currently at Galerie Almine Rech in Paris, range from $13,000 to $40,000, while Navarro’s winter 2006 show at Roebling Hall in New York had editioned sculptures priced from $10,000 to $35,000.

While the influence of the highly perceptual work of the 1960s and ’70s on artists today is one of Ravenal’s interests, his “Artificial Light” also explored the avenues that have opened since then. “These artists are taking it beyond just the power and beauty of light and are trying to bring it back into referencing the world in different ways,” he says. Allora and Calzadilla, for instance, borrowed a piece from Jenny Holzer for their Growth (Survival), created for the show. In a darkened room, Holzer’s aphorisms, broadcast on six vertical LED strips, provided the light needed to sustain a monstrous plant cobbled together from different species. Allora and Calzadilla took as a starting point NASA’s use of artificial light to grow plants in space and used Holzer’s texts as life support.

In another gallery, Rackowe built a long hallway in which a glaring bulb slid back and forth. Viewers could walk down the harshly lit hall or move around the room, which was awash in film-noirish beams of light passing through slits in the hall. “Much of my work is inspired by cities and moving about built spaces,” says Rackowe. “I’m using light as a means of filling a volume and scanning or mapping the space that contains the work. This beam travels up and down the viewers and seems to be reading them. You’re not sure whether there’s a threat or whether it’s more about contemplation.”

The element of threat also hovers around the work Navarro created for “Artificial Light.” The artist bent tubing filled with purple neon in the shape of two of Marcel Breuer’s sleek, modernist Wassily chairs and installed them in an entirely black room. The work conflated the trippy appeal of a teenager’s bedroom and the menace of electric chairs. In another installation, Die Again (Monument for Tony Smith), 2006, which he showed last year at the Whitney at Altria, Navarro built a huge black cube with lights and mirrors embedded in a floor that seemed to descend infinitely. “It was like standing on a bottomless pit,” says Shamim Momin, who organized the show. “It’s so beautiful and evocative, but at the same time it’s terrifying because you’re kind of in your tomb. You have that great thrill of the unknown.”

The Whitney has an installation, on view through May, by Terence Koh, who has used candlelight and neon chandeliers in performances and installations. In the current work Koh uses a brilliant 4,000-watt bulb that makes the perimeter of the room vanish in a void of white light. A dark lead sphere on the floor, barely visible, suggests the aftermath of a cosmic event. The artist intends the light to generate what he calls “romantic pain.”

Momin says she recently noticed the number of younger artists who cite Turrell and Flavin even if their work doesn’t appear to riff directly on them. They use fluorescent tubes for the psychological states their light can evoke. “Minimalism is one of the most readdressed movements right now, so it’s logical that the light element is being unpacked or reinvested with different types of meaning,” says Momin. “I hesitate to use the word ‘spirituality,’ because that makes it sound too religious. But I think using light now is linked to the desire for transformation. It’s a kind of sorcerer’s craft.”

Rembrandt: Myth, Legend, Truth

The great self-portraitist, 34 years old in 1640, dresses up as an Oriental potentate in 1658.









Some have called him vulgar, ignorant, and greedy. To others he has been the ultimate misunderstood genius. He has represented the bohemian, the liberal, the Romantic, and the revolutionary. Beginning in his lifetime and ongoing as we celebrate his 400th birthday, opinions and beliefs about Rembrandt have changed with the centuries
by Sylvia Hochfield

In January 1670 the artist Abraham Breughel wrote a letter to the Sicilian collector Antonio Ruffo. Breughel acted as Ruffo’s agent in Rome and had been urging his patron to buy Italian pictures, but Ruffo had other ideas. He complained to Breughel that the greatest painters in Italy couldn’t provide him with a half-length portrait equal to those of Rembrandt, who had died a few months earlier.

Breughel answered with barely suppressed contempt. The great Italian masters would hardly condescend to paint such trifles as a draped figure lost in shadow save for a point of light at the tip of the nose. “The great painters are interested in showing a beautiful nude figure, from which one can see that they know how to draw,” he wrote, clearly implying that Rembrandt did not. “Only an uneducated person tries to clothe his figure with a clumsy dark garment, and these artists compose the surroundings in such a way that we cannot make head nor tail of them.”

Among the trifles Breughel dismissed so disdainfully—Ruffo had purchased it years earlier from Rembrandt himself—was Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653), today considered one of the greatest treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As Rembrandt’s 400th birthday is celebrated this year with blockbuster exhibitions, symposia, festivals, tours, and performances, and as museums the world over lucky enough to own his works set them forth with pride, it seems unthinkable that the man we consider one of the supreme geniuses of world art was dismissed so contemptuously in his own time. But Breughel was only repeating what critics and theorists had been saying about Rembrandt’s art for years.

Rembrandt was “one of the great controversial figures,” Julius Held wrote in ARTnews in 1950. Academic critics were both attracted to and repelled by the Dutch master. He was a superb colorist who couldn’t draw, a realist who ignored the classical canon. Biographers branded him a lowborn, illiterate, vulgar slob. But Rembrandt’s reputation changed with the times. By the middle of the 18th century, the ultimate outsider was becoming the ultimate misunderstood genius. To 19th-century artists and critics, Rembrandt was a bohemian, a liberal, a national hero, a Romantic, and a revolutionary. In the 20th century, he became one of the most scrutinized artists of all time, thanks to a series of catalogues raisonnés, culminating in the Rembrandt Research Project’s ongoing Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings.


Rembrandt attracted notice at an early age. He was famous during his lifetime and after his death. He always had admirers—his prints and drawings were eagerly collected—but he also had powerful detractors. Reliable information about him was scarce, and in its absence legends proliferated. Within a decade of his death, a remarkable number of untruths were circulating about him, and they continued to multiply, at least in popular media, through the 20th century.

One of the most persistent myths is that all of Rembrandt’s troubles came about because of the Night Watch. This canvas, it was said, outraged the members of Captain Frans Banning Cocq’s militia because they couldn’t see their faces clearly, and was jeered by the public. Angered by Rembrandt’s refusal to alter the painting, the militiamen refused to pay for it, and it was hung in an out-of-the-way place to avoid embarrassment to the city of Amsterdam. The scandal, in 1642, was the beginning of the end for poor Rembrandt, who was only 36 at the time. The stubborn genius who “refused to prostitute his art by catering to the tastes of the stupid, backward public” descended into old age “without a friend or a guilder, or even a good piece of herring.”

Thus Seymour Slive summed up the artist’s imagined fate in his brilliant, entertaining book Rembrandt and His Critics. Twentieth-century biographers elaborated on the description of Rembrandt’s debt-ridden, drunken old age—the famous man brought low by his own extravagance and intransigence. The truth, however, is quite different, Slive writes. Captain Banning Cocq’s men were pleased with their unconventional group portrait, and the public admired it. It brought the artist enormous fame and was considered one of the great attractions in art-filled Amsterdam. If Rembrandt was solitary in his last years, it was because he chose to withdraw from the world.

Discerning critics admired Rembrandt from his earliest days. Even before he went to Amsterdam, while he was sharing a studio with Jan Lievens in his native Leiden in 1628, the two young artists were singled out by the connoisseur Constantin Huygens, who remarked that they were already the equals of the most famous painters and would soon surpass them.

But the idea that Rembrandt was somehow “different”—in a class by himself as a painter and a social outsider—developed when he was still a very young man. Arthur Wheelock, curator of northern Baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., says that this persona was in large part Rembrandt’s own invention. Wheelock points to Rembrandt’s earliest self-portraits, in which he presents himself to the world with wild hair and very strong chiaroscuro effects. “These are radically different from any that had been done before,” Wheelock says. “Most self-portraits were made with an eye toward elevating the status of the artist, presenting him as more than a mere craftsman, so they show the artist well dressed, dignified, often with an easel.”

But in these self-portraits, Wheelock says, “Rembrandt is thumbing his nose at all that. He’s saying, ‘Look at me. I’m totally different. I don’t come out of a well-established tradition.’” And that, says Wheelock, is how he was seen by Huygens, who was “amazed by this beardless miller’s son, amazed that he could create what none of the ancients ever thought of, even though he never had a master worthy of the name.” (In fact, Rembrandt had studied with Pieter Lastman, the greatest history painter of the day.) Rembrandt wasn’t yet 25 years old when Huygens predicted a great future for him.

Less than 20 years later, in 1648, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was established in Paris to train art students. Henceforth, artists were to be learned enough in history and mythology to paint noble and heroic subjects that would instruct and elevate; they would imitate the ancients; they would study nature but know how to improve on it; they would have “knowledge of anatomy, proportion, perspective, drapery and expression.” Rembrandt would be severely criticized by successive generations of art theorists in the next 150 years because he didn’t follow the rules of the Academy.

Biographers traced the defects in Rembrandt’s art to his deficiencies of class and character. Joachim von Sandrart, the German gentleman-painter who published a biography of the artist in 1675, implied that Rembrandt was not only ignorant of the classical canon but was virtually illiterate. He could have learned from the ancients to paint Greek goddesses, but he preferred lumpy females with sagging breasts, clumsy hands, and garter dents in their thighs. He was indecent, placing copulating dogs in The Preaching of Saint John and a defecating dog smack in the center foreground of The Good Samaritan. More shocking, Rembrandt associated with lowborn people. It was Sandrart who originated the legend of “Rembrandt the Slob,” in Slive’s phrase.

The legend was embroidered by the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci, who included Rembrandt in a book of artist’s biographies he published in 1686. Baldinucci had never met Rembrandt and knew only two of his paintings, but he confidently described the artist’s ugly, plebeian face and his clothes that were always messy and dirty because he wiped his brushes on them as he worked and did “other things of a similar nature” (not specified). He bought picturesque old clothes at auction and hung these filthy rags on his studio walls among objects of beauty and value. He disdained everybody and wouldn’t allow the greatest monarch in the world to interrupt him when he was working. Rembrandt was hardly an example for those who believed that painting was a noble profession.

This unappealing character was also whimsical and capricious. An example of Rembrandt’s bad behavior, according to the Dutch writer and painter Arnold Houbraken: while he was working on a family group portrait, his beloved pet monkey died, and because he had no other canvas available, he painted the dead animal into the portrait. His clients naturally objected, but Rembrandt refused to paint out the monkey and lost the commission.

None of Rembrandt’s extant pictures support stories like this, Slive comments, but Houbraken’s three-volume account of 17th-century Dutch painters (published in 1718–21; republished in 1753) disseminated such tales and became a major source for students of Dutch art.

It was Houbraken who wrote that Rembrandt was so greedy that his students would paint gold and silver coins on the floor just to see him try to pick them up. In the last years of his life, according to Houbraken, the painter accepted so many commissions and worked so fast that his pictures looked as if the paint had been smeared on with a trowel; he wouldn’t allow people to look at them too closely because he didn’t want them to see his bad technique. One portrait, Houbraken said, was so heavily impastoed that you could lift it from the floor by its nose.

Nevertheless, most of Rembrandt’s critics admitted that this coarse eccentric had a kind of genius. He couldn’t draw like the divine Raphael or improve on nature according to the rules of the Academy, but his expressive powers were undeniable, especially in his history paintings and his religious pictures. His biblical characters weren’t distant or abstract; they were real human beings feeling genuine emotions, whose intensity they communicated powerfully to the viewer.

Even Sandrart called him a great colorist and a master of chiaroscuro, a view shared by Roger de Piles, the influential French artist, writer, and diplomat. De Piles, a classicist, thought that Rembrandt broke every rule, but he admired the Dutch painter’s marvelous ability to imitate the natural world. In his biography of Rembrandt, first published in 1699, de Piles lamented that the painter, who was born with genius, fine and original thoughts, and a lively imagination, “sucked in the taste of his country” with his milk and “was brought up in constant sight of sluggish nature, and only knew too late of a more perfect truth than that which he always practiced.” In other words, as Slive puts it, Rembrandt didn’t have the good luck to be born in France, where his innate talents might have been cultivated.

But de Piles, like earlier writers, considered Rembrandt “a master of his colors.” In 1708 he published a treatise on the art of painting, dividing it into four elements—color, composition, expression, and drawing—and grading 57 well-known artists on a scale from 0 to 20 in each category. De Piles admired Rubens and Raphael most, awarding them 65 points each. Rembrandt and Titian were tied for the tenth-highest score, a total of 50, which broke down, in Rembrandt’s case, to 17 for color (the same grade as Rubens and Van Dyck and far above the pathetic 4 given to Leonardo and Michelangelo); 15 for composition (compared with Caravaggio’s 6); 12 for expression (Caravaggio, 0); and 6 for drawing. Despite Rembrandt’s deficiencies in the last category, de Piles had great respect for him: he was the only 17th-century Dutch painter included on the list.

Outside the Netherlands, Dutch painting wasn’t as highly regarded at this time as Italian, French, or English painting. Gérard de Lairesse, the subject of one of Rembrandt’s most sublime portraits, wrote in 1707 that he had thought highly of the painter until he learned the Academy’s “infallible rules of art.” They taught Lairesse to despise Dutch genre paintings as “pictures of beggars, bordellos, taverns, tobacco smokers, musicians, dirty children on their pots, and other things more filthy and worse.” How could one entertain persons of repute, Lairesse asked, in an apartment full of such works?

But there were always contrary opinions about Rembrandt. With very few exceptions, Slive says, “critics of the 17th and 18th centuries accepted him as a serious history painter and applauded his portraits, etchings and drawings.” Even the Academic critics who deplored his style appreciated aspects of his work. By 1721 Antoine Coypel, director of the French Academy, was complaining that the “Rembrandts have been the only models which one has endeavored to imitate. Everything has been reversed.” This was a great exaggeration, but it was true that a number of French artists had begun to copy Rembrandt’s works or adopt aspects of his style. The Paris art market, according to the Dutch scholar Christian Tümpel, “valued the Dutch realists and Rembrandt so highly that it was worthwhile to produce fakes purporting to be their works.” In Germany and in England, too, Rembrandt’s paintings, prints, and drawings were eagerly collected, copied, and imitated.


Rembrandt’s rise to the heights he occupies today came about with changes in taste. The authority of the Academy declined; interest in naturalism, and in human personality and psychological subtlety, grew. The age that admired Watteau and Chardin, Held wrote, admired not only Rembrandt’s spontaneous technique but also the “sublimity” he achieved in the treatment of simple subjects. It was Watteau’s dealer, Gersaint, who compiled the first catalogue raisonné in Western art history—a list of Rembrandt’s etchings, published posthumously in 1751.

Five years later, an aristocratic painter who had been rejected by the Academy, the Chevalier Antoine de Marcenay de Ghuy, rhapsodized: “No one has the right to consider himself a connoisseur who does not like Rembrandt with all his faults. What a touch, what a harmony, what resplendent effects!”

The beginnings of the Rembrandt cult were emerging. To the young Goethe, Rembrandt was a great poet comparable to Shakespeare and a painter equal to Rubens and Raphael. Delacroix risked what he called blasphemy to proclaim that “people will perhaps discover one day that Rembrandt was as great a painter as Raphael.” Writers had begun to mirror themselves and their times in their interpretations of the man and his art. To Romantics, he was a Romantic—a “somber, strange, bold, bizarre, romantic poet,” in the words of the French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye. To republicans, he was a man of the people. The image of the artist as nonconformist was grafted onto the image of the revolutionary.

Even the repulsive, vulgar subjects deplored by Lairesse were judged differently. To the critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, the ill-visaged Jews and usurers, the beggars and bandy-legged cripples, the gross slatterns, the “Hebrew incidents which seem copied in a Rotterdam hovel” were acceptable because Rembrandt had given these humble subjects transcendent meaning. The “chief interest of the picture is not man, but the tragedy of expiring, diffused, palpitating light incessantly competing with invading shadow.” In his native land, Rembrandt accumulated glory. By the middle of the 19th century, he had become the icon of the Dutch Golden Age “at a time when the Dutch were taking new pride in their national identity,” wrote Jeroen Boomgaard and Robert W. Scheller in their 1991 essay on Rembrandt criticism (in Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop, edited by Christopher Brown). “Like Dürer in Germany and Rubens in Belgium earlier in the century, he became all that a nation felt it should take pride in.” In 1852 a monument was erected to the artist in what is now the Rembrandtplatz in Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s new status required some image polishing, because his somewhat unsavory reputation didn’t fit the part of national standard-bearer, Boomgaard and Scheller write. But Rembrandt was becoming more than the symbol of Dutch national pride. His star was rising to unprecedented heights internationally: he was coming to be regarded as the archetype of the artist who “transcended space and time in his universality.” He was, according to the Dutch writer Carel Vosmaer in 1868, simply “the painter of life and the human soul.”

French artists in the 19th century constructed a somewhat different persona for Rembrandt, according to Alison McQueen of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, author of The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt (2003). McQueen says that the Dutch painter “offered something new to artists: a historical model who was not associated with Academic art. Specifically, he was a model for printmakers, particularly those who wanted to revive etching, which wasn’t in favor in France in the 19th century because the Academy and the Salon supported engraving.” The French printmakers preferred Rembrandt to their own Jacques Callot as a model, McQueen says, “because Callot had been associated with royalty, while Rembrandt was a man of the people.”

To French artists in this revolutionary century, Rembrandt embodied democracy and republican sentiment—the opposite of Rubens, the leader of the Flemish school, who had worked for royalty and aristocracy. This Rembrandt persona, McQueen says, conflated his biography and his art. He had lived for many years in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam; he had depicted beggars and the urban poor, which was seen as evidence of his sympathy for different social groups. His bankruptcy led many people to feel empathy for him as an outsider. The critics “made more of Rembrandt as a social outcast, misunderstood in his own time. They held him up as an example to the French realists and said, ‘You will be understood in a couple of hundred years, just as Rembrandt is by us, even though he wasn’t in his own time.’

“The artists, on the other hand, wanted to cast him as far more successful,” McQueen continues. “He was a man of humble origins who rose through his art. The myth of the bohemian artist had started to emerge, and the idea that Rembrandt was socially progressive and didn’t associate with royalty or the aristocracy, showed that it was possible for artists to challenge the social order, to live outside the confines of academic or conservative values, and still be successful—in the future if not in their own time.”

To the Dutch archivists who discovered that Rembrandt had had many teachers, the French artists replied, ‘Yes, but he didn’t learn anything from them.’”

By the end of the 19th century, Rembrandt had become a cult figure in France. His name and his images, McQueen says, were “endowed with meaning that encompassed anti-authoritarian conduct, personal and political liberalism, republicanism, originality, and innovative creative powers.” A play dramatizing his life, presented in Paris in 1898 and overlapping with the first retrospective of his paintings in Amsterdam, presented him as a tormented genius, a completely original figure, misunderstood and unappreciated by his contemporaries. The playwrights couldn’t resist exaggeration, making the artist blind at the end of his life, as well as ignored and poverty-stricken.


In the last quarter of the 19th century, Boomgaard and Scheller write, Rembrandt underwent another radical transformation. If earlier scholars had reconstructed his biography and character on the basis of his art or their ideologies, now the amassing of facts about his life and the study and attribution of his paintings became paramount concerns. Connoisseurship came into its own. “To see with one’s own eyes, to know and recognize the master’s hand, increasingly became the basis of the discipline of art history.”

The canon of Rembrandt’s etchings, E. H. Gombrich wrote in 1970, was the first battleground. Around 1800 there were thought to be about 376; by the end of the 19th century, the list had been pruned to 71. In 1952 the German scholar Ludwig Münz acknowledged 279. In his recent catalogue, Gary D. Schwartz listed 374.

With painting, too, history shows the canon expanding and contracting. In 1880 there were estimated to be about 350 extant paintings by Rembrandt. The sumptuous eight-volume catalogue produced between 1897 and 1905 by Wilhelm von Bode and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot validated 595 works. Wilhelm Valentiner was more generous, bringing his total, in 1921, to 711 paintings. Abraham Bredius reduced it to 630 paintings in 1935, and in 1968 Horst Gerson, who as a young man had worked with Bredius at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, brought out a revised version of the Bredius catalogue that accepted only 420 works. Ernst van de Wetering, the head of the Rembrandt Research Project, estimates that it will reduce the number of Rembrandt’s paintings to about 350—the same figure put forth in 1880.

The complex relations of Bode and Hofstede de Groot, Valentiner, and Bredius with others in the art world—and with one another—are described by Catherine B. Scallen of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, in her 2004 book Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship. Scallen’s fascinating account of how they acquired and maintained their authority, how they clashed with one another over attributions or united against outsiders, how they used “power and influence in the overlapping worlds of scholarship, art dealing, and public and private collecting to support their hegemony in the realm of Rembrandt connoisseurship” offers rare insight into the history of art history.

The catalogues raisonnés these men produced were extremely influential until well into the 20th century. But by 1969, when the tricentennial of Rembrandt’s death was celebrated as enthusiastically as this year’s quadricentennial birthday, scholars complained that confusion reigned. There still existed no carefully argued catalogues raisonnés of the master’s works, and pictures of dubious attribution still hung on the walls of the world’s great museums. “Only a small group of pictures are historically sound,” Gerson told an audience of Rembrandt scholars at a symposium in Chicago that year. “All the rest are attributions or not Rembrandts at all. Art history is concerned to a great extent with interpretations, not with facts. What we need most is information.”

The Rembrandt Research Project was formed in the late 1960s by a group of Dutch scholars who agreed with Gerson. Their aim was to start “from nil,” in the words of Ernst van de Wetering, the youngest member of the group—to separate Rembrandt from the Rembrandt mystique, the “extravagant mythologization” that resulted from his great fame on one hand and the lack of precise information about him on the other. Their Rembrandt was not the stubborn nonconformist or the master of a unique and mysterious technique but the head of a large workshop of students and assistants to whom he transmitted a “rational painting technique and pictorial and stylistic ‘recipes.’” At the same time, his hand could almost always be distinguished from those of his students and assistants. The first three volumes of the RRP’s Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, published between 1982 and 1989, covered the period of Rembrandt’s life from 1625 through 1642 and listed 280 paintings, all ranked A (authentic), B (doubtful), or C (rejected). The group members achieved a remarkable degree of unanimity in reaching these decisions; in seven cases only van de Wetering expressed dissent.

Volume IV of the Corpus, published last year, is very different from the first three volumes. It has dropped chronology—it deals only with self-portraits—and abandoned the ABC system. Between the third and fourth volumes, the RRP experienced an upheaval as older members died or retired, and the younger generation, in the person of van de Wetering, took over. Volume IV reflects his evolved conception of Rembrandt as an atelier master who worked much more collaboratively with his students and assistants. As van de Wetering told ARTnews in 2004, “‘Is it a Rembrandt or not’ no longer seemed the vital question.” In this he expresses the attitude of many scholars today who regard the traditional end of connoisseurship—the granting or withholding of attributions—as only one of many concerns.

At the same time, van de Wetering has been making new Rembrandt attributions and reconsidering old ones. He now believes that Rembrandt painted what he calls oil studies, heads or half-figures that “may well have served as preliminary exercises for figures in a larger composition.” There has been a tendency, he adds, “to reject these oil studies as partial copies by students.” His reattributions have aroused the expected controversy. Of the Weeping Woman in the Detroit Institute of Arts, van de Wetering says, “My conviction is that it is by Rembrandt, but that is up for discussion.” Told that another eminent scholar strongly disagrees with him, van de Wetering laughs and says cheerfully, “I don’t care if he doesn’t agree. It’s not a matter of life or death.”

Van de Wetering expects the final volume of the Corpus, which is dedicated to small-scale history paintings, to be completed within two years. “For me,” he says, “that is the end.” He intends to retire and return to his first love, painting.


Whenever the group rejected a well-known painting, it found itself in the spotlight. This occurred most notably in 1984, when committee head Josua Bruyn expressed his conviction that The Polish Rider, one of the Frick Collection’s most beloved paintings, was not by Rembrandt and suggested that Willem Drost, a painter about whom almost nothing was known at the time, might be its author. That attribution wouldn’t be possible today, says Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because recently discovered documents reveal that Drost was in Italy by 1665, at the age of 22, and that he never returned to Holland before his death in 1659.

Rembrandt scholarship today has expanded to include the master’s followers, says Liedtke. He cites Werner Sumowski’s six-volume Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler (Paintings of the Rembrandt School), published between 1983 and 1994, with its approximately 3,000 photographs of Rembrandt-style pictures. “In the ’60s, if you said a picture might be by Drost, you might be able to conjure a mental image of one in your brain, and you would have trouble getting a reproduction. Now you have 30 illustrations you can put your hand on immediately. For Govert Flinck, you would have 200 or 300. That has changed our understanding of Rembrandt.”

We also know much more about the social and political context in which Rembrandt worked, thanks in large part to Schwartz, whose 1985 book, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings, presents an enormous amount of information about his patrons. “In my view,” Schwartz writes, “it is of much greater historical importance to know whether—and for whom—Rembrandt painted or inspired the painting of a particular composition at a particular moment in his career, than to know whether this or that existing canvas is by the master’s own hand.” To Schwartz, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656), whose subject is the rightful inheritance by a younger son over an older one, is not a transcendent vision—Schwartz doesn’t use such words—but a calculated attempt to flatter and justify a powerful patron who was involved in a messy family clash over a will.


An irony is that through the 19th century, people were looking at a different Rembrandt from the one we see today. The appealing golden glow of his pictures—the patina of age and dirty varnish—was considered the very mark of the masterpiece, and thousands of paintings were slathered with dark varnish in an attempt to imitate it. In recent years, a number of Rembrandt’s works have been cleaned, in some cases with surprising results—as when the Night Watch was revealed as a daylight scene.

“Scholars today work much more closely with conservators than in the past in order to know what pictures have condition problems, are overpainted, need cleaning, and so on,” says Liedtke. “And there’s a much greater interest in the technical means by which Rembrandt described naturalistic effects, as opposed to simply judging his style.”

“We’re looking at a different Rembrandt,” says Wheelock. Almost all of the Rembrandts in the National Gallery of Art have been cleaned since Wheelock arrived there in 1973. “You see very different colors and a different sense of space. The chiaroscuro effects and the palette are very different. As a consequence, you find new ways of thinking about the way Rembrandt thought about his images, and also connections to other artists you might not have thought about without knowing that palette.”

Wheelock remembers the great controversy surrounding the cleaning of The Mill in 1977. “It was a dark, brooding painting that was thought to reflect Rembrandt’s depression at the time of his bankruptcy. Then, with conservation, it was revealed that this deep, brooding tonality was in large part dirty varnish. It’s got a wonderful blue sky and clouds, which had not been seen since the beginning of the 19th century. It was hugely shocking.”

In connection with the Rembrandt Research Project, van de Wetering has recently studied The Mill, which is featured in the exhibition “Rembrandt’s Landscapes” in Kassel and Leiden. He took it out of its frame and discovered that the canvas was tilted, so that the mill, the little boat, and the walking woman were all off-kilter. He also discovered that the picture had been cut to make it “more squarish.” It was originally rectangular, van de Wetering says, and the loss of a significant part of the canvas has disrupted Rembrandt’s usual relation of dark to light.

Other discoveries remain to be made. What else lies ahead for Rembrandt studies? Liedtke says that a great deal of archival research is still unpublished. “Forty or 50 years from now,” he believes, “we’ll have a much more nuanced and subtle idea of Rembrandt’s paintings and drawings. A lot will emerge, particularly about Rembrandt’s pupils, and this will affect our view of Rembrandt.”

Will we know more about the man? “We’ll know more about his house, his business, his family, his daily life,” Liedtke says.

But to know his character, we will have to do what people have always done: we will have to look at his paintings.

Is She Smiling for Two?

Out of the box and ready for her close-up: the Mona Lisa undergoes examination by X-ray fluorescence.
C2RMF/D. VIGEARS

Space-age technology allowed restorers to see details of the Mona Lisa they never could before
by Laurie Hurwitz

Newspaper headlines recently gave the Louvre’s most famous resident a new name. Maybe, they suggested, we should call her “Mama Lisa,” because a team of researchers who examined Leonardo’s masterpiece last September concluded that the Mona Lisa was pregnant. Under her thick coat of dirty varnish, the researchers said, she is wearing not a shawl but a fine, gauzy veil attached to a white bonnet that is no longer visible. Such garments were typically worn by Italian Renaissance women when they were pregnant.

Leonardo’s portrait of the young wife of a Florentine silk merchant, painted between 1503 and 1506, is so famous and popular that the Louvre has given it its own gallery and keeps it in a special humidity- and temperature-controlled box, protected from harm—and its admirers—by a double layer of triple-laminated, fireproof, and bulletproof glass.

The work is removed from its case once a year so that the poplar panel on which it is painted can be measured for warping or expansion, and the silica gel used to maintain the box’s humidity can be changed. Over the past two years, a team of French and Canadian researchers also undertook the first major study of the painting in half a century. Using a state-of-the-art three-dimensional high-resolution laser scanning system, the scientists carried out the most precise and extensive analysis of the portrait to date. Their results, along with the findings of 39 researchers contributing to the project, were recently published in Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting (Harry N. Abrams), written by Bruno Mottin, Jean-Pierre Mohen, and Michel Menu, from the team of researchers at the French Museums’ Center for Research and Restoration, located in the Louvre.

The scans were made by researchers from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), who were invited by the Louvre to travel to Paris in the fall of 2004 with a portable version of the apparatus, which is capable of creating 3-D images at a depth of ten micrometers (roughly one-tenth of the diameter of a strand of human hair) and is also used by NASA to check space shuttles for damage during flight.

NRC researchers produced the scans in two nighttime sessions last October to make a “virtual model of the Mona Lisa, so we could zoom in and look at features on the surface and back in great detail, in a way you really can’t see on the real picture,” John Taylor, an NRC imaging applications specialist, told ARTnews. Under tight security, with groups no larger than four—one restorer, one expert from the French team, and two of the Canadian technicians—allowed near the painting in order to maintain temperature and humidity conditions, the 3-D laser scanned the painting’s entire surface—back, front, and sides—in bands some 11?2 inches wide, never in direct contact with the canvas. The team then digitally stitched the scans together to construct a model that would allow them to study the painting’s color, relief, and craquelure.

Their main objective was to record the warping of the support; the portrait is painted on a thin panel of poplar, a soft wood that is particularly vulnerable to variations in humidity. A small split, about 4.7 inches long, located at the top of the painting and repaired a century ago, was monitored, as was the craquelure, the network of fine cracks in the paint surface, which can give clues as to how well paint layers adhere to the support. The researchers concluded that the painting will remain stable if it stays in its temperature- and humidity-controlled box. The scans also showed that the paint layers are still firmly attached to the panel.

But the most surprising conclusions came from Bruno Mottin, whose close observation of the subject’s clothing and hair convinced him that the sitter, identified by Vasari as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the wealthy, socially prominent silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, was pregnant or had recently given birth.

Her faded bonnet and the attached veil draped around her shoulders had been obscured by the thick, dark varnish that covers the painting. The new scans make these elements much easier to read. “Until now, the fabric around her shoulders was considered a shawl, but no one wore shawls at the time,” Mottin explains. “Scans uncovered evidence that it was in fact a gauzy veil. Da Vinci loved geometry; he was fascinated by regularity. I started out by studying the pattern. When I saw that the movement in the fabric was different, I asked myself what it meant. Da Vinci was so meticulous that I felt it had to be intentional.”

The veil reminded Mottin of a garment worn by the subject of Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady (ca. 1470–75), in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, who is pregnant. It was, he says, typically worn by “nursing mothers during the Italian Renaissance.” This accorded with the findings of scholarly research suggesting that Leonardo’s painting was commissioned to commemorate the birth of Lisa Gherardini’s second child (she ultimately had five). “This helps us date the painting more precisely, to around 1503,” Mottin explains.

Mottin’s studies of the Mona Lisa’s coiffure revealed that her hair is not unbound and flowing freely, as was once believed—an idea that “surprised historians, because wearing your hair loose at the time was typical of young girls or women of little virtue,” Mottin says. In fact, her hair is pinned into a chignon and covered by her bonnet.

Scans also showed that Leonardo changed his composition: he had initially painted one of her hands clenched, rather than in a relaxed position, suggesting that she may originally have been depicted in the process of rising from a chair rather than seated. According to Matthew Landrus, a Renaissance and Baroque scholar who has taught Renaissance and medieval history at Oxford University and is currently an art history professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Leonardo “changed hand positions in a lot of paintings, including Christ’s in The Last Supper—information that came out in the recent cleaning of the painting.”

Landrus, author of The Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci (HarperCollins, 2006), is also researching a copy of the Mona Lisa in a private collection that was once owned by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In an article by Michael Burrell in last September’s Apollo magazine, the copy (on view at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London through February 11) is compared with other early copies that reveal details no longer visible in Leonardo’s painting. Reynolds’s Mona Lisa was executed in the early 17th century, probably by a French copyist who seems to have had access to the French court at Fontainebleau. It may even have been traced from the original, Landrus believes. It “retains many of the original colors of the Mona Lisa,” he says, “and almost the same proportions. It has aged less than the original. In particular, it shows that the original colors included a deep blue sky, yellow sleeves, and dark green gown.”

The Mona Lisa, Landrus adds, is a “very dirty painting in very good condition, despite the fact that it was in the steamy atmosphere of the French king’s bathroom for a while, and even stolen.”

He continues, “But the painting attracts more than 6 million visitors a year, 90 percent of whom come to see the painting, more than half from out of the country. Taking it out of the box to clean it for even a day might be disastrous.”

Considering the controversy that erupted when the museum undertook a cleaning of Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in 1994, the Louvre is unlikely to attempt to clean the Mona Lisa anytime soon.


Laurie Hurwitz is the Paris correspondent for ARTnews.

Where the Great Women Artists Are Now

Miwa Yanagi’s chromogenic print Yuka, 2000.
©MIWA YANAGI



Linda Nochlin on the many faces of contemporary feminist art
by Barbara A. MacAdam



There are few feminists who have been as influential, intellectually accessible, and prolific as Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She is also a journalist, critic, curator, and author of numerous books and essays on subjects ranging from realism and Courbet to representing the nude to such contemporary artists as Jenny Saville and Robert Bechtle. Nochlin is perhaps best known for her seminal 1971 article in ARTnews, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in which she assessed the social structures—extending from academic training to patronage to business and institutional attitudes—that influenced not only the art produced by women but their professional and art-historical status as well.

BAM: Your 1971 article is a comprehensive, very eloquent assessment of the state of women’s art at the time. Where do you believe feminism stands today?
LN: I think we’ve made a lot of progress. I know it’s not fashionable to admit it, but I’m just stating a fact. I think women artists occupy a better position today than they did 30 or 35 years ago. Some of the best artists in every medium are women. The problem is to make collectors, museums, and curators who aren’t really up on things see that there are many great women artists. There are collectors and curators who—out of habit, laziness, or even misogyny—simply don’t bother with women. But that’s happening less and less frequently as women begin to occupy the most prominent places in the art world as creative artists. I mean, who wouldn’t think of collecting Louise Bourgeois? You’d be crazy if you didn’t. Or if you were interested in video artists, you’d be foolish not to consider the videos of Sam Taylor-Wood or Pipilotti Rist, not to speak of women working in various media from other parts of the world—Shahzia Sikander, for example, or Ghada Amer, or some of the Latin American women, or the Japanese. They are major figures. They’re the ones who are doing the most interesting and challenging work. It isn’t that people have to be charitable toward women in general or to people of other ethnicities, as they often were in the past.

BAM: Did it become easier for women when abstraction came along, and then Conceptualism? Did these new ways of making art mean that women weren’t stuck with the academic tradition and didn’t have to compete with the established male artists? How has the art scene changed for women since 1971?
LN: It has changed, but in different ways in different parts of the world. I think that in third-world countries women are returning to tradition, although often in very challenging, sometimes negative, critical ways. Shahzia Sikander, for example, uses Persian miniatures as a basis for her work but asks questions at the same time, and she uses contemporary media, including video, to recast her own national background. Ghada Amer uses traditional stitchery to make what would be considered pornographic images. So, yes, they are turning to their own backgrounds, but they’re doing so in often quite challenging ways.

BAM: Aren’t there new avenues for invention now that weren’t available in the past?
LN: Absolutely. I think there are all kinds of avenues for critical thinking in visual language that simply weren’t there before.

BAM: Do you think feminism means the same things now as when you wrote your article?
LN: I think it means much more, although there were always complex artists working in the feminist movement. It is oversimplifying to say that all the 1970s feminists were “essentialists”—that is, single-minded. A lot of them were not. I don’t think Martha Rosler was an essentialist, or Joyce Kozloff, or Valie Export. But they were nevertheless feminists.

BAM: Do you still define yourself as a feminist?
LN: Very much so, but I believe that now there are feminisms. I am very open-minded. It’s a big mistake to think that feminism is the same everywhere. It’s important to recognize how notions of womanhood and femininity are constructed in different societies by different people. I think it’s a mistake when people define themselves entirely as essentialists. But women are still very critical. Someone like Sam Taylor-Wood, especially when she works with male imagery—and she does a lot with men that is very feminist without being blatant—raises questions beyond that of maleness as a given, femaleness as a given. And I believe someone like Mary Kelly demonstrated in the ’80s how sexual identity arises in the individual almost inevitably, using diapers as her medium.
In fact, every time I go to a show of a woman artist who is interested in gender issues, or who doesn’t even know she’s interested in them, I see a new, more open, more critical, more inventive kind of feminism. It often works unconsciously, against the grain.

BAM: What about abstract painting?
LN: In the ’70s, in the context of Minimalism, very often pattern, decoration, richness, and blood assumed a feminist mode. It doesn’t mean that it naturally had to have it, but often feminist implications arise in certain historical circumstances and within certain art meanings that are givens. If the given is that male artists are involved with Minimalism—Donald Judd and Richard Serra—then maybe something by someone like Eva Hesse will assume a feminine meaning. This is partly because Hesse was trying to think in oppositions, in a kind of dialogue, and also partly because a woman artist herself wants to engage in a formal argument.
I don’t think the work all came out of the vagina or anything like that. I think it all came out of the thinking of very ambitious artists who happened to be women. These women wondered, How am I going to place myself in relation to the art language of today? And this is one way that they thought about it—that the work could be made out of something ephemeral; that it was going to be antigeometric in a sense, though not always; that it was going to have organic references even though it was abstract; that it might be vulnerable and subject to disappearance—all of which reads as somehow feminine. Meanwhile, others—male artists, mostly—were making things that might last forever.

BAM: I guess you can also have painting that is somewhat ironic, like the work of Beatrice Milhazes, who riffs on the overtly, baroquely decorative and lacy. As the issues of feminism—that is, the original issues—become less urgent or more diffuse, the problem will become how to engage the world, no?
LN: I don’t think that the position of women is going to cease to be problematic. That’s utopian. We live in a world where women are oppressed, where in certain countries they can’t initiate court cases, where they have marriage thrust upon them. Even polygamy is coming back, and some forms of oppression are tied to religion. This happens around the world. These issues are not going to go away.
Even in terms of art, as far as the market is concerned, women artists do not get the prices men do. There are rare exceptions, as in the case of Louise Bourgeois, perhaps.

BAM: But even she didn’t command such high prices until late in her life.
LN: There are still battles to fight in that area, although women are curators—often well-paid curators who work very hard—and dealers. But do they often take women artists on? Not necessarily. And as for museum directors—think of that!—how many big museums do women direct? Women tend to run alternative spaces or small museum galleries, not major museums and the like.

BAM: But the situation for women has changed in terms of the art itself.
LN: Yes, in terms of expectations, in terms of what’s out there in the galleries. I’m going to point out, too, that the trope of “woman as exception” has always been popular. You think of people like Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun or Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot or Rosa Bonheur—probably one of the most popular artists of the 19th century—or of Georgia O’Keeffe, arguably the best-known woman artist in the United States. They’re not very highly respected in vanguard circles. People don’t know exactly what to do with “women as exception.” They’re like some odd bird out there that has done something unusual.

BAM: What about people like Marie Laurencin and Sonia Delaunay? Couldn’t they, too, be considered somewhat exceptional?
LN: Not really. Sonia Delaunay was wonderful, but it was her husband who had the name. She made money for them by doing design and decorative art on the side, but Robert was considered the important artist.
However, in the pre–Soviet Union and early Soviet Union, you really had women right in there doing abstract art. It was the only time that a whole group of women were included in avant-garde circles on a par with male artists.

BAM: Which woman artists today are carrying the banner?
LN: I would say people like Janine Antoni and Pipilotti Rist and Sam Taylor-Wood and Jenny Saville. They’re still young, and there’s a generation still younger than they are. I think Rachel Whiteread is brilliant and original, and there’s also a sense of covert domesticity, a counterargument to the assertive monumentality and permanence of someone like Richard Serra.
These are women who very deliberately make their art entangled with pleasure and violence. One of my absolute favorites is Angela de la Cruz, who I think is utterly splendid. She combines rage and elegance and is very much a world artist. There’s also Sarah Lucas, a fierce feminist—fierce at least on gender issues.

BAM: Now that women have become more comfortable with their situation in the art world, do you think that there is more humor in their work?
LN: There’s more everything. And there’s also a lot of tragedy. Women are doing a lot of in-between work—combining paintings, objects, installation, performance. And a lot of photography.

BAM: But aren’t men doing that, too?
LN: Yes, but I think there is a difference in terms of the gorgeousness and vulnerability in the women’s work. I think Cecily Brown, with her violently animated surfaces, has been dealing with sexuality, beauty, and aggression. Her work makes constant reference to the connection between the act of fucking and the act of painting. Brown borrows from the painterly traditions of the 19th century.

BAM: You point out in your “Global Feminisms” catalogue essay (“Women Artists Then and Now: Painting, Sculpture, and the Image of the Self”) how “anti-painting,” in the form of photography, video, installation, and performance, gained popularity among women, like Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, because “they were associated with feminist refusal of the patriarchal reign of the painted masterpiece.” These other media offered an independent territory for expression.
LN: I think one of the most important innovations of the “Global Feminisms” show is an engagement not only with the problematics of painting, but also with the various ways in which painting interacts with local traditions.
And I think gender—or the instability of gender—is very important throughout the world, as in the photographs of Catherine Opie, where she appears as a Madonna-like figure who is obviously homosexual, nursing her son.
Even more outrageously, Hiroko Okada, a woman, parodies the idea of motherhood being an exclusively feminine condition in her ink-jet print of two big-bellied men smiling at their situation.

Portraiture has become increasingly conceptual

Kehinde Wiley, Philip the Fair, 2006, portrays an anonymous black man in a Houston Astros jersey set against a French Provincial design. The connection with Philip the Fair derives from a medieval stained-glass work featuring the treacherous king.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DEITCH PROJECTS, NEW YORK





Portraiture has become increasingly conceptual as it addresses not only personal identity but also issues of politics, social inequity, and our obsession with celebrity

In her show last spring at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, Rachel Harrison exhibited bright-colored, rough-hewn sculptural representations of famous people—Cindy Sherman, Johnny Depp, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Al Gore (2007) took shape as a big, vertical block with a stuccolike dappled pink, green, and red surface with a dial thermometer stuck on one side. The Gore depicted here is not the politician, but rather the Oscar-winning director, celebrity author, and evangelist for saving the planet. Harrison’s show—titled “If I Did It” in reference to O. J. Simpson’s unpublished book—revealed how our views of people and the world are contoured by mass media.

Harrison is one of many contemporary artists making portraits that are often not even recognizable as such. “Portraiture is going through something of a renaissance, with a steadily developing conceptual line,” observes Sarah Howgate, curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Many artists now use portraits to comment on larger issues, such as individual identity, social inequities, politics, celebrity obsession—and the genre of portraiture itself. But where artists like Sam Taylor-Wood and Elizabeth Peyton have tended to venerate icons of their generation, today’s younger artists have become more concerned with the effects on celebrities of media manipulation and unrelenting attention. “Artists working with portraiture these days are usually using it as a foil,” says Tom Eccles, executive director of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies. “They’re more quoting from portraiture.”

One novel investigation into the way celebrity and cultural memory intersect is Keith Edmier’s installation Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett (2000). Edmier invited Fawcett, who also makes art, to collaborate with him; each made a sculpture of the other as a nude. Edmier portrayed Fawcett as a reclining marble figure, looking as he remembered her from the 1970s TV series Charlie’s Angels. Fawcett, who had no prior knowledge of Edmier, cast him as a standing figure in bronze as she saw him, but she idealized his features. Together the sculptures, shown at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, expose how fantasy and reality mix in our perceptions.

In the right context, a famous person can stand for a generation, just as that generation’s view can define the person. In an effort to capture celebrities through their audiences, South African artist Candice Breitz, who is represented by White Cube in London and Sonnabend in New York, made video portraits of Bob Marley (Legend), Madonna (Queen), and Michael Jackson (King)—all 2005—and of John Lennon (Working Class Hero) in 2006. In none of these does the subject actually appear. Working Class Hero is a 25-channel video installation showing 25 fans, all singing Lennon’s 1970 debut solo album, Plastic Ono Band, in sync from beginning to end.

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno (represented by Gagosian and Friedrich Petzel, respectively) took a more direct approach in their film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), which was made before the French soccer star’s famous head-butting incident at the World Cup. They used 17 cameras to track Zinédine Zidane through a single game, focusing on him exclusively. We see him spitting, frowning, placing his hand on his hip, and occasionally springing into action. The sound track shifts from fans to commentators to silence. The real dramatic moment occurs when Zidane cracks an uncharacteristic smile.

“The Zidane film really tackles how you make a portrait today,” says Nancy Spector, curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “It’s about using today’s media and popular culture. It’s not traditional—it’s constantly moving. It creates a psychological portrait.”

Reality TV shows, in which participants more actively reveal themselves, offer another kind of psychological rendering. In his documentary film the return of the real (2005), which was short-listed for the 2006 Turner Prize, British artist Phil Collins invited former guests on talk and makeover shows who felt their lives had been ruined by the appearances to tell their stories at a press conference he set up in Turkey. He hired a Turkish reality-show director to interview each participant. By putting these people in the limelight, Collins makes the ethics of exploitation and the audience’s interest in it the subject of his portraits.

Collins, who shows at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, also creates video portraits in which politics, youth, and pop culture intersect. For each work, he sets up a task: in they shoot horses (2004), Palestinian teens participate in an eight-hour dance-a-thon, and in baghdad screentests (2002), filmed during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, 40 Iraqi youths audition for a nonexistent Hollywood film. These young people from regions defined by political strife behave like teens anywhere. Collins’s video is an uncontrived portrait of the people behind the headlines.

Homing in on media representations and their distortions, French artist Valérie Belin and Japanese artist Kazuna Taguchi each consider the ways in which women are idealized in popular imagery. They examine its effects on how they see themselves and how they are perceived.

For her 2006 series “New Faces (Portraits),” Belin, who shows in Paris with Galerie Xippas and in New York with Sikkema Jenkins & Co., hired 12 young models, 6 men and 6 women, selected from the catalogues of top Paris modeling agencies. The models’ skin in the photographs is made up and flawless, and Belin uses light to create a flat, two-dimensional impression of almost supernatural beauty.

Taguchi, who is represented by Tokyo’s Taro Nasu Gallery, cuts up images of women that she finds in fashion magazines, scans them together, paints on them, and then rephotographs them to achieve seamless portraits of composite ideals. The effect is akin to seeing someone who has had too much cosmetic surgery—the parts are all in place, but something is not quite right. Both artists consider how people measure themselves against these standards.

German-born Conceptual artist Oliver Herring also makes composites, but to different ends. His recent show at Max Protetch in New York featured three-dimensional sculptures, which he made by collaging photograph fragments of individual people. The almost cubistic representations reveal different information from various angles. Herring also lets people portray themselves (you are what you do) through tasks and games that they perform. For example, he has them spit food dye onto their bodies and clothes as if they were canvases. They do so for hours, until they are exhausted, and then Herring documents those moments.

Performance is also a component of German artist Olaf Nicolai’s work, which examines stereotypes and personal aspirations. For Blond, a piece he first made in Tilburg, the Netherlands, in 2003, he opened a hair salon for one month and invited people to get a bleach job free of charge. He advertised in local papers and put in the salon’s windows images of famous blonds, including, of course, Andy Warhol, as well as images from artworks in which blond is a key concept. Nicolai, who is represented by Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin and Leipzig, took before-and-after shots of each person, though he only shows the after shots—the achievements—which look like standard school yearbook photos.

Photographer Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s most distinguished artists, considers personal identity in the context of ancestry. He examines his own background in the series “Re-take of Amrita” (2001–4), based on old photos of his aunt Amrita Sher-Gil, a famous painter who died at age 28 in 1941. Sundaram shows digitally manipulated photos of her as a child, a teenager, and a young woman in Paris. The artist’s hand becomes evident when his aunt appears twice in the same frame in different outfits, or when her homes in Paris and India overlap, or when she is depicted years after her death with her parents as elderly people. Sundaram creates a world where past and present coexist. He examines how his family history is interwoven with that of modern India, and how even his own decision to become an artist was entwined with his heritage.

New Yorker Brian Alfred seeks to convey his own identity in terms of people he chooses to associate with. Since 2005 he has been working on head-shot paintings of people he admires—from his wife and friends to musicians, artists, and people he has never met—often modeled on images gleaned from the Internet. He plans to exhibit 500 of them together, formulating a different kind of genealogy.

The power of the portrait may turn up in the part—which stands, of course, for the whole—as in veteran painter Francesco Clemente’s portrayals of collectors, shown at New York’s Mary Boone Gallery, where the focal point of the paintings is the flirtatious, spike-heeled shoes of the women collectors posed jauntily in the air. The mood is in the shoe. Emerging artist Victoria Burge also focuses on legs and feet in drawings and paintings of touchingly spindly legs in schoolgirl socks, conjuring their owners’ youth and vulnerability.

Political and social critiques play a large role in portraiture, especially in China in recent years. In the 1990s, when the Cynical Realist and Political Pop painters made hard-edged, angry, and ironic portraits of Mao, comrades, and Red Army soldiers, portrait painting was everywhere. More recently, however, Chinese portraiture has turned more contemplative and personal.

Yang Shaobin, once a Cynical Realist himself, spent much of 2006 producing “800 Meters,” a series of paintings featuring miners from his hometown, covered in dirt, often smiling despite the hardship of their jobs. The series underscores the humanity of these often forgotten workers, whose faces are portrayed as strikingly individual. The series is part of his Long March Project, which tracks Chinese history and cultural development. Yang Shaobin, whose work can be seen at the Long March Space in Beijing, has written, “In my paintings I aim to convey a sense of disquiet, that hidden agenda which it is often hard to put a finger upon, but which is really responsible for the horrors the modern world is facing.”

The 29-year-old Chinese photographer Cao Fei, who is represented by the Lombard-Freid gallery in New York, has made a number of video portraits, including an 88-minute film of her father, a sculptor, incorporating footage of him making a statue of Deng Xiaoping for an official revolutionary museum. Perhaps her most powerful film yet is Whose Utopia? (2006), which presents anonymous factory workers—the individuals behind the “Made in China” stamp—at a lightbulb factory. Cao Fei divides her work into three sections. The first is documentary, showing the workers at their jobs. The second reveals some of the workers’ fantasy lives—dreams of being a ballet dancer or a rock star—acted out inside the factory. In the third part, the individuals look directly at the camera, and the audience is forced to regard them anew.

Artists Kehinde Wiley and Robert A. Pruitt address African American identity and social issues. Wiley, who shows at Deitch Projects in New York, makes immaculate paintings, inserting black males in street wear into the canon of Western European portraiture and posing them as saints or prophets. Pruitt, by contrast, works with symbols: a beautiful sculptural ring of handcuffs, for example, or his humble yet dramatic sculpture Glass Slippers (2005), composed of sneakers covered in shattered beer bottles, which he showed at the Whitney Biennial last year. His works can be viewed as portraits of African American society in general, and of himself, the artist, merging hip-hop, found objects, and sophisticated art-making tactics.

In Britain, Hew Locke uses portraiture to question power structures. He grew up in French Guiana, where he recalls seeing the image of Queen Elizabeth on his schoolbooks every day. Her significance seemed very abstract and unfathomable to him from that distance, and he still finds it difficult to understand. To put her in perspective, he re-creates the Queen’s portrait as it appears on currency but uses brightly colored, cheap plastic toys, garlands, and other paraphernalia, as in Black Queen (2004). “My feelings about the royals are ambivalent,” Locke says. “I am simply fascinated by the institution and its relationship to the press and public.” He adds, “My political position is neither republican nor monarchist. I am interested in producing powerful, magical images of the royal family.”

Some portraitists conjure images through words or the combination of words and pictures. Parisian artists M/M, who are also graphic designers for fashion-world clients, have been collaborating with writer Stephanie Cohen to make text portraits of their friends and colleagues—who include Björk, Kate Moss, Douglas Gordon, Marc Jacobs, and Nicolas Ghesquière—as well as collectors who want to commission them. The collaborators write a text for each in a style they feel befits the sitter. Since Gordon is a Scot, his portrait reads as if it were an obituary for a Scottish lord, while Björk’s is constructed as more of an abstract, poetic narrative. They then frame the paragraph and, in the case of the famous friends, display it on a gallery wall. The portrayals commemorate an individual in a historical, literary, or social context.

“Portraiture is vital—increasingly so,” says Dan Cameron, curator of such international biennials as Istanbul in 2003 and Taipei in 2006 and newly appointed director of visual arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. “We are losing our identities through the bombardment of media imagery. Portraiture shows us who we are and how we feel about who we are: our identities. It’s like a barometer.”