“Reflections / Refractions”
Where: National Portrait Gallery, 8th and F Streets NW
When: Through August 16
Info: Free; 202-633-1000; npg.si.edu
“Physiognomy,” says National Portrait Gallery curator Anne Collins Goodyear, “can be a mask.”
That’s the premise around which she and Wendy Rick Reaves, NPG curator of prints and drawings, have assembled “Reflections/Refractions,” an intriguing survey of 20th introspection on view through mid-August. An ideal companion piece to the NPG’s Marcel Duchamp-inspired portraiture show, “Reflections” features works of self-examination by a coterie of influential creators, from Childe Hassam to Edward Hopper to Andy Warhol.
Portraiture, and even figuration itself, had fallen out of fashion among the avant-garde in by the middle of the last century, Goodyear notes. It fell to artists like Chuck Close and Will Barnett found ways to make it relevant, and revelatory, again.
Close’s 1982 “Self-Portrait/Manipulated” is but one example of how breaking free of representation made new depths of insight possible. Close made the piece — a large head shot, of sorts — by pouring different paper pulps into a grid and then removing the grid before the pulp had dried, giving the finished cast a craggy texture that almost appears to move.
Robert Rauschenberg’s 1968 tri-panel “Autobiography” is another unconventional portrait. Like all the best pieces here, this one is dedicated to the faithful execution of a concept rather than likeness.
The green box in the panel on the right is a Duchamp reference, says Goodyear. The piece’s three panels can be arranged vertically or horizontally, as they are here. Included in this piece’s forest of evocative imagery are an X-ray of a skeleton, and Rauschenberg’s astrological sign, Libra. There are oil tanks, alluding to his boyhood in Port Arthur, Texas, and a skyline of Manhattan, where he lived later. There’s also a dense text narrative of his life printed in a spiral, so that the text resembles a giant fingerprint. The third panel is dominated by a photo from to his performance piece, “Pelican” — a sample of concept-art-on-wheels that he presented in a DC roller-rink in 1963.
The show finds artists stretching conceptually in other directions, too. Robert Arneson’s 1975, “Brick,” is — wait for it — a brick inscribed with his name. Arneson, Goodyear points out, is trading on our prior associations with the word, and the object. Bricks are ubiquitous and anonymous. There’s the character Brick in Tennesse Williams’s 1955 play”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which preceded Arneson’s work, and also Pink Floyd’s 1979 anthem of alienation, “Another Brick in the Wall,” which followed it.
Arneson’s “California Brick” gives us a brick cleaved in two as if by an earthquake. Arneson hemorrhaged while working on it – the bleeding was the first sign of the bladder cancer that eventually killed him. It also alludes to his earlier “Self-Portrait of an Artist Losing His Marbles,” a traditional bust that Arneson, ever irreverent, filled in with marbles after it cracked in his kiln.
The show’s more recent pieces are equally self-reflective. Kiki Smith’s 1994 photograuve/etching/drypoint “Free Fall” shows us the artist, naked, cradling a book to her body in an almost fetal pose. Susan Hauptman’s 2001 “Self-Portrait with Dog,” meanwhile, gives us hyper-drafted face, a clumsy, disproportionate body, a feminine costume, and butch haircut — each seemingly an contradiction intended to advance portraiture by subverting it.
In that, it’s wholly representative of this generous, absorbing show.
