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FACE TO FACE a very brief account of the printed face "Lord, why castest thou off my soul? Why hidest thou thy face from me?" (Psalms,8814) The face is the essence of the human individual. Although we recognize people we know from a distance, even from the back, by posture and gait. and although other kinds of measures, such as fingerprints, are deemed more scientific as positive Fig. 1
identification, it is the face that is most commonly understood to define a person. In contemporary life it is the "photo 10," the passport or driver's license with a photograph of the bearer's face, that we are expected to produce upon official demand, to prove that we are ourselves. As with God, if we turn our face away, we have turned our whole being away Until the early part of the twentieth century, the great majority of works of art depicted human beings in a recognizable story or situation, and faces and facial expression played a key role in the Mocking
of Christ, for example, the torturers are shown with ugly faces, further contorted
by hateful expressions; in the dramatic scenes favored by artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, resolve is conveyed by a steady gaze and set jaw, and demure innocence by downcast eyes. A major category of works of art, parallel to those telling a story, is the portrait. a genre with roots lost in antiquity, already strong by the fifth century B.C Although a depicted single face is not always a portrait. most of them are-as are most in the Face to Face exhibition. In a portrait. as in an image telling a story, the expectation is that facial expression will reveal character. Printmaking emerged in Europe in the fifteenth century, as paper began to be plentiful. and both religious and secular images depicted human beings-the
holy family and saints
of the Christian faith, the gods of pagan antiquity, allegorical figures, or simply images of human beings, like the fools on playing cards. A good half century passed after the beginning of printmaking before prints became a medium for portraits of specific individuals; during the fifteenth century (as indeed Fig. 2
a-e) those who commissioned portraits were at the high e
of the social and economic scale, and they preferred ore conspicuously costly media. But toward the end of e century printed portraits began to appear (although ese were not necessarily commissioned) and the first rinted self-portrait. an image made by the engraver Israel
an Meckenem of himself and his wife, was made around 1490. In 1518 the great German artist Albrecht DOrer made a
oodcut portrait of no less a personage than the Holy
Roman Emperor Maximilian, and this and DOrer's eight other printed portraits (two woodcuts and six engravings) both sanctioned the medium for other artists-and sittersand set a high standard for the genre. From the beginning of printed books, it was logical that book illustrations ould be printed, too, and thus immense numbers of images to illustrate the Bible, literary texts, and documentary material such as travel chronicles were created, at first mostly in woodcut, such as lost Amman's rendering of a Turk with scepter and shield (fig. 1),later in engraving or etching. DOrer made drawings and paintings of himself, but never a printed self-portrait.
His great
successor in printmaking, however, Rembrandt van Rijn, working nearly a century and a half later, made over twenty etched self-portraits, out of at least seventy-five in all media. At thirty, he portrayed himself and his wife Saskia with an almost fierce intensity (fig 2); just twelve years later. his last printed self-portrait shows a more subdued and somber man, having lost three of his four children in infancy, and his beloved Saskia herself. Also in the 1630s and '40s, in Catholic Antwerp, only some eighty-five miles from Rembrandt'sAmsterdam but culturally a world away because it was in the orbit of the Hapsburg Empire, the renowned portrait painter Anthony van Dyck put his talents into an etched series of elegant portraits of his contemporaries, including many Fig. 4
fellow artists. Van Oyck drew the sitters, their faces in detail but the rest only sketched in, and made sensitive etchings on the plates from these drawings; at a later date the details were filled in by professional engravers (fig. 3). In seventeenth - century Europe, however, it was France that produced the greatest volume of printed
portraits.
With
its centralized absolute monarchy, an enormous and complex hierarchy of important persons was established in relation to the king, and through engraved images, multipliable and relatively inexpensive, the population could satisfy its desire to be in the Fig. 5
know about who was who. Louis Xlvs mother, the dowager queen Anne of Austria (fig. 4)-as the daughter of the Hapsburg Philip III of Spain, her marriage in J615to Louis XIII had cemented the alliance between the two most powerful states in Europe-was obviously on the must- know list. Mezzotint-a medium in which a rocker is used to rough up the entire surface of a copper plate, so that if printed the resultwould be entirely black, and then the image is created by burnishingwas first used in Amsterdam in the 1640s, and in Germany later Fig. 6
in the century. The medium, with its possibility of infinite tonal
gradations, became immensely popular in England-so much so that it became known as la maniere
anglaise-as
it was ideal for making printed reproductions of the
portrait paintings that were the staple of British art, such as the rendition of Isaac Newton, in a magnificent wig, by John Smith (fig. 5), following a painting by Godfrey Kneller. By the end of the eighteenth century Francisco Goya, initially a society painter but who became disillusioned by that world of pomp and flattery, mocked the worship of ancestors implicit in the cult of portraits in his etched image of an ass admiring his forebears, everyone
of whom, naturally, was
also an ass (fig. 6). And once lithography, the invention of Fig. 7
which also took place right at the end of the eighteenth century, was widely available as a means of printing images quickly and cheaply, it became the medium of choice to illustrate the satirical periodicals that emerged in France during the so-called JulyMonarchy (1830-1848). the first manifestations of a truly popular press. Honore Daumier made his fame with his nearly four-thousand lithographs of political subjects (fig. 7) and gently sardonic scenes of daily life, published in these periodicals (in the years they were not shut down by the censors). Once photography had liberated prints in general from their documentary function-and printed portraits from their role of providing basic information, a likeness, to the world-artists
were
free to show the human face and form in any way they chose. Early in the twentieth century, forms in art began to be broken apart and abstracted, by Picasso and Braque in Paris, and in Germany by the Expressionists, of whom Erich Heckel was a central member (fig. 8).
aturalism did not
disappear, however, but continued, as it has to this day; artists such as the Mexican Diego Rivera always worked in recognizable forms, and his major work is in the centuries-old medium of fresco. It is probably no coincidence that Rivera's Self-Portrait
(cover). in the angle of the
body, the straightforward gaze, and even in the right eye being slightly higher than the left. is reminiscent of Rembrandt's image of himself made three centuries earlier (fig. 2). The
increasing
images opened
ubiquity
of
digital
our eyes to yet another
way of breaking down what we are seeing, or think we are seeing. Chuck Close, in his prolific and constantly self-renewing oeuvre, has seized on the grid of the digital image, but
then
thrown
over
our
expectations
by making what look to be digital images Fig 9
in traditional
media such as mezzotint, or woodcut
such as the
multicolor portrait of his wife, Leslie (fig.9). And in the twenty-first century, not only do traditional media persist, but so do the variety of reasons that that have motivated creators of printed portraits. Albrecht DOrer made "official" portraits, such as of the hereditary ruler Emperor Maximilian, but, more importantly, portraits of figures like Fig. 10
Ulrich Varnbuler. Philip Melanchthon, and Erasmus, bold thinkers who
were shaping history in his time. In 2002, at age eighty, john Wilson created in etching a direct and powerful portrait of the most important leader in the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, who, as it happens, was named for a man DOrer admired tremendously
In Wilson's
portrait of Martin Luther King Ir. (fig. 10),the face takes up less than a quarter of the printed image, yet Wilson has focused his attention-and
thus ours-on
that face, its weariness, its promise of
endurance, its hope for better things to come. All we need to know about King is in that face. Suzanne Boorsch Robert L. Solley Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs,
Yale University Art Gallery
IMAGES ------------------------------------------------------------------Cover:
Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886 -1957), Self-Portrait,
1930, Lithograph, 15.88"x
11.25"
Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery, Mount Desert, Maine Jost Amman (German, 1539
1591), Turk with Shield and Scepter, from
IutkisctÂť:
Chronica,
1577, woodcut. 4.625"x 3.875"
The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University 2.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606 -1669), Self-Portrait
with Saskia, 1636, etching, 4.13"x 3.75"
The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University 3.
Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599 -1641), Portrait ot Joos de Momper,
Painter of Landscapes,
from the Iconography.
1630s, etching & engraving, 9.75"x
The Balker Collection: Gift of Norman and I:sther Bolker, Gonzaga University 4.
Robert Nanteuil (French, 1623 -1678) after Pierre Mignard (French, 1612 -1695), Portrait of Anne of Austria,
1660, engraving, 12.88"x 9.75"
The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University 5.
John Smith (British, 1652 -1742) after Godfrey Kneller (British, 1646 -1723), Portrait of Isaac Newton,
1712, mezzotint,
10"
13.63"x
The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University 6.
Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746 -1828),
NAnd so was his grandfather,"
from Los Caprichos,
1799, aquatint,
8S'x
5.94"
The Fredrick and Genevieve Schlatter Endowed Print Fund, Gonzaga University 7.
Honore Daumier (French, 1808 -1879), "Come on, big Cupid!" lithograph,
(Young Lepeintre in the role of Tragala n the play Twenty Years Later), 1834,
12"x 9"
The Fredrick and Genevieve Schlatter Endowed Print Fund, Gonzaga University 8.
Erich Heckel (German, 1883 -1970), Young Girl, from Genius 2,
o. 1, 1913, woodcut.
10.19"x 6.69"
The Balker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Balker, Gonzaga University 9.
Chuck Close (American, b. 1940), Leslie (detail), 1986, woodcut, 24.75"x 21.25"
1O.
John Wilson (American, b. 1922), Martm Luther King Jr. (detail), 2002, etching, aquatint & chine colle. 35.69"x 29.75"
Gift of the Sahlin Foundation, Gonzaga University
Gift of the Sahlin Foundation, Gonzaga University
Exhibition
is
in
honor
and
in
memory
of
Dr.
Anne
Baruch,
Chicago,
This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2007-2008 ŠJundt Art Musuem, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258-0001
Illinois.
6.13"