Portraits and expression
Chaim Soutine | France 1893-1943 | L'homme aux rubans (Man with ribbons) 1921-22 | Oil on canvas | 81.3 x 61.7cm; 99 x 79cm (framed) | Purchased 1988 with funds from the 1988 International Exhibitions Program | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Portraiture conventionally aspires to presenting a person’s likeness and is bound up with ideas of commemoration, identity, beauty, truth and memory. The works assembled here offer a variety of approaches to painted portraits – a common form of remembrance prior to the invention of photography.
The group of portraits by British artists were created in the early to mid twentieth century and show the artists’ friends, family members and acquaintances in a realist manner. They also display the influences of modern stylistic changes occurring at the time, such as Post-Impressionism and Fauvism.
By contrast, works by Chaim Soutine, Karel Appel and Jean Dubuffet expand the convention of portraiture to communicate an emotional dimension. The distortion of Soutine’s Man with ribbons 1921–22 and the vigorous, impasted surface of Appel’s Crying head 1963 reflect the artists’ intent to express psychological, rather than a naturalistic, observations.
Jean Dubuffet’s Bivouac 1976 depicts a series of figures and faces described by the artist as ‘a display of multiple memories of places and scenes’. The work’s apparent randomness was carefully orchestrated by Dubuffet, in an effort to capture the fleeting nature of vision and memory.
