The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is challenging traditional notions of portraiture with its latest exhibition, The Face of Life: Modern Portraits at The Met. Featuring nearly 80 works from the museum's permanent collection, the show takes an expansive view of what constitutes a portrait, moving beyond mere physical likeness to explore memory, myth, and the artist's own imprint.
Curated by Stephanie D'Alessandro, the exhibition includes iconic pieces such as Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, Max Beckmann's triptych The Beginning, and Wifredo Lam's Ídolo, a vibrant depiction of the Yoruba goddess Oyá. These works, alongside cubist abstractions, a hand mirror, and Joan Miró's "painting-poetry," demonstrate the diverse ways artists have interpreted the human form.
Redefining Resemblance
D'Alessandro explained that the show questions the very essence of a portrait. "People often assume the portrait of someone resembles them, but what is it that resembles them? Is it the physical look? Is it something else? And what of the artist gets injected into that?" she said in a video interview.
Picasso's famous portrait of Stein, which took months to complete after he painted her face from memory, exemplifies this struggle. Stein herself wrote, "It is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I." The painting is paired with an excerpt from her 1923 poem If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso, which plays with words like "exact" and "resemblance" to question the nature of likeness.
Spiritual and Abstract Portraits
Lam's Ídolo, a recent Met acquisition, draws on Santería, a Cuban religion blending Yoruba and Catholic traditions. The painting depicts Oyá in a state of transition between human and animal, with dripping media suggesting the painting itself is coming into being. Another new acquisition, Francis Picabia's Elegance, presents a monstrous woman with a parasol, reflecting the artist's dadaist roots and paired with Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
Abstract works like Paul Klee's May Picture and Vasily Kandinsky's Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II) offer impressions based on emotional experience rather than physical form. D'Alessandro noted that these pieces "can function as a kind of portrait, a kind of record" of human presence and connection.
Timeless Human Drive
D'Alessandro emphasized that portraiture's fundamental concerns are timeless, even as techniques and technologies evolve. "The things that we grapple with today – like virtual reality or phones – are technologies that make us see and not see things. These things have parallels with an earlier time. It's a kind of reconnecting with the past and seeing that all is not always new."
The exhibition also includes Florine Stettheimer's The Cathedrals of Broadway and Marsden Hartley's Portrait of a German Officer, further illustrating the breadth of portraiture. D'Alessandro sees in these works a fundamental human urge to connect, echoing E.M. Forster's words: "There's something in that human drive that connects us the whole time. If we take the time to look into a portrait, we can understand something far beyond the subject."
The Face of Life: Modern Portraits at The Met is now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
