Bringing Back The Portrait

...It is in portraiture, though, not in humor, that the artist displays the most interesting side of his personality...

...certainly Abstract Expressionism had already disintegrated when Pop overtook it...

...Of these, the tour de force was certainly Throne, a full-scale bow...

...In the exhibit, too, was a head of Bishop Neumann that I had seen last year in a show of liturgical art mounted by the Catholic Church in Philadelphia, and had found the most memorable work there...

...Hauteur was also out among the womenfolk, who were aiming more at down-to-earth maturity, whether posing in pant-suits or well-cloven evening gowns...

...The abstractionist, who was an amateur student of religions, cautioned the realist that he would be held responsible for the souls of everyone he painted...

...Pearlstein distinguished himself from other "nonspecialist" portraitists whose work is a subjective comment on the model, and explained that his art derives from the Cezanne-Cubism tradition, where the "primary" experience is unquestionably the artist's...

...Arneson seems to like putting touches of verisimilitude on his work: He has glazed the lips of a matt face and, in a near caricature of his dealer, added whitish patches around the eyes to suggest the light that would be refracted if the empty spectacles contained lenses...

...But with rare excep tions—like John Koch, who paints well, bringing out the cozy and erotic aspects of wealth, and the late Rene Bouche, who was a fine and elegant draftsman—it has been an esthetic wasteland for quite some time now...

...The result is often an image resembling more the artist than the subject...

...But novelty of medium is the least of this artist's achievements...

...His Bishop Neumann looks, quite accurately, like a man as capable of practical good works as of spiritual ones...

...Most of the faces were grinning and some wore funny hats, but because of the scale—three times life size at a guess —and the bravura of the modeling, the effect was quite traditional...

...That movement dissolved as quickly as it appeared, yet its influence continues to be pervasive...

...Interestingly, while the notion persists that irony, parody and satire are effective weapons, all evidence indicates, to the contrary, that they are merely a face-saving recourse for the underdog...

...No heavy indictment of the Establishment is involved in Classical Exposure, a 1972 bust of himself looking like a Roman senator—except for beard, chest hair and cigar...

...Pearlstein's remark comes from his answer, published in a newsletter put out by the Frumkin Gallery, to a half-joking accusation made years ago by the late Ad Reinhardt...

...The portrait of a black artist, Mike Henderson, for example, did not make an impact until one had digested the idea of a man being so dark as to appear navy blue all over, his teeth included...

...Although the artist clearly restrained himself in a higher cause, he suffered no loss of vigor...

...Indeed, irony, informed and otherwise, has become so de rigeur a cultural stance that nothing is safe from spoof in art, literature, theater, film, or Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman...

...A Cali-fornian by birth and outlook, Arneson is now 47, making him more or less the coeval of Johns and Rausch-enberg...

...and a series of works exploring what he considered to be the menacing potential of the toilet...

...The unconscious, liberated by modernism, turns out to be a formidable enemy of representing the human presence as perceived...

...I don't think this gets Pearlstein off the graven image hook...

...Obviously, Arneson enjoys the license procured for all artists by Duchamp, yet he doesn't seem to expect institutions to topple as a result of his japes...

...has its high-priced stars, of course, such as James Wyeth...

...It rests on a column that has genitals added at the appropriate level, with a pair of feet protruding from under the base...

...I do not mean to exaggerate the significance of Arneson's Neumann...

...The painter Philip Pearlstein implicity acknowledged the problem when he noted that his sitters "can, and sometimes do, ask whose ego is involved...

...The grabber was the pair of turds therein, "crafted," says Frankenstein, "with the highest degree of skill and beauty that his mastery of ceramic could achieve...

...When I last visited this gallery, two years ago, the rage among the corporate enchiladas on exhibit was to look quizzical, sporty and a little windswept...

...The sitter is merely permitting his forms to be used as a "technical motivation," and, concluded Pearlstein, "the working process I have evolved allows only my soul to be involved...

...Needless to say, they were stolen upon exhibition...

...Well raked over as this subject has been, the discussions have most often centered on the technical and philosophical pressures of modernism, plus the competition from photography...

...Moreover, Arneson doesn't take his gags that seriously...

...He proved that in a recent Frumkin Gallery show, consisting of 10 heads of himself and friends, together with three masks...

...I found the monochromatic pieces less immediately impressive...

...As for the New Realism's "critique" of art and society, all it managed to do in the long run was bring about its own acceptance and further discredit figuration...

...And while it may be true that not all realists feel compelled to separate the body from the soul in order to function, there is reason to conclude that most are suffering from some kind of psychic split...

...Grouping them as if they were prides of luxuriantly-maned lions, he appeared to be trying for the Hyannis Port look...

...And even a portrait by a "fine" artist has its drawbacks...

...Arneson's early works, as Alfred Frankenstein observed in last January's ARTnews, were "vessels full of accident and agony...

...There followed a stream of domestic artifacts inspired by the banality of the house he had acquired upon moving to Davis, to teach at the University of California branch there...

...For one thing, a hypothetical prosecutor could surely ask why he has not confined himself to cadavers (not that this controversial artist hasn't been suspected of so doing...

...My most vivid memory is of the painter who specialized in families, with or without their lovely mums...

...my models . . . have only lent their faces...

...the greatest, I would say, is the way he is transcending his own contributions to Funk Art, the West Coast subdivision of Pop...

...Nowadays, most people wanting a likeness go to Portraits Inc., where they can choose from a roundup of artists willing, if not to flatter, at least to provide an image consonant with whatever is in fashion...

...a toaster extruding fingers rather than toast...

...Among them was a typewriter with fingernails instead of keys...

...Ecole de Portraits Inc...

...As others have noted, the pieces could have been well-preserved fragments of giant Hellenistic figures, sculpted and colored to be viewed at a great distance...

...In addition, as one of the relatively few notables to accept an invitation to the liturgical show (another was Pearlstein, who exhibited a commissioned portrait of Philadelphia's Cardinal Krol), Arneson seemed to be expressing the growing and encouraging willingness among figurative artists to "rejoin the world...

...Indebted to Duchamp, Arneson has also invaded the territory of such contemporaries as Oldenburg, and has made use of Magritte and Giaco-metti...

...For in the realm of "quality" portraiture, likeness is generally the last consideration—art, naturally, being the first...

...If that does not sound impressive, think for a moment about the current state of portraiture (secular as well as devotional), the branch of figurative art hardest hit by abstraction...

...Arneson, in contrast, has barged ahead and made a touching likeness of a smiling, rubicund man in a cassock...

...Whatever the case, however, not even the longevity of Picasso could prevent the discrediting and banishment of figurative art by Abstract Expressionism, or bring about its return in some form other than satire—i.e...

...Yet I believe the work comes close to bridging the fatal division, despite (or possibly because of) its subject being dead...

...His art is no less sleazy and naughty than its Eastern analogues (and perhaps more so), but it comes with that special California candor, and is sunny, macabre and boisterous...

...Pity the poor realist, for whom the world is still not ready...

...Like them, and evidently influenced by their example, he began his career toying with Abstract Expressionism before reacting against it in a surge of oedipal neo-Dadaism...

...At the same time, he is as remote from them as the American Neoclassicists of the last century were from their models in ancient Greece and Rome...

...that with the "death of God," artists have found it increasingly difficult to depict either the deity or His replacement, man...

...cast atypically in aluminum and set on a checkerboard base...

...I would suggest that the crisis of religion has not been sufficiently recognized as an important cause of realism's disarray...

...Then, in 1961, he began making ceramic parodies of beer and Coke bottles...

...I can't think of a single tyrant, in the arts or elsewhere, who has been unseated by humor...

...If so, he was probably disappointed that the head, well received by the local religious, was not bought by the Church —it had to wait for a private collector to find it at the Frumkin Gallery...

...Previously this prelate had been the victim of academic portraitists interested mainly in displaying their pietism...