Historically Responsive & Critically Engaged: Contemporary Figurative Painting

After its near disappearance in the latter half of the 20th century, contemporary figurative painting has been revitalized as an essential component of much of the critically significant pieces of art being made and distributed today. Works from artists such as Jordan Casteel, Kerry James Marshall, Jennifer Packer, Alice Neel, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Jenny Saville and more exhibit the influence of portrait painting against the implications and expectations of the contemporary art world. “For centuries, of course, portrait painting was art. But by the second half of the 20th century, it had almost disappeared. By this time, critics routinely announced the death of painting with every new technological and aesthetic innovation. First there was the proliferation of photography, then the ready-made. Then there was the internet, and social media, whose rise seemed to render the medium of painting — not to mention portraiture — completely irrelevant. And yet portraiture — in the classic, realist sense — has become increasingly essential (and visible) in the last few years.” (Petrovich) The current revival of contemporary portraiture reveals the persistence of figurative painting despite the prevalence of concurrent contradictory art forms and theories. To understand the evolution and resurrection of figurative painting, one must closely examine the terms by which we monitor and value contemporary art and the ways in which artists subvert those terms. One must also weigh the extraneous socio political impacts that are intertwined within the discipline of figurative art. Considering the evolution of this subject matter within the enclosure of the contemporary, the subversion of the fictional notion of progress implicated by the art world, and the political, social and digital need for affirmation and representation, figurative painting can be negotiated as a radical, significant component of contemporary art.

The first step in unpacking the prominence of portrait painting requires an understanding of the pretexts of contemporary art. The emergence of contemporary art is a departure from the traditional values of what it means to be an artist, bridged by a change in the conditions of time and the melding of art and philosophy. “[Contemporary art] invites the viewer into a new temporality and insists that the time for just this new kind of art has arrived. The contemporary, then, is first of all a matter of direct experience, and then it is one that claims further significance because it may be epochal. It combines instantaneity— total immersion in the present — with a demand that an unknowable future be instantly accepted.” (Smith) “Many artists are fascinated by how temporality was treated by their predecessors, from which they draw inspiration in their efforts to deal with present concerns. For some, this becomes a way of approaching art's internal history, that is, the densely textured interplay between artists, those who knew each other as well as those connected by imaginative sympathy. Its raw materials are example and influence, suggestion and orientation, trial and error, ideas incompletely realized, trails laid for one's successors ... In other words, the connectivity between objects, ideas, people, and institutions is the core subject of the art historian's attention.” (Smith) This approach establishes the critical groundwork that reveres the continuation of figurative painting. Figuration acknowledges the influences, suggestions and orientations Smith refers to as being fundamental in artist practices; contemporary figurative and portrait painting allows artists to challenge and question those influences, suggestions and orientations while creating space for those who have been left out. This connectivity serves not only as an argument that supports the continuation of portrait painting, but also speaks to the inevitability of art history in the contemporary. Acknowledging this inevitability allows us to continue to critically examine the systems and structures that art has and continues to rest on. “Despite their differing perspectives, many artists today use art historical reflection to tackle pressing issues about what it means to live in the present.” (Smith) To make art as if the burden of its own history does not continue to influence its creation is a refusal to repudiate the cynical aspects of such history; it accepts the status quo and thus moves forward before problems of inequity, misrepresentation and discrimination in art history have been resolved. Therefore, contemporary art cannot ethically exist without connectivity to its predecessor. The true contemporary artist should not assume or forget anymore than it moves forward or backward.

Additionally, despite the submergence in “nowness” touted by the contemporary, there is a prevalent requirement for art made under the umbrella of contemporary to contribute to a legacy of progress. Ronald Paulson explains: “The history of art is less adequately described by a progress narrative than as congeries of different symbolic forms or discourses that interpenetrate and supersede each other as (only possibly) a series of successive forms and discourses.” While the contemporary artist must balance the acknowledgement of its history without leaning on it and reinforcing it, they must also not make work with the goal of the progression of art in mind. Rather than interrupt or succeed another form or concept or tradition, contemporary works of art should contribute to a growing conversation about humanity. This boundary functions as a qualification of freedom which has allowed for the reemergence of figurative painting. In an age dominated by theory, the division of the abstract and the figure has been popularized. Certainly, the association of high art and abstraction explains why portrait painters feel they must defend their practice. Paulson discusses the ways that the binary of figurative and abstraction is mediated by the progress narrative: “Fictions utilized by artists in order to paint one way or the other, and second, fictions imposed upon the artist by theorists, art historians, and other artists, for example the fiction of an abstract or a non-representational painting as somehow an advance on or complete break from the figural or representational. These fictions mediate between abstraction and figuration… These are little more than metaphors, assumed and reified in an unconsidered way by artists and writers on art. A major one is the metaphor of ‘progress,’ or the notion that art has a ‘story’ or ‘geneology.” (Paulson)

The supposed binary of the figural and the abstract yields to the narrative of progress. This mentality manages the value we assign a piece of art. Theorist Gilles Deleuze takes a modernist approach in describing the split of abstraction from the figural vis-à-vis the concept which he refers to as the logic of sensation. He claims, “There are two ways of going beyond figuration: either toward abstract form or toward the figure [or sensation].” Championing the figure as a form related to sensation, Deleuze differentiates it from the abstract form which “is addressed to the head and acts through the intermediary of the brain.” He goes on to express that:

Sensation is the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the ‘sensational,’ the spontaneous, etc. Sensation has one face turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, ‘instinct,’ ‘temperament’)... And one face turned toward the object (the ‘fact,’ the place, the event). Or rather it is Being-in-the-World, as phenomenologists say: at one and the same time I became the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, it is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives and receives sensation. (Deleuze, 31)

Deleuze’s arguments flatter my affinity for figurative painting by proclaiming its significance; however, these ideas do not subvert the systems of value which lift one form of art making above the another. Perspectives like this are tempting to use as subjective arguments about whether or not a style or form has value, but I included this excerpt to emphasize that valuing figurative paintings over non-representational paintings the conversation away from what may actually liberate a portrait painter from the fictional confines of contemporary art and instead reinforce the mythology that says painting must be either progressive or referential to sensation, that elements of time, culture, subject, concept and style cannot converge.

Lorna Collins, an advocate for the critical significance of abstraction, constructs a contemporary argument that supports the convergence of content, subject matter, process and theory. Contradicting Deleuze, Collins explains, “The binary constructed to separate and segregate disintegrates as the paradox shifts to a parity (which is as unknown and incommensurable as the chaos, and so is chaos) at the surface. The sense of 'twoness' is unfolded and opened, no longer tightly binomial but multiple. In this the diaphora is not synthesised or resolved, but opened.” Collins advocates that, in art, the convergence of forms such as the abstract and the figure reveal something unique about the moment of its creation. It is the breaking down of the binomial that allows for great art to be made. She continues, “What is important is the surface, where an interface between antagonistically juxtaposed efforts to confront or resolve this diaphora unfolds to provide a parity or coexistence between them. This provides a sense of chaosmos [which]... brings the sublime sense of an interface, or chaosmosis, between that primal paradox of cosmos and chaos.” (Collins) I include this perspective to emphasize the ways that breaking down the binary between the figure and abstraction create space for both to exist in profound ways. “Any firm distinctions posited between the genres of abstraction, figuration and the Figure dissolve, just as when paintings disrupt their boundaries, as sensation. Deleuze's Logic of Sensation depicts this sense of sensations, but his constrictions to abstraction and the Figure within this overflow these, and demonstrate that they cannot in fact be captured in this way. [Deleuze's attempt] to differentiate and segregate genres, such as figure, Figure or abstraction, cannot accurately survey those paintings and sensations that they refer to or categorise.” (Collins) To dignify the practice of portrait painting, we must break down the separation of abstract and representational art. This separation is only possible by rejecting the genealogical narrative of art. Arthur Danto, writer of The State of the Art, contends, “The immense problem of self-definition has been imposed on painting… Art must now, whatever else it does, come to terms with its own nature. (Danto)

After identifying the space for figurative portraiture, there is room to acknowledge the ways in which figurative works reassess power and recognition in and outside of the art world. Portrait painting now functions as a social response, an extension of humanity, a disruption of the status quo, and a subversion of the isolation and exclusivity of art history. Juxtaposed with the history of portrait painting that upheld traditions of privileged classes, reinforced social hierarchies and preserved the power of affluent, elite white folks, painters are now using portraiture to celebrate folks that have been left out of the narrative. Now more than ever, in the digital age, more folks have access to viewing figurative paintings. It is evident that the influence that portrait painting can have on representation has tangible reach to a broader audience than ever before. Aruna D’Souza of The New York Times describes this influence in reference to painter, Jennifer Packer: “Portraiture is everywhere at the moment, in painting and photography alike, and some of the best of it has a specific aim: to make those who have been rendered invisible — on museum walls, in public culture, in political discourse — visible.” (Souza) In another New York TImes article, Dushko Petrovich speaks on the work of Kehinde Wiley stating, “When he first started showing his work in the early 2000s, Wiley’s reversals of classical figuration were an outlier at a time when most painters dealt in abstraction… [What] might be most important about Wiley’s selection was that it seemed to signal contemporary portraiture’s new relevance, the reconsideration of a mode that had been thought out of fashion, if not downright taboo, for decades. Long confined to historical museums and musty mansions, it seemed like portraiture had suddenly been rushed out of storage.” He answers:

“So why is portraiture returning now? For one, there is an institutional urgency to speak to a more diverse audience with painting that depicts the black community, the Asian-American experience, the Latino face, to attract the various people who had been excluded from the museum by remaking the history of figurative painting… And there is another reason for figurative paintings’ resurgence as well: We live in a time in which reality is almost daily warped in ways that were unimaginable even 18 months ago. We have swiftly entered an era where the very notion of truth, or facts, is considered fungible. As we reassess the various power structures that landed us here, it is stabilizing and reassuring to look at the work of an artist who is clearly in control of her craft, who is able to depict a reality that is material and grounded in recognition — of seeing, in the Facebook age, a painting that looks like who it is meant to.” (Petrovich)

It is unsurprising that rational, easily understood writings on the subject of the resurgence of portraiture and figurative painting are accessible in readily available and widely distributed formats such as The New York Times. This speaks to the prolific nature of contemporary figurative painting and the ways it influences multiple spheres of culture.

We no longer examine figurative paintings with innocent eyes — contemporary art audiences come to experience art with an understanding of the abstraction and conceptualization that has changed art forever. Artists no longer must subscribe to the historic traditional measures of art. “Figurative artists no longer live in a time of shared myths and historical truths, and therefore have to resort to private mythologies of their own creation, which emerge gradually out of the continuity of many individual canvases.” (Paulson) Figurative artists are accessing something new and everlasting about the visibility of humanity, the tenderness of connectivity and interplay between recognition between the painter, painting and audience.

Annotated Bibliography

Collins, Lorna. “Sensations Spill a Deluge over the Figure.” Deleuze Studies 2, no. 1 (2008): 49–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45331336.

This text breaks down Deleuze’s arguments about the logic of sensation and defends the convergence of abstraction and the figure.

Danto, Arthur C. The State of the Art. 1st ed. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987.

Essays discuss pop and performance art, Van Gogh, primitivism, Motherwell, Caravaggio, De Kooning, Kandinsky, Rousseau, Chagall, Rivera, and the end of art history. “The immense problem of self-definition had been imposed on painting… Art must now, whatever else it does, come to terms with its own nature.”

Deleuze, Gilles, and Bacon, Francis. Francis Bacon : The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

This text is Deleuze’s meditation on the logic of sensation in regards to abstraction and the Figure and the paintings of Francis Bacon.

D'souza, Aruna. “Jennifer Packer: Painting as an Exercise in Tenderness.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/arts/design/jennifer-packer-whitney.html?searchResultPosition=1.

This text discusses the critical significance of Jennifer Packer in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Paulson, Ronald. Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

This text considers the “persistence of figuration in an age dominated by abstraction — dominated in theory at least, for in art, as in literature, it has been an age of theory.” “A visitor to an exhibition of neo figurative painting noticed how the paintings hardly conceal their desperation to recover the human figure without losing touch with the traditions of nonrepresentational painting in its many forms.” “Fictions utilized by artists in order to paint one way or the other, and second, fictions imposed upon the artist by theorists, art historians, and other artists, for example the fiction of an abstract or a non-representational painting as somehow an advance on or complete break from the figural or representational. These fictions mediate between abstraction and figuration… These are little more than metaphors, assumed and reified in an unconsidered way by artists and writers on art. A major one is the metaphor of ‘progress,’ or the notion that art has a ‘story’ or ‘geneology.” “This book is about the figural painting that coexisted with the more touted tradition of nonrepresentational, nonfigurative, theory-oriented painting.” “My position for this book is that the history of art is less adequately described by a progress narrative than as congeries of different symbolic forms or discourses that interpenetrate and supersede each other as (only possibly) a series of successive forms and discourses.”

Petrovich, Dushko. “The New Face of Portrait Painting.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 12, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/t-magazine/portrait-art-painting.html?searchResultPosition=1.

This text considers the revival of portrait painting in contemporary art. “So why is portraiture returning now? For one, there is an institutional urgency to speak to a more diverse audience with painting that depicts the black community, the Asian-American experience, the Latino face, to attract the various people who had been excluded from the museum by remaking the history of figurative painting… And there is another reason for figurative paintings’ resurgence as well: We live in a time in which reality is almost daily warped in ways that were unimaginable even 18 months ago. We have swiftly entered an era where the very notion of truth, or facts, is considered fungible. As we reassess the various power structures that landed us here, it is stabilizing and reassuring to look at the work of an artist who is clearly in control of her craft, who is able to depict a reality that is material and grounded in recognition — of seeing, in the Facebook age, a painting that looks like who it is meant to.

Smith, Terry. “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art.” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (2010): 366–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29546137.

This text discusses the ways that contemporary art still references the historical. ‘ Many artists are fascinated by how temporality was treated by their predecessors, from which they draw inspiration in their efforts to deal with present concerns. For some, this becomes a way of approaching art's internal history, that is, the densely textured interplay between artists, those who knew each other as well as those connected by imaginative sympathy. Its raw materials are example and influence, suggestion and orientation, trial and error, ideas incompletely realized, trails laid for one's successors ... In other words, the connectivity between objects, ideas, people, and institutions is the core subject of the art historian's attention.”