Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Hide/Seek


Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture catalogs last year's exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. I think the curators' selection of which specific image or images should represent each artist was brilliant. Examples below.


Goat's Horn with Red
1945
Georgia O'Keeffe


Una, Lady Troubridge
1924
Romaine Brooks


Arnold Comes of Age
1930
Grant Wood


Men Reading
1914
J.C. Leyendecker


Hugh Laing and Antony Tudor
1940
Carl Van Vechten


Dancing Sailors
1917
Charles Demuth


Djuna Barnes
1926
Berenice Abbott


Margaret French, George Tooker and Jared French, Nantucket
c. 1946
PaJaMa

Joseph Cornell
1933
Lee Miller


Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane
1933
Marsden Hartley


Portrait of Marcel Duchamp
1925
Florine Stettheimer


River Front No. 1
1915
George Bellows


Nude
1947
Agnes Martin

"Before she died, Martin attempted to reacquire and destroy all of her figurative works." from the catalogue, p. 144.