Max Beckmann, Paris Society (Gesellschaft Paris), oil on canvas, 43 x 69", 1931, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1927. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

The Bruce Museum’s Paris Portraits: Artists, Friends, and Lovers (on view through January 4, 2009) is a brilliant exhibition, historically consequential and aesthetically telling. One has to credit the curator, Kenneth Silver, with subtlety of choice and an eloquent essay, rich with both social and art history and convincing in-depth interpretation. Silver describes the Paris art society in which the portraits were made—most are paintings, some are drawings, others are prints (including an advertising poster)—as though he belonged to it. He seems to have an intimate knowledge of the personalities of the artists and their sitters, suggesting they were all his friends. He is the historian-critic at his perceptive and reflective best: a participant-observer with just enough feeling to suggest his deep engagement with the art, but not enough to compromise his intellect and thus lose historical perspective and analytic detachment.

Many of the portraits are of prominent, even notorious, people, such as Martin Fabiani, a debonair Parisian dealer in Nazi-confiscated art who was arrested after the war. He seems like a proper citizen in Matisse’s charcoal sketch of him, a frontal view, and rather self-assured in Picasso’s pencil drawing of his profile (both 1943). One would hardly know he was a collaborator and art-exploiter. The entertainer Josephine Baker, portrayed some half dozen times by Paul Colin in 1927 as Le Tumulte noir—her “foreign” skin color and “primitive” dancing clearly excited him—was a much more popular figure. And even more wildly popular—at least for a short time—was Maria Lani, a celebrity imposter “cinemactress” portrayed fifty-one times (1928– 29) by various avant-garde artists, among them Bonnard, Braque, Chagall, Cocteau, Delaunay, Derain, Léger, Matisse, Man Ray, Pascin, Picabia, and Soutine (many of the portraits are in the exhibition), before suddenly disappearing from Paris. The jig was up once the artists did their jig with her, making her famous forever. No doubt they were taken with the contradictions of her appearance—“narrow, pointed chin, sharply slanting eyebrows, broad forehead, and slightly coy lips,” as Silver writes—but they seemed more taken by her risqué celebrity, which added to their own.

Max Ernst, Gala Éluard, oil on canvas, 32 x 25 3–4", 1924. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 2006. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is rich with comparisons: Jacques Lipchitz’s 1920 sculpture of Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s 1906 painting of her; Jean Puy’s 1908 painting of a reclining Ambroise Vollard and three 1937 prints of his head by Picasso; Marie Laurencin’s 1906 self-portrait pencil drawing and her head sculpted in 1920 by Hermann Haller; Margit Pogany’s painted self-portrait (1913) and Brancusi’s bronze sculpture of her head (1925). There is also Max Beckmann’s portrait Paris Society (1931), a cynical comparison of social types, each ironically individualized; Romaine Brooks’s The Crossing (1911), a portrait of the naked body of her one-time lover, the famous dancer Ida Rubenstein; a self-portrait of Chagall at the easel (1932); and portraits by Delaunay, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Max Ernst, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Auguste Herbin, Jean Metzinger, and Amedeo Modigliani, to mention several of the other artists in the exhibition.

What is noteworthy about the portraits is their difference in style: some are realistic, some abstract. The point is made clearly by the difference between Pogany’s introspective self-portrait and Brancusi’s rather cold-blooded abstract rendering of her—hardly the same person; indeed, hardly a human body of flesh and blood, but rather a sort of stylishly indifferent man-nequin. This abstract de-personalization and de-individualization of the sitter—in the name of art supposedly higher, more individualistic, and deeply expressive, and thus altogether more important and valuable than human beings—is progressively depicted in Picasso’s three renderings of Vollard. His face becomes a sort of violin that Picasso plays with stylistic virtuosity. It is an extraordinary virtuosity, no doubt, but one that ends up doing emotional injustice to Vollard, obscuring his inner life. He becomes simply an occasion for the artist to show his stuff—another person for the artist to work over with his art.

Emile Deschler, Josephine Baker, gouache, ink, and crayon maquette, 17 3–4 x 16", 1935. The Rennert Collection, New York.

This aesthetic working over—the emphasis on style at the expense of the person; insight into form at the expense of insight into the individual; the imposition of the artist’s unique, individual style at the expense of existential uniqueness and individuality (that is, the compromising of the individual by uncompromising art)—is particularly evident in the cubist portraits, among them Louis Marcoussis’s etching of Apollinaire (c. 1920), in which we have some sense of the likeness and individuality of the person, and Jacques Villon’s 1913 drawing (Monsieur Duchamp) Reading, where the likeness and individuality are sacrificed to the geometrical and linear streamlining of the figure.

Duchamp-Villon’s 1917–18 sculptural portrait of his brother Marcel turns his head into a grimacing, abstract skull, and while Herbin’s and Delaunay’s colorful portraits are less distorted (although Duchamp-Villon may have had insight into the anti-life character of his brother) and clearer likenesses, their formal qualities seem more emphatic than the human qualities of their sitters, however much their color seems to convey intensity and vitality. But maybe it is just the intensity and vitality—the projective power—of the colors. The portraits range along a sliding scale of realism and abstraction, with Gris, Pascin, and Rivera anchoring the “low” realist end, and Brancusi, Duchamp-Villon, and Picasso tending toward the “high” abstract end, however less absurdly unrealistic Picasso’s abstract renderings of Vollard are. Matisse is somewhere in-between: He maintains a realistic likeness, however purely abstract the lines in his drawings. So is Beckmann: he gives us a sense of a real person, using abstract distortion to convey their socially distorted lives. The exhibition also features a so-called “conceptual” self-portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Box in a Valise (1961), in which he displayed a miniature version of his wares, like a good—if also ironical—salesman (too clever for his own good, and so ultimately self-defeating). Also included are some surrealist portraits, which stretch the relationship between a person’s appearance and an artist’s unconscious take on him or her, to the breaking point of utter unrealism.

Albert Gleizes, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Morinaud), oil on canvas, 77 x 45 1–4", 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art: the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

If a portrait is supposed to be insightful—a speaking likeness conveying the inner life of the sitter—then many of them are failures, however artistically convincing. The modernist imposition of the artist’s original or novel style denies the sitter his or her originality or novelty. The artist takes possession of the sitter with his avant-garde style, in effect dominating and victimizing him or her in name of “pure art,” instead of using style to suggestively convey the sitter’s subjectivity, as well as his or her socially objective appearance.

The self-portraitists seem less subject to this problem than the avant-garde portraitists, perhaps because for the former, the portrait is a means of introspection, while for the latter, it is another experiment in innovation. From this point of view, the more traditional realist portraits are more successful as subtle likenesses than the avant-garde abstract portraits, although they are quite successful as works of formally pure art.

The exhibition is an object lesson in the contradictions of modern art, conceived in the broadest sense, and the contradictory sense of the human being in modernity and described by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the originator of systems theory, as the struggle between the view of a human being as both a robot (the abstract closed system conveyed by the closed stylistic system of cubist portraits) and an organic individual (a person in the process of growth and change by way of socio-environmental feedback).

There are no signs of the Paris environment in the abstract portraits, while there are many telltale signs of it in the realistic portraits. They are socially, as well as personally, realistic and artistically successful, if not artistically “advanced.”

Donald Kuspit is professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York. He is author of The End of Art (Cambridge University Press), and contributing author of Sean Scully: A Retrospective (Thames & Hudson, 2007).

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