by Francesco Carelli
Professor FM , Milan and Rome
At Palazzo Reale in Milan, this  exhibition of  works from the  illustrious  collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the theme of the portrait and the self-portrait features eighty master-pieces by the leading artists of the 20th century, including  Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Laurens, Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon.

After  the first  modern revolution  of the portraits  of humanists by  Durer and school, after the breach of Impressionism and its assertion of the painter’s independence, the modern artist’s engagement  in portraiture involved  going beyond the  goal of capturing  an expression  to explore their subjects  innermost self as well as their own artistic intentions.  At the same time. artists feed themselves from the constraints  previously  inherent in the portrait, those imposed by their clients, who formerly expected  not only a flattering  portrayal  but also an assertion of social status through a set of perfectly codified signs.

Between  psychoanalytical  theory, where  the  interpretation  of  dreams is seen as the path of knowledge of the subconscious, and other sciences or pseudo-sciences such  as physiognomy, which  sought  objective  information about  personality  in the shape or expression of the face, the turn of the century saw a convergence of efforts to penetrate what human beings regarded as the unknown and sometimes frightening part of themselves. Two artistic movements, namely Fauvism and Expressionism, echoed  the  subjectivity  of the individual.  The  rings around the eyes of the women painted by Chabaud  can be seen  as metonyms  of  their dark side: femmes fatales or fallen angels pictorially set up as idols of a new urban and electrical world.   The theme of melancholy in Modigliani and Derain, and the tension of the gaze exchanged between artist and model, as in Le Fauconnier and Marquet, heighten the almost magical presence of the subject’s inner world.

A new man ? A Nietzschean superman ? The isolation  of  the face from the rest of the body and the simplification of human morphology for a perfect form take sculpture away from the image of the subject’s outer envelope. This assertion of an anti-mimetic creed is connected in the case of Constantin Brancusi with a Platonic conception of sculpture as idea.  Reference was  often made by Cubists to ritual masks or archaic facial expressions borrowed from Primitivism, and their representations did not fail to arouse revulsion in the public, who saw them as an insult  to  the  basis  of  humanity and  even as  blasphemous  towards the  part of man  that God created  in his own  image.   Resemblance, a concept inherently bound up with the portrait, appears to have to be definitively discarded. But if we are far away from the mimetic exercise of “ feature by feature “, the artist’s analysis and synthesis of  the subject’s  appearance  make  it possible  to distinguish  new canons of  human  beauty  as well as and  expressivity that  sometimes betrays an element of personality.

The works  gathered  together  here share a wild delight in imperfection, diametrically opposed to the canons of  perfect beauty inherited from the classical art of ancient Greece.  Both Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti produce figures constantly at the breaking  point of deconstruction or decomposition. The “ collapse of the being “ as Jean Clair wrote, a breakdown of the innermost Self, a vision of death that introduces  itself constantly, but in some cases more  than others, in the art of  portrait. In Giacometti’s striking portrait of  Isaku Yanaihara, the miniaturization of  the head, which seems to be  set back from the plane of the body, captures  all the power and  authority of the subject.   Giacometti’s universal human face is also an expression  of the  crazy struggle of life.  Jean Dubuffet’s mass of  lines, like  a doodle  drawn  during  a  phone call,  presents  a swarming  mass of  beings stripped of their individuality.

Dominated by Minimalism, the 1960s are characterized by abandonment of the principle of subjectivity in art, whereas the mass media ( cinema, television, video and photography ) instead accentuated the principle – inherent in the portrait – of staging. The Self gave way to the icon and the image.

Kurt Kren reconsiders physiognomy and other sciences of the facial features through the test developed by the Hungarian psychopathologist Leopold Szondi, who established a set of 48 remarkable heads supposed to exemplify eight psychopathologies identified by him.  Kren cinematically reproduces the selective, memory-appropriating work with respect to faces.