Sotheby's Talks: Facing Now: Why Portraits Still Matter

[Music] a very warm welcome to Sotheby's thank you all for joining us this evening I'm Helen Newman chairman here in Europe and a global head of Impressions model and it's a real pleasure to welcome you here to this Sotheby's talk held in collaboration with Intelligence Squared on the subject of portraiture and today we're going to be exploring the power of the portrait from the ancient Egyptians right through to present day AI and we will look at why does the human likeness continue to Captivate Us and what in insights to Portrait should really offer about our society and its evolving nature and ultimately How do portraits contribute to our understanding of ourselves and I'm absolutely delighted that to join us in this conversation we have two very very eminent speakers Simon Sharma professor of art history and history at Columbia University author of countless books and writer and presenter of over 60 television documentaries and on Art and history thank you Simon for being with us today it's a huge pleasure to welcoming you here and Ellen and Ian karita at Barbican Art Gallery here in London and where she has been absolutely masterminding exhibitions on Lee krasner basket Imran Karachi and most recently Alice Neil so it's wonderful to have this conversation particularly in the week that the National Portrait Gallery reopens here in London so portrait is very much on our mind here at Sotheby's as we host the exhibition of loans from Chatsworth house with the great Rembrandt and of course as we Mount our sales with a theme linked to face to face and celebrating portraiture so Simon I'd love to start with you and I think we'd go right back to the earliest portraits we know right um thank you um so much Hannah um yeah this is um it's not quite ancient Egypt actually it's rather unanswered Egypt it's um fire and portraits which I'm sure lots of you know which were accompanied mermaid mummified bodies uh in the ptolemaic period so um from the late first century BC not many of those um but they go into the as late as the third Century A.D and this is probably about halfway between but what I want to say actually by way of a preface to this lovely occasion is that portraiture begins with a fear of death um and the worry about impermanence and immortality I mean you could say a lot of painting is it actually a huge amount of figurative art or possibly all the figurative Arts is driven by the terror of The Fugitive whether it's the landscape or still life Advantage not still life or whatever but Portugal and the Western Traditions begins with these with these images and it raises in the age of Snapchat where a face will disappear after 10 seconds or Instagram or Tinder swiping the compulsion now not to actually nail something down as permanent or even you know long lasting but the the the second issue that's about classical portraiture which is as we unfortunately say in academic journals problematized is the notion that portraiture is designed to capture the essential us that there is something that we judge the artist to the degree to which he's not captured very similitude of physionomy but something that is the essential you you and you and you know in the age of AI and uh in the age of avatars and everything else there may be no essential us to capture anymore so the issue is whether or not portraiture and those who persist heroically in producing portraits simply are impervious to this or don't care are hostile and whether portraiture as it continues is a kind of fight back against those two those three these were I would have to say what's really wonderful about them there's as you see startlingly naturalistic um and they were meant to give a sense they were actually apparently laid on the mummy where the mummy's head is would be these boards basically I mean they'd be seen as boards so they were meant to be seen not in some sort of sempiternal way um but as if they just come into the room again and a lot of them are children um surprising number of children who die very early on so I think that which is very very touching so that you'd want to have the memory of the child as you happen to see them in in some way or another so pretty much everything about you know the psychology of portraiture I think is anticipated no and you talked about fear of death death and of course self-portraiture is a huge vehicle in a way and that is I think on yeah next yeah this I love this portrait he's a bad boy and think about some taurosa that I hadn't realized you know for a long time you just because he's he was such a favorite of 18th century cook English collectors British collections um wasn't it um but they're all kind of Bandits and Mountain scenery um that was they loved that but he was also very I mean extraordinarily striking sense of self-possession um of course artists actually Dura is the case you know were out there rather friendly promoting themselves as artists can be seen as picked or doctors learned learned painters not just artisanal members of a Goldsmith skilled of Saint Luke so we have Dura of course classically and Leonardo and Titan um but they all also depended on patrons and what's amazing about Salvatore Rosa documented I mean I first learned about him from my great friend and and colleague Francis Haskell um who in his wonderful book on Barack Roman painting um first Drew my attention to baldinucci and balori and Rosa's biographers in the middle of the 17th century that Rosa wanted to have no truck with patrons at all so if you ever hear art historians telling you that the self-consciousness of the painterly ego begins with the romantics that is profoundly a mistake it actually begins about this period Swiss is a Flemish painter son of a merchant lived in Brussels goes to Rome and I'll just show you the note to here he is with you know vanish now so there is a switch yes indeed and you're going to say oh he was famous for emulating Velasquez and Painters who he or other painters he met at Rome and your instinct saying oh obviously he'd seen Vermeer and in fact actually there was a connection because towards the end of amir's life baltus out of the monsony's famous French aristocratic collector and traveler goes to visit Vermeer and he has a friend with him whose name I've forgotten who's a painter who was actually swertz's neighbor in in Rome when they lived in the Via marguta where else but everybody it's much more likely for me a copied him because actually by the time Vermeer gets gummy in any serious when Switz is on his way has an extraordinary mystical Catholic conversion and on his wage China he causes so much trouble to the Jesuits whom he is with that they basically evict him and he goes through his conjugated line group and ends up in Goa where he dies in very mysterious circumstances so I mean his life is an extraordinarily wild romance but it's and it's astonishing painting I mean the Lana Brothers maybe did heads like this and there are many of these and there are old women too it has a sense of spickering in medius um that obviously we know and what happens in Vermeer so I suppose actually I you know he he saw you could say it's a troney you know it could have been a maid servant we don't know so it could be a kind of genre of study in a way in the Dutch style or it could have been very specifically you know someone who's presence he wanted to register and you know you don't want me to go on about paint handling but it is very very remarkable and the effect of this person being in our presence depends on what the Dutch call howding which is the relationship and modulation between Shadow and highlights which are very unorthodox actually in Switz and that's what I'll say about him I want you all to rush home and grab your computer and look him up and you'll be astonished really astonished not just for portraiture either um yeah here's the wonderful Chatsworth Ron Brown I have nothing to say about this except blimey it's gorgeous thing it's a gorgeous thing I think this is not attorney even though it's old man I think it's very likely to have been a commission didn't you I think really and he's wearing this kind of what looks like an archaic piece of costume that goes around wears it himself in 16 in the 60 to 58 portraits in in the frick and beautiful portrait half of the marriage portrait the National Gallery here also has this very wonderful old-fashioned kind of keyboard what have you got I don't know what you call it the next um picture is on is also a reflection indeed Lucian probably called it a reflection and um it is I think my favorite Lucian Freud of all um and I have a lot of not favorite Lucian Freud's but um um but this is an extraordinary picture 93 I think it is isn't it yeah here's the Paradigm of him with his bare feet in the shoes all this is naturalistic um but here is my idea of beauty me in in the mirror it's literally a reflection and the center of the painting you can see where the center of the painting the seat of geniuses in a supremely Freudian place okay um so I want to show a couple of pictures which seem to be the other way around which was not just the issue of the artist looking and laying a proprietary claim to the model but when women start to do self-portraits um they can actually reclaim agency and control over what the gayest does and also what their bodies were this is Paul and Madison Becker in 1906. she is the first person so far as I know to correct me anybody to do a nude self-portrait and um she was incredibly I mean she died tragically young at 31 she was very gifted she married an artist not so good um Otto modicon she was Paola Becca in 1901 and she moved to I always forget what it's called It's a Small Town it was an artist colony in a Bremen begins with welfare I can't quite remember and um and she starts actually but she becomes very unhappy with Otto and she goes to Paris she makes four trips to Paris and in Paris she starts painting herself as in this case um nude and you can see she's paying herself pregnant um she wasn't in fact pregnant at the time she painted herself in this way it's very touching she the marriage for whatever reason was unconsummated we know from her letters for five years and during which time this was painted and shortly afterwards she does she goes back to utter and she does conceive and she she there's a child a daughter born and then she dies three weeks later of an embolism is absolutely catastrophically tragic really it's a terrible story and I think actually this is sort of um it it's very very moving because it is almost childlike and uncertain and self-curious really that two other great nude paintings but it's a great chapter in sort of instinctive wish um to to produce a kind of art um which takes over really from male obsessions and the last picture in my list hope I haven't taken too long is this masterpiece by Laura Knight the National Portrait Gallery um how am I doing I just won't go on okay great um and this is fantastic Laura Knight will also another case for someone marriage or much less successful and gifted artist Harold Knight and Laura um her mother dies young she's in Nottingham and she really has to work very hard to sort of keep the family together eventually she finds a way with Harold to actually be part of the famous artist colony and St Ives in Cornwall is it not Cromwell Evan Cuomo and she starts to actually play with again nude figures on the beach there are a lot of they're not very good actually I think they're very joyous and playful exuberant there's one very daring nude on the beach which we only know from a photograph because she destroys it then at some point in 1912-13 she paints this amazing picture which is the model is a friend of hers called Ella Naper and formerly you can see it's rather extraordinary it always haunts me that to stale in Holland are doing those experiments which will eventually resolve themselves in mondrian's art and she's actually this is apart from the figures It's actually an extraordinarily hypnotic study in the rhyming of horizontal and vertical lines and the fierceness of the red is very important tonal part of the power of it but she again we we have it what it is is a retort to De Janeiro lab it's a retort to Kobe's studio all those paintings where all the men get to keep their clothes on and the women are available for nude inspection and decoration and whatever kind of satisfaction just the opposite here we have so it's a brilliant it's such a kind of thought through piece of stupendous painterly Mischief I think and I I absolutely love it it's my great choice great choice thank you well that was just an amazing romp through hundreds of years of portraiture and I think I would love to move on now to some works we will have hanging in our galleries will be open tomorrow and notably of course the Clint portrait which many of you saw we announced last week and we're so delighted to have as the star of the seasons particularly with this team and I think it's interesting with Clint because he's obviously incredibly well known for his commissioned portraits and we haven't actually talked a lot about that yet the difference between the the self-portraits the commission portraits and the portraits with paid models or or procured models and but I think with Clint there's a special Dynamic going on because Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century didn't really have an established Gallery scene and it's not like in Paris or Berlin where there was a proper Modern Art Gallery scene so as an artist Klimt really needed these commissions I mean they were his way to to um to promote and sell his work and actually became an incredibly well probably one of the most well paid portrait artists of his time in the early 20th century and because he's famous for the golden block Bower and the great portraits to the members of the leader of family in the Wittgenstein family and Phil savani and all these great large um typically vertical format obviously portrait format commissions but alongside that he paid to obviously's Landscapes the allegorical and then these non-commissioned portraits of models and here you see him really in his full kind of freedom of expression is not constrained by any demands from the patron he is adopting this Square format which I think um sort of breaks down the hierarchy of city city and background and that it has an amazing effect here with the with the drapery of this shinazari and uh Asian style cloth that he's put behind the model and then of course because you know she is a model that he's taken for the purpose of his work he has you know almost painted her nude I mean there's even a theory when you look at the drawings that prepare for this work that she started nude and then he clothed her and put the kimono on and put the fan in front of her breasts but however it's composed it is um I think a wonderful example of that the beginning of the 20th century influence of secessionism merged with the course of the obsession with Japanese three and and and Chinese culture at the time which was so prevalent in Vienna and also I think what's very interesting about this is it sets the scene of what is to come in the 20th century because that strong portraiture in Vienna which then leads to artists like Sheila and kokoshka who in turn are drawing on that tradition of the other Freud and psychoanalysis kind of sets the scene for 20th century portraiture and that study of the you know the the the inner world of the artist and the inner world of their subjects which becomes so expressive and so important all the way through now very different when you see this you will be surprised it's a very small format feeling we were looking just now when we were coming down for this talk incredibly powerful self-portrait by the uh artists associated with the surrealist movement Leonor Finney but I think looking out with this incredible boldness and she's chosen panel it's a painted on which I think is very much kind of looking back at the Old Masters and that and do you think that sort of sense of the the you know the the northern European tradition of the dramatic light very powerful very much you know this is me and I will paint in my way and share myself what did you do angle of her gaze as well you know that angle of the look completely goes back to the history of mirrors coming in in the kind of 15th century in Europe and suddenly you're looking a scance because you're looking at the mirror here and then capturing it here which you can tell because one eye is normally in focus and one eye is normally slightly soft and I think here she's she's making that link in art history she's saying you know as artists and I'm as good as the man and I have that come from that tradition and she's very she's very um bold and outward outward going in fact most of her work is not self-portrait so it's quite a rare self-portrait mostly she's doing quite allegorical subjects and very you know surreal compositions but this is a rare small I should say that as you're seeing it in the slide version oh no no but really the when you go and see it the actual compression is incredible it was a little brilliant thing to actually miniaturize it you know it ramps up the intensity of that case I think actually a very narrow yeah in the in the tiny format but also I think it's sometimes it's tempting for us to look at a work like this and to say this is a woman wanting to establish herself in the Canon often it's just an artist wanting to establish themselves as an artist you know it has never been easy to be an artist in almost all sets of circumstances especially once patronage gave way and you were making portraits without any sense of who you might sell them to and so I think often when you have that intensity of look it's a person saying will I make it you know and will the work make it and will I make it and what is the relationship between the two yes no I treated but I think it's inevitable that we look at it through our eyes now but then when you read about what was going you know the whole sort of surrealist movement and that interaction with brittle or maxence and everything it was a very male dominated world even though there were all the women interweaving with their complex relationships around it so but I know I agree Ellen it's uh we we can only bring our perspective as ever but the next one is is the Freud that is hanging here which actually I really think you have to look at up close to appreciate his full um complexity and you know I chose this because not only is coming up and so you have the opportunity to see if I sound but when we talk about portraiture um you know there's what you see in the painting the actual figure but there is the artist I think what's powerful about this is the artist is present without painting himself so if you think of you know Freud his two giant subjects are the self-portraits and the news but here although he's not in there he seems to be present in every bit of the every bit of the composition the sort of open door to the Wardrobe with his coat hanging there the reflection in the window that just seems to nod at the easel um and actually the figure of the nude is is small in a composition when it's set which itself is very compact for Freud so it's a very interesting use I think of space and the model and the artist's presence in in a in a beautiful nighttime interior it's brilliantly creepy is that all you're going to say about it I think there's a lot of water stickers I think there's a lot of Walter sick in this I have to say of Secrets of kind of memories of sticker yeah and Eleanor yeah I mean it's alienating I think yeah you know it is it's in the interior with the figure of the of the model um it's a document really yeah it's a documentary but a lot of Freud there is subliminally in there every every um aspect of how he's composed it so and then we have the Savile which um is a real a real coup and you go from the small finish self-portrait to this absolutely Monumental incredibly expressive oil on paper um I mean an absolute giant giant of a painting and are not necessarily a known sitter but even as an uninstitute I think Jenny brings a lot of herself in it as well so it has that sort of sense of aspects of self-portraiture and um you know bringing in images um from photographs and collected images but again what is not captured in this slide is the surface of this work which is spectacular I mean it's almost as if she's started with the texture and then literally molded the face and the features from from the paints it's so thick the oil it's almost like it's the flesh is being created through the paint and that you know with Jenny when you hear her speaking she's much more articulate talking about her work I am but she talks a lot about her her experiences of actually going to see um you know plastic surgery and see um you know the dissections and and flesh being worked and that is really what you sense in front of that it's incredibly powerful and expressive and and as I say Monumental well also given the last hundred years of painting have been largely bifurcated between figuration and abstraction often falsely it allows her to do both to exist in both you know you look at it up close and it has these great painterly swathes to it but also kind of resolves into this extraordinary image and given that we live in a landscape in which women are regularly pasted onto Billboards the size of buildings you know it has a relationship to the idea of what a space can be and can sell in today's culture as well I think two two things I think she's an extraordinary um Handler of materials really I mean she's she she takes the kind of texture of what you can do and what resists in pain very very seriously she's extremely old-fashioned in in the best possible way in that way and then again I think you know you couldn't possibly see a painting like this and not realize that she was interested in damage um I mean there are much more if this looks worrying to you um check out some of the other pieces that Jenny did she's interested in in the instability of faces when they um both you know um as Anna says sort of surgical differences um all kinds of mutilations changes and morphing processes um Fascinate her and um wonderfully I think I mean her her genius is really to make a a marriage of beauty and violence that actually works and I do think again I do take your point that you know one mustn't over radicalize you know stretched or radicalizing but in her case I might we haven't talked about the early extraordinary panties like prop which are self-fulprinted even though when I first met Jenny um I expected it to be a very large woman that she's beautiful at very slight lied massively in the direction of turning herself into a kind of gargantuan figure a Monumental figure so she has done something within the paradigms actually of in a way I went to a traditional painting but using the traditional materiality and tools of representation on land there is nonetheless thematically oh actually is thematically genuinely revolutionary I think and it's very um it's it's incred I find that incredibly heartening because when you you what you don't want to do I think I think we'll probably hesit I don't want to speak for you too but um what you don't want to do is to divide wonderfully spirited and accomplished and dynamically fresh art into the old stuff and the new stuff and Jenny is a kind of supreme example there are others I could mention of resisting that foolish polarization yeah it's spectacular truth is better but Elena let's turn to you and what you have chosen to to a small small Choice selection um of things that I thought would be interesting to kind of throw into the mix one is this extraordinary dagger I'm sure some of you here will have had a chance to see the degarmane show at the door say in Paris and it is probably one of the most exciting shows I think I've had the privilege of seeing in recent years for those of you who don't know it this is a painting that dagar made of Manet and his wife which so enraged Manny that he cut his wife out of the picture and so they include it in the exhibition as this kind of extraordinary Testament used the word document it is a kind of fascinating historical document to this controversial difficult testy friendship that existed between these two artists even to use the word friendship as maybe a little bit of a reach but I wanted to include it because I think it's very easy for us to look at portraiture now and see it as a rather traditional sometimes quite polite genre of painting and to forget the kind of fierce provocation that it might lay down and of course in this instance it's probably provoked could be provoked by there being a sense of who were the women who were in paintings during this period you know they were often people who were sex workers as well you know or they might have been immediate family members but there was a kind of thrill of intimacy perhaps he felt what right has he to paint my wife you know the person who paints my wife is me you know um there's so much in that Dynamic that we don't we don't know and can't understand couldn't possibly know but I I kind of love it as a as a testament to what portraiture can can set off within us um and then something much more recent some of you would have seen the Alice Neal show that I did at the Barbican this was the work that we actually opened with I think as a curator you always have to know where are you going to begin the story and the answer should almost certainly not be with the student work so it res and and what's what's the kind of end for me I knew I wanted to start with this because it's a it's a pretty unprecedented image um I think octogenarian female nudes I can probably otherwise only cite that great Maria elastic painting with the gun to her head and the gun out of the painting which is also an astonishing piece and this is made about 20 years prior to that it took five years she wasn't working consistently on it for five years she was encouraged to begin it when she was 75 years old in 1975 and she she found it she found it fantastically difficult she dedicated a whole career to making what she called pictures of people she detested the word portrait in the same way that she she thought it was fussy you know um but she she finally kind of settles on this on this work and um and it's there's so many things you could say about it but but one of them is that it is wonderfully Unapologetic in her depiction of her aging body and also that she leaves her glasses on so we have a number of great paintings self-portraits of artists wearing glasses and it was I think a way has been continues to be a way for artists to encircle their sight you know both literally the main Central Tool of their trade but also their their Insight their capacity their perspicacity their their ability to see things as they really are and you know Simon started by talking about you know what does portraiture mean in an age of Technology certainly verisimility doesn't really have a place hasn't had a place arguably for 150 years or more one of the things I found myself saying when I was had you know was able to live amongst Alice Neal's work for this short sort of three-month period was that you won't like every painting but the ones that capture you are because she understood the right degree of wrong you know she was kind of wonky in the best of ways and sometimes they kind of killed her off stage and sometimes they just kind of hold their own and and when you have the pleasure of meeting either the people who sat for them or some of the relatives of the people who sat for them you really see how she managed to um to capture very vividly something that's that's not easy to set down and paint so that was why we kind of had to had to open the show with this one the second of hers that I wanted to include uh is this painting of John Perot which the team thought was particularly funny because he was a curator so he was um he was doing a show about the male nude he was a curator a Critic and a curator at the School of Visual Arts in New York and he wanted to borrow a very radical painting that she made that some of you will have seen of Joe Gould who has kind of multiple sets of genitalia that she made in the 1930s which was you know truly a Brazen image and she said oh well you know surely surely other artists are allowed to include new work and he said well yes some people are making new painting and she said right there it is I shall paint you then because how could you possibly go about curating a show of the male nude without being a male nude yourself yes and of course going back to the degal Mane show you know this is her male Olympia you know this is this is a fantastic opportunity and Chantel joffy the artist had a great line in which she said he looks like nothing so much as a big Ginger Tom it's really a good line you know she was she was very good at capturing the kind of animalistic qualities within each of us and then some of you will have also seen this show um which I wanted to use really as an opportunity to kind of open up um the question of portraiture which if the Freud sets you off this is really going to set you off uh to kind of how do we determine what constitutes a portrait um so this is a painting made by sahila so canvari who did a new commission for us in the curve last Autumn she made a suite of new paintings all of feminist icons from pre-revolutionary Iran so this is foreign who was for those of you who don't know that you know one of the great modernist poets in in pre-revolutionary Iran she wrote an incredible collection of poems called sin um for which she was subjected to electroshock treatments they were in part about her having an adulterous affair she had her child taken away from her you know she has a truly truly terrible experience and um sahela wanted to make these images they're all black and white but with tiny colored details because she's drawing from promotional materials you know of course these women couldn't come and sit for her most of them are no longer alive those who are alive are living largely in Exile in Europe and and America but she wanted to make both portraits of these individual women so we have a picture of an install shot as well for those of you who didn't see the exhibition so each one of these rosettes has so the whole curve was painted in these Islamic geometric patterns and each one of the rosettes has one of the portraits in the middle so it was a Pantheon basically dedicated to these women and so she both wanted to create a testament to their individual stories because many of them this was also at the Barbican Art Gallery I don't know if you're familiar with the Barbican but they have been doing some rather remarkable exhibition making so each one of those rosettes has its own miniature painting in it and they're made in egg tempera I mean speak about reclaiming ancient techniques so she's making them in a way whereby in a thousand years that painting will still exist so if you're concerned about the censorship of these women's histories here is a way to say I will tell this story and I will ensure that it survives but it's also a way of her telling her own story it is in many respects the whole kind of installation of self-portrait because here is somebody who came to the UK when she was 14 fleeing from the revolution who hasn't been able to go back for at least 20 years who's trying to understand how did it how did we get to be here how did I literally get to be here um and so I think it's interesting when you see these projects which kind of open up an expanded notion of what might constitute a portrait or a self-portrait credible that's fantastic and then I think you've chosen oh well if you really want to explode the notion of the portrait so I was going to show a short clip of film but then you know it never quite works out like that in presentation but uh Julian Knox is an artist how I'm working with this Autumn and he has many descriptions for himself as an artist but one of them that I like is a poetic archivist and he is is the kind of root of his practice as in poetry but he also makes uh film and sculpture and other work and he has been busy for the last three two three years working with choirs across Europe and asking each choir to sing the same Central song that he's composed with his musical director but then also interviewing them and trying to use that kind of each of these choirs as a way to get an insight into experiences within the black diaspora across Europe and kind of spaces of resonance between their experiences and spaces of dissonance between their experiences and so to try and create a portrait of something that is by definition impossible to portray or impossible to create a singular portrait of so I'm also very interested in these contemporary practitioners who are trying to find ways different ways of depicting quite complex ideas outside of what can be contained within a picture frame I mean that's a wonderful way to come to the end of the slides and try to wrap up a very um you know far-reaching conversation because I think that it also brings the whole question of what will happen now really and what how it will be with portraiture in the future given the combination of imagery that we now you know all living with I mean one of the things that was very interesting for me to see with the Alice Neil exhibition is that you know a bit like people are endlessly tempted to say painting is dead you know the same thing might be said uh for portraiture and yet there is this real resistance to that I think because people live in a very busy demanding highly technologized age in which something about not just painting but in the instance of Alice Neal she was painting almost exclusively from life from models from people who would come and sit for her I sometimes joke that the John Perot painting she asked him to sit 17 times I'm not sure it took 17 sittings but you know these are these are paintings made from life and in the Wake specifically of what lots of us experienced during the pandemic of being very atomized and experiencing one another through screens I think people have only come to Crave painted portraits even more yeah I I think there are no that's true I think the whole sense of the instability of the self I mean there's a huge paradox um which uh may or may not be good actually I mean I say this to my students um on the one hand this identity has become very unstable particularly in an age of migration really cultural migration which can produce extraordinarily beautiful hybrid kind of sense of identities that are brought together and disappear I tell you I'm thinking of what I'm saying this um we lost and apart from the horrific human tragedy of grenfell tower we lost a really great artist in kalijit Singh um who was a first graphic artist who did self-portraits in ritualized African Traditions from the world her family and her mother in particular had come from but also a deeply informed by Setters of having Mice and Men or be able to sustain that in in London in the new place that sort of sense of migratory instability you know it has potential for enormous um you know creative power actually creative inventiveness my basic sense of actually portraiture being constantly re-examining why it why it happens why it should be tackled Jenny savile's a wonderful example of that Alice Nielsen incredibly brilliant Masterpiece set I think actually of her um aged 80 or whatever it is it's a good thing but I I it will evolve in lots of different ways I think that we don't yet quite anticipate well thank you look I'd like first of all to thank our speakers Simon and Eleanor for sharing your kind of wonderfully idiosyncratic and choices um for this talk we couldn't possibly even begin to show everything and even as we put the slides up we regretted we haven't inserted further ones but um it's really just to provoke the conversation and you know to provoke thought as it is the theme of this week here in London and um it's I think an enduring one that will be forever part of our human identity and wherever there will be art there will be portraits so thank you for being with us and this is really now the opportunity for you to say your bit and ask your questions because we have a bit of time so that Rihanna that um if anyone would like to uh there we go but I think we'll bring you a mic and um I'm sure you've heard it many times before but the balance between what does a portrait say more about the artist or more about the city and um okay we will recognize the Rembrandt or some of the freuds do we know who the benefits one was or we just say are we buying a Freud and again where does that balance lie and does it really matter you know it's it's um I thought I think it's a fantastically good question I mean it's interesting it well it's interesting that the National Portrait Gallery for instance it's about the distinction of the sitter so although they have some work by some brilliant artists in there first and foremost it's about the sitter and then the decision is made about who the right artist might be to be able to capture that that sitter and I know somebody who's avoided a portrait and he said it was like having a third person in the room where somewhere between the sitter and the artist was the portrait well I think it's actually a triangulation I have to say yeah I think there was a third person involved in this even if it's a private commission mainly you yes yeah and so I I've always thought of it as a kind of triangular relationship really yeah when it works yeah okay thank you and then I think we can wrap up and thank you again Simon Sharma thank you very much [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Sotheby's

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Keywords: sotheby's, sotheby's talks, facing now, portraiture, portrait mode, the summer season

Id: d6fS2Bt3rqA

Length: 43min 54sec (2634 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023