Letter

Why bother going to a museum for an exhibit of 17th century portrait prints? The very idea and purpose of portraiture in the age of social media selfies seems to be incompatible with work so ancient in conception and technique. But if you put down the smartphone a minute and linger in the rooms filled with faces which comprise the Art Institute’s “Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and the Portrait Print”, you might see a few familiar looks and attitudes staring back at you.

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was already one of the preeminent portrait painters of his age when he embarked on an ambitious series of etched portraits he called Iconography. Unlike much of the portraiture before, which focused on nobility and other eminences, this series featured artists of the past and present. Putting mere painters on par with aristocrats was unheard of but the prints proved immediately popular. Some of the early examples (etched by Van Dyck himself unlike later ones done from his drawings by master printers) are the heart of this show. They include a self-portrait, as well as renderings of well-known artists like Pieter Bruegel and Frans Snyders, and are distinguished from much of the supplementary images in the show by Van Dyck’s decisive mark-making, as well as their fragmented, unfinished quality.

It is this last aspect which makes these portraits appear especially contemporary. By leaving large parts of the paper blank or barely sketched in Van Dyck allows us to enter his subjects’ space and fill it in ourselves. There are also many examples of stylistic echoes of this strategy in the ensuing centuries. While his work is not included in the show, the work of the great New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine came immediately to mind. By focusing on some details of physiognomy, while leaving others absent, both artists allow airiness as well as immediacy into their compositions which is often extinguished in more formal and finished work.

Rembrandt, who was Van Dyck’s contemporary and an even better portraitist, is also well represented. An early self-portrait from 1618 contrasts a serious gaze with his quick signature flapping in the breeze on a curtain in the window to his right. Though etching is of course a much more time consuming process than pushing a button on an iPhone, the impulse to include dashed off or humorous moments like that signature have some of the same feeling we find in our own better snapshots.

Doubts about the purpose of portraiture were voiced at the same time that portraiture began. One of the earliest examples in the show, Albrecht Durer’s “Portrait of Philip Melanchthon”(1526) includes the following text on a plinth below its subject’s imposing profile, “Durer was able to depict the features of the living Philip, but the skilled hand could not portray his mind.”

Portrait prints were the Instagram of their day and then as now there were people questioning the narcissism and vanity of their production. And yet, the impulse to render the likeness of yourself and your friends seems irresistible, whether you’re holding an etching needle or an iPhone. Over 400 years have passed since Anthony Van Dyck set out to immortalize his friends and heroes and that love of staring at faces has hardly waned.

p.s. I wrote short reviews of an animated film about a Steam Age which never went away and a documentary about an ex-yakuza member who becomes a bible-thumper...

A photobooth is an anachronism. In a time when every digital device we carry in our pockets is capable of shooting a feature-length movie, a box with a seat inside and a privacy curtain, which produces four black-and-white shots of unpredictable quality and takes five minutes to do it, would seem obsolete. And yet, both the Rainbo Club and the Skylark both have them, and in both bars they are used multiple times nightly.

A few weeks ago I was a guest critic at a final thesis show at a local college. One of the kids displayed a wall of Fuji Instax snapshots with his messy scrawl underneath to indicate the date and subject. Some of the pictures were blurry, others looked barely composed, but all together they presented some sort of visual diary. In his talk before his classmates and teachers, the kid talked about how permanent and unalterable these pictures were. In a time when every image can be ceaselessly altered and manipulated, these crappy little photos felt more real to him.

I think it’s a similar thing that keeps drinkers coming back to the photobooth. They feel as if the wet, curling, chemical-smelling strips of photo paper capture an actual moment of their lives. Then they lay out all the finished pictures on the table next to their drinks, take out their iPhones, and take pictures of their pictures so they can share those frozen moments with all their friends who are probably at other bars, where there may not be a photobooth.

The fact that people still feel the need to have tangible souvenirs in this way may be a fetish or relic or affectation, but just the fact that there’s any interest at all in images which aren’t just flitting past our eyes, barely differentiated, one after another, gives me some small bit of comfort.

p.s. I went to the M.F.A. show at my alma mater and lived to tell about it.

Tuesday afternoon I rang the bell at Bernice’s and was buzzed in. The bar’s closed on Tuesdays but I was there to paint a portrait of Steve, the guy who runs the place. I’ve only been coming to the place a little over a year but it feels like a regular part of the routine. Steve and I developed an easy rapport pretty quickly. That’s not what usually happens when I meet people. Maybe it’s his many years behind the bar or perhaps the fact he’s been making his own art for decades. In any case, I’m not in a position to take any friendship lightly these days.

After the painting was finished, his mom, Bernice, came out from the back to take a look. She stared at it a minute, then said, “You found the secret Steve…” I took that as a good thing. 

Saturday my friend Bill put me on the guest-list for his gig at Lincoln Hall. Him and his friend Ryley were opening for a couple touring bands. I stuck around for a song or two of the band which followed them but it was the kind of thing where you can tell from the band members’ haircuts what their music would sound like. I was happy to’ve heard my friends play at a larger venue anyhow.

p.s. I wrote a review of Alex Abramovich’s Bullies. An entertaining account of how he tracked down the kid who tormented him in school, who went on to found an Oakland motorcycle club.