Portrait Artists: 20th Century
Famous Exponents of Portraiture in the Twentieth Century.
Visual Arts Guide

Portrait Artists of the Twentieth Century

As we have seen, 20th century art turned away from classical or formal portrait art and focused instead on new ways of presenting reality. Portraits became merely another genre which artists used to promote a particular style of art. Such styles included: Fauvism, Expressionism, German Expressionism, Cubism, as well as Surrealism/Pop-Art and Photorealism.

However, in addition to artists from these specific schools, the twentieth century saw the emergence of several British and Irish virtuoso portrait painters. These include: Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Lucien Freud.

Graham Sutherland (1903-1980)
An early landscape artist, Sutherland took up portraiture after the war. His most famous paintings included: Portrait of Somerset Maugham (1949) and the controversial Sir Winston Churchill, which was commissioned in 1954 and later destroyed.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Deeply influenced by Surrealism, as well as the apocalyptic images of Edvard Munch, William Blake and Hieronymous Bosch, Bacon's nightmarish portraits hover between control and fear. His works include: The Screaming Pope (1953) - based on Velazquez' Portrait of Pope Innocent X - Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966), and Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968).

David Hockney (b.1937)
A virtuoso in drawing and figure drawing, from Yorkshire, now based largely in California, David Hockney has produced a number of crisp modern portraits. These include: Portrait of Nick Wilder (1966), Mr and Mrs Clark (1970), as well as a number of self portraits and sketches.

Lucien Freud (b.1922)
Grandson of Sigmund Freud, the artist Lucien Freud is arguably Britain's foremost living artist. His main subject has been the human figure, and his raw, naturalistic style of figure painting depicts the human body and face in all its unique contours, lines and individual detail. He paints people "not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be." Among his huge output of portraiture and life-like figure paintings are: Naked Man With Rat (1977) and The Painter's Mother (1984).

For details of portraiture in Ireland, see Irish Portrait Artists.

Painting The Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces (1900-2000)

Held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, in 2000, this exhibition celebrated a century of portraiture by featuring one portrait from each year of the 20th Century. Among the galaxy of subjects painted, were: the Soviet leader Lenin (by Isaak Brodsky), a self-portrait by Edvard Munch, the poet Anna Akhmatova (by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin), the Pop Artist Andy Warhol (by Jean-Michel Basquiat), the actor Charlie Chaplin (by Fernand Leger), the writer Somerset Maugham (by Graham Sutherland), the writer Edith Sitwell (by Pavel Tchelitchew), the rock star David Bowie and his wife Iman (by Stephen Finer), the singer Elvis Presley (by Andy Warhol). Other portraitists shown included: Salvador Dali, Otto Dix, Alberto Giacometti, Oskar Kokoschka, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele and Walter Sickert.

The next article covers Self Portraits.

• For more about the different types of painting (portraits, landscapes, still-lifes etc) see: Painting Genres.
• For details of landscape and portraiture in Ireland, see: Irish Art Guide

• How to Update This Mini Review of Portrait Artists of the Twentieth Century

Irish Art News Stories - Guide to Irish Art Exhibitions and Shows
© visual-arts-cork.com 2008 All rights reserved.