Portrait Artists: 20th Century
Famous English Exponents of Portraiture in the Twentieth Century: Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucien Freud.

Portrait Of Emy (1919) by the German
Expressionist Karl Schmidt Rottluff.

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.

Head VI (1948) by Francis Bacon,
one of several studies based on
Velazquez' famous Baroque Portrait
of Pope Innocent X.

Portrait of Somerset Maugham (1949)
(detail) by Graham Sutherland.

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). See also the British Neo-expressionist semi-abstract painter Frank Auerbach (b.1931).

For a list of the 50 Best Portraits, see: Greatest Portrait Paintings.

Elizabeth Taylor (1967)
(Silkscreen Print) by Andy Warhol,
the leading portrait artist of the
Pop-Art movement.

WORLD'S TOP PORTRAITURE
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.

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.

Lucian Freud (b.1922)
Grandson of Sigmund Freud, the artist Lucian 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). Other portraitists shown included: Salvador Dali, Otto Dix, Amedeo Modigliani, Oskar Kokoschka, the Impressionist John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso, the Expressionist draughtsman Egon Schiele and the English painter Walter Sickert.

The next article covers Self Portraits.

• For Renaissance portraiture, see: Renaissance portraits.
• For Baroque portrait pictures, see: Baroque portraits.
• For Neoclassicist portrait paintings, see: Neoclassical portraits.
• For 19th century portraiture, see: Nineteenth Century portraits.
• For Impressionist portrait pictures, see: Impressionist portraits.
• For Expressionist portraiture, see: Expressionist portraits.
• See also: Portraits by Picasso.
• For more about 20th century portraitists, see: Art Encyclopedia.