The portrait's progress

An attempt to explore the nuances of another person's otherness, the portrait acts as a mirror but it may not always be reliable or honest, says RANJIT HOSKOTE

THE portrait is art's tribute to the enduring mystery of the human presence, the enigma of otherness that inheres in every individual, so far as those around him are concerned. This otherness, this sense of never being able fully to fathom another human being, is one of the most compelling spurs to the creative imagination, whether in painting, sculpture, literature or photography. In that it is an attempt to explore and reveal the nuances of another person's otherness, the portrait acts as a mirror held up to the other.

The painted portrait-as-mirror offers us a certain leisure: we do not stare directly at the other, but look obliquely at his reflection, hoping to surprise some secret of personality while the features are in repose, or to renew our acquaintance with a face dulled by easy familiarity or ceremonial distance. We assume, also, that the portraitist has had the opportunity to grasp the secret workings of his sitter's character, the nature of the self concealed beneath the roles played and the manner adopted in daily life. The sitter is like a riddle that calls for decoding, the painter his destined cryptographer.

It must be pointed out, however, that the portrait was not always an honest or reliable mirror. At first, it was a discreet instrument of posterity: the genre of portraiture can be traced back to the natural human desire to immortalise, or at the very least memorialise, those considered worthy of honour, worship or emulation. This was the raison d'etre of the formal portraits of royal and ecclesiastical personages executed during the feudal period. As patronage for the arts spread downwards from the apex through the pyramid of medieval and early modern society, vanity became the engine of portraiture: merchants, courtiers, cardinals and envoys now celebrated themselves, or were celebrated by their friends and sycophants, through commissioned portraits.

In Europe's kingdoms, the images of these patrons, and those of their wives, parents, children and mistresses were composed for posterity, often in idyllic settings placed at a remove from the vagaries of personal fortune and public history. Somewhat later, in the more republican societies of north-western Europe, there emerged the dramatic group portraits of professional guilds and associations.

How literal, idealised, sympathetic or hostile these portraits were would depend on the artists social attitude; it depended, equally, on whether or not the sitter had a sense of humour, and the strength to recognise the truth about himself. The relationship between portraitist and subject is a game fraught with tension, the sitter practising evasions and deceptions while the painter responds with knowing flattery or shrewd insight.

As the painter strips aside the layers of clothes, skin and appearance, to touch the life of desire, anxiety and motivation coursing through the bloodstream, he provokes the sitter's fear of vulnerability and exposure. The painter must be tactful when the patronly reflexes of irritation and control are displayed; the sitter must accept the ambivalence of the painter, who both cherishes his presence and mutilates him in the act of understanding. A mutual curiosity holds the players in this difficult game together: they are like detective and person-in- hiding, surgeon and patient.

Vivid evidence for such a relationship is provided by the great masterpieces of psychological portraiture, from Cranach and Holbein through Velasquez and Rembrandt to David and Goya. The portrait is no longer a mirror, in the hands of these masters, but has become a probe: it records the extent of convergence or divergence between the nature and the presentation of the self. The ever-watchful eyes belie the serene poise of a cardinal's bearing, attesting to the politician within. The restless soldier degenerates into a corpulent emperor over a series of portraits. Elsewhere, the royalty assembled for a family portrait are shorn of stately dignity and shown up for the bewildered, ill-at-ease philistines they are.

Finally, having represented every species of patron, the artist turns the mirror-probe on himself in the self-portrait, reflecting upon the mystery of his imagination and its ability to capture its objects through the medium of charcoal, brush, knife and pigment. The self-portrait as such, as against the insertion of a self-portrait into a group, was inaugurated by Durer and extended into an independent genre by Rembrandt: it benchmarked the artist's liberation from the shackles of the commission, being done purely as an exercise of choice, for oneself.

This freedom of choice translated itself into an increasing freedom of artistic interpretation as Impressionism shaded off into that diversity of styles, including Expressionism, Abstraction and Cubism, which is collectively described as Modernism. Anti-realist in temper, the Modernist idioms emphasised the logic of an individual painterly style over fidelity to the presence of the subject, so that the portrait became a manifestation of the painterly signature rather than a record of the sitter's individuality.

Prismatic geometry replaced, to a greater or less degree, the mirror reflection as a model for the portrait: if Modernists like Modigliani refined the individual sitter into a dressed arrangement of implied ovoid and cylindrical forms, Picasso went further, translating the individual into a set of sharpened, disjoint planes. A later Modernist, Francis Bacon twisted the subject into a harsh approximation of his or her instinctive self, the naked body clothed in textures suggestive of bodily fluids and excretion. All these modes present a heightened, if often harrowing evocation of the human presence, but the individual is unaccountably lost in the interpretation.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that the portrait as traditionally understood has nearly disappeared from the purview of contemporary art. I close with questions rather than answers: Did Modernism fatally weaken the genre of portraiture? Or have we lost our passion for encounter with the Other because those great unmaskers, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida, have taught us to suspect all the devices by which we approach the world, whether volition, consciousness, desire or language?

Are we, perhaps, held back by a debilitating self-suspicion, because disciplines like feminism, post-colonial literary criticism and radical anthropology have called into question the ethical propriety of essaying the representation of the Other? At the same time, contemporary art practices based on identity politics have brought about a renewal of interest in such generic Others as the victim, the subaltern, the marginal, the ordinary, the sexually variant. Has this tendency, too, contributed to the neglect of that old-fashioned specific Other, the individual, as a focus of representation? Or is it, alas, that the individual has been hopelessly devalued in an epoch dominated by mass-scale phenomena like unitary states, transnational corporations, mediatic structures and artificial wrap-around environments like the Net?

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