ArtSeen
Elizabeth Josephson
Sideshow Gallery
The study of how an individual feature reflects a person’s soul, spirit, or personality is an old concern of artists. However, it is only at the end of the 19th Century and the turn of the 20th Century, with the advent of modern psychology, that artists became more cautious of physiognomic analysis. How can one forget Géricault’s powerful portrait of a kleptomaniac in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent or Van Gogh’s painting of an old French peasant, Patience Escalier, from a private collection last exhibited at the great "Van Gogh in Arles" exhibition at the Met in 1984? Let’s recall Gertrude Stein’s portrait in which many friends had complained to Picasso that it doesn’t at all look like her. Picasso’s famous remark was: "In the end she will manage to look just like it." And she did.
Perhaps, in the light of contemporary portrait painting, the issues of working from life should be readdressed, not because it is irrelevant or unfashionable to the current taste, especially when mechanical reproduction and the manual virtuosity have created the possibility hybrid quotations and all sorts of superficial readings of past art.
The works of Elizabeth Josephson, in spite of their obvious kinship with Oskar Kokoschka, Willem de Kooning or Alice Neel, seems to utterly stand alone on the other side of the track of this particular genre. While lacking the sureness of the painterly eloquence of the artists she admires, Josephson proposes a beautiful option— the resonance of her own vulnerability. In this case, it becomes her strength rather than her weakness. However slow in speed and deliberate in building the subtlety of tones or quickening of pace in becoming more spontaneous, one can find in two of her works, Janice and Ethan and Margerete, that Josephson’s handling of paint has a poetic infelicity yet it feels genuine and not overbearing with unedited form. The work in general invites a psychological response rather than a pictorial critique. I wonder, however, if the later would be an impediment to the artist’s growth?
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Artists for Artists, About some shared empathies
By Choghakate KazarianJUNE 2018 | Editor's Message
When artists speak of their peers, they reveal something about their own practices and aspirations: the longing for a kindred spirit or for what they are not and maybe wish to be.
A Bridge Between You and Everything: An Exhibition of Iranian Women Artists
By Cigdem AsatekinDEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen
Organized by the Center for Human Rights in Iran and curated by Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, A Bridge Between You and Everything features 13 contemporary Iranian women artists.
Artists Choose Artists
By Joyce BeckensteinDEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen
Every three years, the Parrish Art Museum curators relinquish their decision-making powers to a team of well-established artists who judge a competition. Artists Choose Artists is an exhibition of works by seven jurors and 21 selectees. For this fourth iteration the jurors—Lillian Ball, Ralph Gibson, Valerie Jaudon, Jill Moser, Alexis Rockman, Lucien Smith, and Allan Wexler—sorted through 300 online portfolios and visited selected studios of artists residing within local zip codes. In prior years this arduous exercise raised the question, “how do artists who are not curators choose?” This year, jurors tended to pick artists whose work resonates with their own styles, their choices and juxtapositions uncannily and unexpectedly raising intriguing and urgent issues.
Bel Canto: Contemporary Artists Explore Opera
By Kathy BrewSEPT 2019 | ArtSeen
Bel Canto: Contemporary Artists Explore Opera features eight contemporary artists in a range of interdisciplinary work who explore ideas within the tradition and aesthetics of the opera.
