The newly rehung Portrait Hall at UMFA juxtaposes historical and contemporary works, encouraging new conversations about how identity is crafted and displayed.

Before there were any art museums, there was the Wunderkammer—the Room of Wonders—and the Cabinet of Curiosities. Beginning in the 16th and continuing into the 17th centuries, these were how royalty and the wealthy showed off their collections: of art, natural history specimens, scientific instruments, and noteworthy objects of everyday use. While these exhibits were energized and guided by the personal tastes of their proprietors, they depended for their impact on engaging the viewer’s feelings of awe, response to mystery and curiosity. Objects that inspired reflection in the audience and projected symbolic meanings were particularly valued. These were, then, the direct precursors of the modern museum.

In 1769, a suite of Florentine administrative offices, or “uffizi,” which had been built between 1560 and 1580, officially opened to the public as something new: the first-ever art museum. From that date until today, directors, academics and others would endlessly debate the organization of the museum and, with it, the nature of art. Where the rooms of wonder had relied on quantity and variety to overwhelm the audience, something less chaotic and more coherent was needed. Their ideas rebounded to the artists, who began to create works in the new categories. The Romans had painted gardens and buildings, but in the 17th century, Claude Lorrain introduced the landscape, with its divisions of foreground, mid-ground, and distance, and suitable objects of interest distributed among them. Greeks and Romans were probably the first to depict specific persons recognizably, and Alexander the Great, as he conquered the world, spread their impulse in the form of images of him, almost certainly inspiring the East to form images of Buddha. Artists who depicted their clients and subjects began to draw themselves as well.

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is currently undergoing a staple of modern museums: rehanging its collections. Among other things, calling attention to the holdings is a way of refreshing them and lifting their status across the board. The Latin American gallery, originally a long, narrow hallway that seems to have been created to service an enormous elevator, was probably too small for its previous use, and the rise of Latinx artistry, and something appropriate needed to be created for the old space. The Portrait Hall was a possible solution: a surprising portion of the museum’s collection is made up of portraits, but without some way of calling attention to them, preferably in rotation over time, they might never stand out from the treasures that surround them. And portraits have one advantage over landscapes and whole schools of painting: they really need to be seen close up.

At the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Barkley L. Hendricks’ portrait of William Corbett confronts Jacques Philippe Bouchardon’s King Louis XIV—a dramatic inversion of power, pose, and presence.

So our tour of the portrait begins and ends in the same spot, near the entrance, where for now Jacques Philippe Bouchardon’s mid-18th century equestrian portrait of French King Louis XIV—the so-called Sun King—is gazed upon skeptically by Barkley L. Hendricks’s nearly full-length 1975 painting of William Corbett, titled “North Philly Niggah” by its subject. The inversion of the two presentations speaks volumes about the history that passed between them. Louis is dressed in the garb and posed in the manner of a Roman Emperor, a figure beyond mere mortality, while Corbett wears a stylish and impressive, belted greatcoat, with sheared lamb lapels, over a buttoned-up magenta shirt worn without a tie. Each of them self-consciously presents himself—as befits a formal portrait—but the king presents an inflated, sham image, while Corbett inspires confidence that this is precisely how he appeared in life.    

It’s often impossible to authoritatively count works of art, but there are around 20 in the hall. There are slightly more women than men, each sex with a side of the space, while one—American painter Benjamin West’s 1770 tondo, depicting his wife, Elizabeth Shewell West, and their son, Raphael Lamar West—has one of each sex, and a nearby, anonymous couple by Barthel Bruyn the Younger, from the middle of the 16th century, begging the question: are these two portraits, or just one?

Googling art, as writing about it often requires, it soon becomes apparent that certain works, like David and Mona Lisa, occupy an exclusionary pride-of-place in many mental catalogs, followed by that one unforgettable work that inevitably comes to mind for a particular individual: the one they saw on that first trip to a museum, or read about in the financial news. That said, there are exceptional works at UMFA for those who recognize them. Among the portraits, the “Study for The Red Smile” by Alex Katz, which is astutely placed at the other end of the Hall, profits uniquely from being visible from afar and, with its casual, unposed posture, stands almost alone in belonging among its contemporary audience. Fans of the artist may recognize it as part of a now-scattered multi-part portrait of his wife, Ada, one of the favorite subjects of a painter who exploited and contributed to many of the -isms of his era. The other distinctly modern image is Robert Arneson’s self portrait, “Breathless (Bust of Bob),” perhaps the most important local work to have been omitted, probably due to its commitment here, from last month’s over-the-top ceramic celebration, and in which the artist, then secretly mortally ill, shows himself holding his breath—surely one of the rarest gestures in any portrait.

A triad of women’s portraits in the UMFA’s new gallery spans centuries and styles, offering varied expressions of poise, personality, and power.

And then, there are the Vigée-LeBruns. There were two indispensable artists during the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath, including the Napoleonic Wars. One was Jacques-Louis David, many of whose works are universally recognizable even to those who don’t know anything about them. The other was Elizabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, one of the few women who were canonical even before feminist criticism came along to correct those obscene gaps in art history. That either one of them, let alone both, survived the rise and inversion and fall of their supporters may be among the best proofs we have of the persuasive power of great art. For UMFA to have two of Vigée-LeBrun’s superbly sensitive portraits means, at the very least, some excellent models for artists and enthusiasts to study how an artist can bring a subject exceptionally to life.

If only one of UMFA’s inaugural portraits is a self-portrait, more than half of the 76 in the Springville Museum of Art’s long-standing exposition, Image of the Artist, were done by their subjects. Some of them choose to conceal their art-making, depicting themselves as they would any other object, while others show themselves in the acts of self-observation and depiction. The intense way they may stare into the mirror to study themselves becomes the piercing way they return the viewer’s gaze. Here they expose some of the working mechanisms of self-portraiture, along with the revelatory choice whether to make it an auto-biography, in which we see them in their working attire, standing or sitting (it matters), and so forth, or instead one of self-mythologizing. Either way, they open windows into the processes of creation that might otherwise remain shut. Of those which were painted by another, meanwhile, many qualify as self-revealing all the same.

A portion of the North Wall at the Springville Museum of Art’s Image of the Artist exhibition, where self-portraits hang “cheek by jowl” in a modern take on Gertrude Stein’s storied salon.

While at the Met, the Louvre, both National Galleries, and so on, visitors must walk through one gallery to get to another, the Springville’s builders created hallways that recall those in palaces and mansions that, along with hidden stairs, allowed servants access to various rooms without being constantly in view of the occupants. However they came about, most of these spaces are now full of art and operate as extensions of the rooms they connect—though the central hall on the second floor, where the Image of the Artist resides, stands apart from that which surrounds it.

Hung “cheek by jowl”—almost literally—and extending high up the walls overhead, this dense mosaic of quirks, idiosyncrasies, and self-exploration recalls the apartment walls of Leo and Gertrude Stein in Paris, where what may have been the densest collection of paradigmatic Modern artists ever assembled crowded together. If the Wasatch Front were Utah’s Paris, and it may well be, the parallel climaxes here. From George Martin Ottinger, posing in 1877 as Fire Chief, to Sam Wilson’s 1985 flattened cube, “I myself,” in which only his “eye” appears, painted as though taped in place, the visual effect is not unlike reading the private diaries of great writers. “How would you like to be seen” shades into “How do you secretly see yourself” and back again.

It can be a bit tricky identifying a specific portrait. There is a map—in fact, there are two: one for the North Wall and one for the South. Matching a shape and location from the wall to the map yields a number, which further accesses a key to the names and other details. A deep dive into the exhibit can require quite a lot of searching back and forth, but while it can be frustrating, this Rube Goldberg catalog forestalls one of the less liberating instincts of our verbal age, which is the tendency to read the text before looking at the art.

It’s often said that because we have TV and computers ours is foremost a visual age, but these two portrait galleries, one old and fixed for now, the other brand new and promising to change with time, suggest knowledge often precedes witness. What chance does Mona Lisa stand in the Louvre’s enormous space, where this too-often-seen icon is entirely dwarfed by a palace and can only disappoint expectations? At Springville, curiosity about a small, remote space leads to a direct encounter with some of Utah’s artists, some famous and some forgotten, but worth getting to know. They face each other across a timeless corridor and appeal directly to our senses, even as their stories fade from living memory. Meanwhile, new portraits are made every day, and we see some worth saving. Who’s to say they won’t find a home at UMFA, as it constructs its own Image of the Artist?

Lee Deffebach’s 1979 self-portrait places the artist within a decorative frame, presenting an unflinching gaze alongside psychedelic color fields—a rare merging of internal and external reflection.

The Art of Portraiture, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, through March 2026.
Image of the Artist, Springville Museum of Art, Springville, on permanent display.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.