{"id":92618,"date":"2025-04-29T07:36:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T14:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=92618"},"modified":"2025-05-06T08:52:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T15:52:04","slug":"umfa-and-springville-portrait-exhibits-offer-rooms-of-reflection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/umfa-and-springville-portrait-exhibits-offer-rooms-of-reflection\/","title":{"rendered":"UMFA and Springville Portrait Exhibits Offer Rooms of Reflection"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The newly rehung Portrait Hall at UMFA juxtaposes historical and contemporary works, encouraging new conversations about how identity is crafted and displayed.<\/p><\/div>\n

Before there were any art museums, there was the Wunderkammer<\/i>\u2014the Room of Wonders\u2014and 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\u2019s 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.<\/h4>\n

In 1769, a suite of Florentine administrative offices, or \u201cuffizi,\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/h4>\n
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At the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Barkley L. Hendricks\u2019 portrait of William Corbett confronts Jacques Philippe Bouchardon\u2019s King Louis XIV\u2014a dramatic inversion of power, pose, and presence.<\/p><\/div>\n

So our tour of the portrait begins and ends in the same spot, near the entrance, where for now Jacques Philippe Bouchardon\u2019s mid-18th century equestrian portrait of French King Louis XIV\u2014the so-called Sun King\u2014is gazed upon skeptically by Barkley L. Hendricks\u2019s nearly full-length 1975 painting of William Corbett, titled \u201cNorth Philly Niggah\u201d 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\u2014as befits a formal portrait\u2014but the king presents an inflated, sham image, while Corbett inspires confidence that this is precisely how he appeared in life. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2014American painter Benjamin West\u2019s 1770 tondo, depicting his wife, Elizabeth Shewell West, and their son, Raphael Lamar West\u2014has 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?<\/h4>\n

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 \u201cStudy for The Red Smile\u201d 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\u2019s self portrait, \u201cBreathless (Bust of Bob),\u201d perhaps the most important local work to have been omitted, probably due to its commitment here, from last month\u2019s over-the-top ceramic celebration, and in which the artist, then secretly mortally ill, shows himself holding his breath\u2014surely one of the rarest gestures in any portrait.<\/h4>\n
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A triad of women\u2019s portraits in the UMFA\u2019s new gallery spans centuries and styles, offering varied expressions of poise, personality, and power.<\/p><\/div>\n