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FACE TO FACEa very brief account of the printed face

"Lord, why castest thou off my soul? Why hidest thou thy face from me?"

(Psalms,8814)

The face is the essence of the human individual. Although

we recognize people we know from a distance, even from the

back, by posture and gait. and although other kinds of measures,

such as fingerprints, are deemed more scientific as positiveFig. 1

identification, it is the face that is most commonly understood to define a person. In contemporary

life it is the "photo 10," the passport or driver's license with a photograph of the bearer's face, that

we are expected to produce upon official demand, to prove that we are ourselves. As with God, if

we turn our face away,we have turned our whole being away

Until the early part of the twentieth century, the great majority of works of art depicted

human beings in a recognizable story or situation, and faces and facial expression played a key

role in the Mocking of Christ, for example, the torturers are shown with ugly faces, further contorted

by hateful expressions; in the dramatic scenes favored by artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, resolve is conveyed by a steady gaze and set jaw, and demure innocence by downcast

eyes.

A major category of works of art, parallel to those telling a story, is the portrait. a genre with

roots lost in antiquity, already strong by the fifth century B.C Although a depicted single face is not

always a portrait. most of them are-as are most in the Face to Face exhibition. In a portrait. as in an

image telling a story, the expectation is that facial expression will reveal character.

Printmaking emerged in Europe in the fifteenth century,

as paper began to be plentiful. and both religious and secular

images depicted human beings-the holy family and saints

of the Christian faith, the gods of pagan antiquity, allegorical

figures, or simply images of human beings, like the fools on

playing cards. A good half century passed after the beginning

of printmaking before prints became a medium for portraits

of specific individuals; during the fifteenth century (as indeedFig. 2

a-e) those who commissioned portraits were at the high

e of the social and economic scale, and they preferred

ore conspicuously costly media. But toward the end of

e century printed portraits began to appear (although

ese were not necessarily commissioned) and the first

rinted self-portrait. an image made by the engraver Israel

an Meckenem of himself and his wife, was made around

1490. In 1518 the great German artist Albrecht DOrermade

a oodcut portrait of no less a personage than the Holy

Roman Emperor Maximilian, and this and DOrer's eight

other printed portraits (two woodcuts and six engravings)

both sanctioned the medium for other artists-and sitters-

and set a high standard for the genre. From the beginning

of printed books, it was logical that book illustrations

ould be printed, too, and thus immense numbers of images to illustrate the Bible, literary texts,

and documentary material such as travel chronicles were created, at first mostly in woodcut, such

as lost Amman's rendering of a Turk with scepter and shield (fig. 1), later in engraving or etching.

DOrer made drawings and paintings of himself, but never a printed self-portrait. His great

successor in printmaking, however, Rembrandt van Rijn, working nearly a century and a half later,

made over twenty etched self-portraits, out of at least

seventy-five in all media. At thirty, he portrayed himself

and his wife Saskia with an almost fierce intensity (fig 2);

just twelve years later. his last printed self-portrait shows

a more subdued and somber man, having lost three of his

four children in infancy, and his beloved Saskia herself.

Also in the 1630sand '40s, in Catholic Antwerp,

only some eighty-five miles from Rembrandt'sAmsterdam

but culturally a world away because it was in the orbit

of the Hapsburg Empire, the renowned portrait painter

Anthony van Dyck put his talents into an etched series of

elegant portraits of his contemporaries, including manyFig. 4

fellow artists. Van Oyck drew the sitters, their faces in detail but

the rest only sketched in, and made sensitive etchings on the

plates from these drawings; at a later date the details were filled

in by professional engravers (fig. 3).

In seventeenth - century Europe, however, it was France

that produced the greatest volume of printed portraits. With

its centralized absolute monarchy, an enormous and complex

hierarchy of important persons was established in relation to the

king, and through engraved images, multipliable and relatively

inexpensive, the population could satisfy its desire to be in theFig. 5

know about who was who. Louis Xlvs mother, the dowager queen

Anne of Austria (fig. 4)-as the daughter of the Hapsburg Philip III of

Spain, her marriage in J615to Louis XIII had cemented the alliance

between the two most powerful states in Europe-was obviously on

the must- know list.

Mezzotint-a medium in which a rocker is used to rough up

the entire surface of a copper plate, so that if printed the resultwould

be entirely black, and then the image is created by burnishing-

was first used in Amsterdam in the 1640s, and in Germany later

Fig. 6 in the century. The medium, with its possibility of infinite tonal

gradations, became immensely popular in England-so much so that it became known as la maniere

anglaise-as it was ideal for making printed reproductions of the

portrait paintings that were the staple of British art, such as

the rendition of Isaac Newton, in a magnificent wig, by John

Smith (fig. 5), following a painting by Godfrey Kneller.

By the end of the eighteenth century Francisco Goya,

initially a society painter but who became disillusioned by that

world of pomp and flattery, mocked the worship of ancestors

implicit in the cult of portraits in his etched image of an ass

admiring his forebears, everyone of whom, naturally, was

also an ass (fig. 6). And once lithography, the invention ofFig. 7

which also took place right at the end of the eighteenth century, was

widely available as a means of printing images quickly and cheaply,

it became the medium of choice to illustrate the satirical periodicals

that emerged in Franceduring the so-called JulyMonarchy (1830-1848).

the first manifestations of a truly popular press. Honore Daumier

made his fame with his nearly four-thousand lithographs of political

subjects (fig. 7) and gently sardonic scenes of daily life, published

in these periodicals (in the years they were not shut down by the

censors).

Once photography had liberated prints in general from their documentary function-and

printed portraits from their role of providing basic information, a likeness, to the world-artists were

free to show the human face and form in any way they chose. Early in the twentieth century, forms

in art began to be broken apart and abstracted, by Picasso and Braque in Paris, and in Germany

by the Expressionists, of whom Erich Heckel was a central member (fig. 8). aturalism did not

disappear, however, but continued, as it has to this day; artists such as the Mexican Diego Rivera

always worked in recognizable forms, and his

major work is in the centuries-old medium

of fresco. It is probably no coincidence that

Rivera's Self-Portrait (cover). in the angle of the

body, the straightforward gaze,and even in the

right eye being slightly higher than the left. is

reminiscent of Rembrandt's image of himself

made three centuries earlier (fig. 2).

The increasing ubiquity of digital

images opened our eyes to yet another

way of breaking down what we are seeing,

or think we are seeing. Chuck Close, in his

prolific and constantly self-renewing oeuvre,

has seized on the grid of the digital image,

but then thrown over our expectations

by making what look to be digital imagesFig 9

in traditional media such as mezzotint, or woodcut such as the

Fig.10

multicolor portrait of his wife, Leslie (fig.9). And in the twenty-first

century, not only do traditional media persist, but so do the variety

of reasons that that have motivated creators of printed portraits.

Albrecht DOrer made "official" portraits, such as of the hereditary ruler

Emperor Maximilian, but, more importantly, portraits of figures like

Ulrich Varnbuler. Philip Melanchthon, and Erasmus, bold thinkers who

were shaping history in his time. In 2002, at age eighty, john Wilson created in etching a direct

and powerful portrait of the most important leader in the civil rights movement of the twentieth

century, who, as it happens, was named for a man DOrer admired tremendously In Wilson's

portrait of Martin Luther King Ir. (fig. 10),the face takes up less than a quarter of the printed image,

yet Wilson has focused his attention-and thus ours-on that face, its weariness, its promise of

endurance, its hope for better things to come. All we need to know about King is in that face.

Suzanne Boorsch

IMAGES -------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert L. Solley Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Yale University Art Gallery

Cover: Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886 -1957), Self-Portrait, 1930, Lithograph, 15.88"x 11.25"

Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery, Mount Desert, Maine

Jost Amman (German, 1539 1591), Turk with Shield and Scepter, from Iutkisct»: Chronica, 1577, woodcut. 4.625"x 3.875"

The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University

2. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606 -1669), Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636, etching, 4.13"x 3.75"

The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University

3. Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599 -1641), Portrait ot Joos de Momper, Painter of Landscapes, from the Iconography. 1630s, etching & engraving, 9.75"x 6.13"

The Balker Collection: Gift of Norman and I:sther Bolker, Gonzaga University

4. Robert Nanteuil (French, 1623 -1678) after Pierre Mignard (French, 1612 -1695), Portrait of Anne of Austria, 1660, engraving, 12.88"x 9.75"

The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University

5. John Smith (British, 1652 -1742) after Godfrey Kneller (British, 1646 -1723), Portrait of Isaac Newton, 1712, mezzotint, 13.63"x 10"

The Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker, Gonzaga University

6. Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746 -1828), NAnd so was his grandfather," from Los Caprichos, 1799, aquatint, 8S'x 5.94"

The Fredrick and Genevieve Schlatter Endowed Print Fund, Gonzaga University

7. Honore Daumier (French, 1808 -1879), "Come on, big Cupid!" (Young Lepeintre in the role of Tragala n the play Twenty Years Later), 1834,

lithograph, 12"x 9"

The Fredrick and Genevieve Schlatter Endowed Print Fund, Gonzaga University

8. Erich Heckel (German, 1883 -1970), Young Girl, from Genius 2, o. 1, 1913, woodcut. 10.19"x 6.69"

The Balker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Balker, Gonzaga University

9. Chuck Close (American, b. 1940), Leslie (detail), 1986, woodcut, 24.75"x 21.25"

Gift of the Sahlin Foundation, Gonzaga University

1O. John Wilson (American, b. 1922), Martm Luther King Jr. (detail), 2002, etching, aquatint & chine colle. 35.69"x 29.75"

Gift of the Sahlin Foundation, Gonzaga University

Exhibition is in honor and in memory of Dr. Anne Baruch, Chicago, Illinois.

This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2007-2008©Jundt Art Musuem, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258-0001