i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

14 / The Subjects of the ArtistIt is a truism that after the invention of photography in 1839 portrait paintinglost much of its raison d’être and nearly all of its prestige. Painters who specializedin ofƒcial portraiture and who worked for ƒrms such as Portraits, Inc.,were excluded from serious consideration as artists. In turn, artists who did notmake portraits for hire but whose work consisted primarily of portraiture werefound guilty of commercialism by association, and their reputations suffered.By the mid-1950s, American critics had declared the tradition of portrait paintingdead. Writing in Reality magazine in 1955, the social realist painter GeorgeBiddle lamented: “Yes, portrait painting as an art—rather than as a debasedform of chromolithography—is very nearly a lost tradition.” 1 Four years later,at the height of abstract expressionism, Frank O’Hara conƒrmed portraiture’sdemise: “And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all . . . You suddenlywonder why in the world anyone ever did them.” 2The curator Henry Geldzahler provided an explanation for the decline ofportraiture: it was the result, he declared, of a lack of enlightened patronage:“As curator in a museum, I get the question about once a month from the wifeof a Supreme Court justice or from a governor, from somebody who has tohave an ofƒcial portrait done . . . It seems to me that Larry Rivers, Jim Dine,and Andy Warhol are the natural portraitists of our age, but most of the institutionsof government haven’t gotten around to understanding that yet.” 3 Withboth artist and patron wary of each other, portrait painting fell into the gulf betweenmodern art and its public. From the mid-nineteenth century on, thatgulf was spanned by the art photographer, whose role in the demise of portraitpainting was at least as important as the lack of sophisticated patronage.The history of modern portraiture is inextricable from the history of photography.Signiƒcantly, art photographers have played a central role in the representationof ƒne artists. From Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen to ArnoldNewman, Hans Namuth, and Richard Avedon, these practitioners have conƒrmedthe cultural myth of creativity with as much authority as Joseph Karshhas formulated the image of leadership for a business elite. Their work evidencesthe symbiotic relationship between art photography and modernism:a portrait by an art photographer (rather than a commercial photographer)helped to validate the historical importance of the artist, while at the sametime verifying (by metonymy), the photographer’s own artistic status. Stieglitz’sphotographs of Georgia O’Keeffe and Namuth’s of Jackson Pollock werecrucial to the establishment of the painters’ careers. That hybrid entity, the artphotographer, has been a bridge between the artist, isolated in the impracticalrealm of creativity, and the visually literate public. 4The liaison between artist and art photographer thus serves as a support tothe artist-critic-dealer network that constitutes the artworld; in turn, the artworldshapes our concept of the art historical signiƒcance of an artist’s work. It