Fairfield Porter’s iconic portrait of John Ashbery is highlighted in a show of paintings at the National Portrait Gallery related to the popular television show Mad Men. (English translation compliments of Google Translate.)
The portrait at the time of Mad Men
By Maxi November 1, 2023, 3:16 a.m.
The artist Fairfield Porter, who portrayed the poet John Ashbery in 1952, was a determined counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism, focusing on landscape and figure. “I want to do everything the avant-garde theorists say you can't do,” he said.
In the world of the popular television drama series “Mad Men,” we are entering the era of Abstract Expressionism. The artwork on the walls of Pete Campbell's office, hung in Don Draper's dining room, and dramatically staged behind Roger Sterling's couch, all recall the long-held idea that, in heyday of the mid-century, figurative painting, figurative art and realism were all its varieties were in sharp decline.
The drips and sprays of a Jackson Pollack were born into an era defined by the Cold War, the uniformity of Levittowns, the short militaristic hairstyles and gray flannel suits of the "Organization Man." And each week, as the opening credits roll to that ominous tune, “Mad Men” viewers are treated to that cold tension of that era as they watch their favorite degenerates, the advertising pitch men of Madison Avenue, throw away their midday bourbons.
In light of the fascination viewers now have with this period, curators David C. Ward, Brandon Brame Fortune and Wendy Wick Reaves of the National Portrait Gallery at ToutLeCD.com have assembled a collection of artworks depicting the human form and dating from 1945 to 1975, when the New York art world declared, against a backdrop of the rise of expressionism, the death of the portrait.
Thumbing their noses at Norman Rockwell as bourgeois kitsch, critics of this period, fond of abstraction, declared that creating "a human image" was simply "absurd" and out of fashion. Painting a portrait, said painter Chuck Close in 1968, was “the stupidest, most moribund, most old-fashioned, most worn-out thing you could do.” And putting the final nail in the coffin, critic Clement Greenberg said: “It's impossible to paint a face. »
But the three Portrait Gallery researchers say the portrait has not disappeared. It was also not subsequently revived or resurrected, but instead flourished. And the 50 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures featured in the exhibition and museum catalog, both titled: “Face Value: Portraiture in the age of Abstraction,” tell a much more subtle and nuanced story of the artists and the way of which they represented a generation of mid-century influencers, philosophers, activists, artists and celebrities. Disciplines came together, merged and split, curators say, and regional artists, outliers and minorities still passionately represented the human form and face.
For portraiture, researchers say, the traditional has become revolutionary. The artists, who had been told they couldn't paint figures, says curator Wendy Wick Reaves, did so anyway out of defiance. “Everything gets an intensity, an extra punch,” she says.
The exhibit features a host of what would be Don Draper's true contemporaries: Marilyn Monroe portrayed by Willem de Kooning, poet John Ashbery portrayed by Fairfield Porter, and Jack Kerouac drawn by Larry Rivers. Others, like Stokely Carmichael with his worker's overalls, Jackie Kennedy with his pillbox hat, or Hugh Hefner with his omnipresent pipe retain their characteristic features, but are portrayed as if in response to, or more certainly in spite of, criticism.
Visitors to this exhibition are treated to a rare and splendid display of portraits drawn from the museum's collections, as well as borrowed works, including Andy Warhol, Elaine de Kooning and Jamie Wyeth. This exhibition is certainly an opportunity to immerse oneself in the new knowledge of the exhibition organizers, but also an opportunity to dive back into the era of “Mad Men” and to better understand this distressing era of atomic bombs, the Vietnam. Anti-war protests, the fight for civil rights, and the Cold War.
Grégory, aka Maxi, fan of series and POP culture, I launched Maxiseries, a first site dedicated to American TV series then ToutleCD to expand my articles on all things Entertainment.