Richard Brilliant – Portraiture – Chapter 2 – Fashioning the Self.

Brilliant discusses the convention of using names within portraiture and how this is used to produce an image that is representative of the person but lacks personal identity. Instead a persona is produced, something that can be considered to be the public façade of the person depicted.

The following issues are explored:

· Names are arbitrary but specific

· Public image overrides personal identity

· Produces a shallowness of the public image

· How the public image is represented – style over substance

· Portraits following conventions of portraiture to fit a genre rather than exploring personal identity

Brilliant begins the section by discussing how names are arbitrary but also have a singular and specific use, to identify the person. He asserts that “it is a general condition to have a personal name, whether public or private, but the persons named are every one of them individual and singular.” On this point I think he is sort of right. People do have the same names as other people, for instance there is another academic called David Macey, which can lead to some confusion. However, as we both look quite different to each other it is possible to circumnavigate that confusion with the use of each of our portraits. So, names can be duplicated, but when they are used in conjunction with an image, then they become singular.

With raising the point about the public image overriding the personal identity, Brilliant is tackling the issue of a person projecting an image that is showing what the sitter wants the viewer to see. He starts by returning to the assertion that a portrait is twofold, a combination of a depiction of a person and a suggestion of an inner life, when he says “by the very nature of their dual function, portraits often reveal a tension between the demands of denotation and designation that determine the relative prominence of personal identity within the overall content of the work.” He then starts by discussing a depiction of Lenin as a leader of the people and the image portrayed, which overshadows his personal identity of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Lenin’s public image is larger and more forcefully projected than the his personal identity and it becomes difficult to see any other image than a political leader starting a revolution that would have consequences for the entire world.

Brilliant then compares this to celebrities and their status, how they are portrayed and the shallowness of this portrayal. This happens because of the limitations of a public image, that it is difficult to produce a public persona that has enough depth and breadth to replace a personal identity. This is often the downfall of many a portrait, that they can be interpreted as lacking a sense of genuineness and are instead just portraying a façade. With this issue it is considering their being style over substance, that the way someone is portrayed is more important than what is portrayed, which consequently leads to a lack of depth with the portrayal of an inner life.

From this position Brilliant then discusses Andy Warhol’s Marylin portrait. In this image Marylin Monroe’s portrait is 50 times by using the process of screen printing and making the point of reproducibility is wearing the image out. With this the type of media used is more important than the depiction of Marylin Monroe, and so leads to the depiction of her inner life being virtually non-existent but the format taking precedent.

The last point Brilliant makes is about the image following the format of portraiture rather than exploring issues of personal identity. With following an accepted format and pose the image can ‘feel’ like a portrait when the representation of a personal identity is missing. When Brilliant states that when it “seems to be about popular portrait photography… and its banality in insensitive hands” he is referring to the depiction being greater than the portrayal of personal identity and leads to being generic, lacking any sense of depth.

Overall, Brilliant does raise some valid and well thought issues concerning portraiture, ranging from the use of a person’s name through to how a portrait can lack depth and become generic.

Addition: Further on in the chapter, Brilliant discusses how a portrait can be misidentified and for an image to be considered to be a portrait a name has to be available. Brilliant discusses the Capitoline Brutus, which was identified more by matching the character of Brutus rather than replicating a likeness to Brutus. It is a case of misidentification and now the sculpture is unidentified and "the Capitoline Brutus is one outstanding example of the imputed portrait whose identification is the object of intensely personal reactions on the part of the viewer."

Brilliant then continues to compare this situation to a portrait of Daniel Webster by Southworth and Hawes. In this photograph the likeness of Daniel Webster is undeniable and his character matches his depiction in being a stoic statesman of the 19th century.

However, Brilliant claims that an image can only be considered a portrait if the person is named, thus giving a personal identity to the sitter. This is because the pictorial conventions of portraiture have been followed but the sitter remains unnamed and "there are works of art, however, that have been accepted as portraits because their faces appear so idiosyncratic within a well known artistic convention that they are assumed to be portraits."

This part I am less convinced of. For instance, in the National Portrait Gallery there are hundreds of photographs of anonymous people, or the work of August Sander when no names are given but are instead furnished with an occupation or social status. The image could just be titled as being Portrait of Anonymous Person and does not seem to break any function of the portrait. Indeed, Brilliant mentions at the beginning of his book that a portrait is a combination of a depiction of a person and an expression of an inner life and both of these can be fulfilled without the need of a name.

Another interesting issue is that if the person in the image becomes unidentified over a period of time then the portrait stops being a portrait. This would be a sort of declassification or a relegation from the genre because one of the tenets of portraiture is missing. It would mean that for a portrait to be a portrait it would require a likeness of the sitter, an expression of character etc and also a name. Out of these three requirements the naming convention is the most fragile, but with it missing it does not affect the other two requirements.