Character Study: Portraits in Print

This lithograph depicts Ruth Asawa’s father, Umakichi Asawa, and was created during her pivotal 1965 fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

Umakichi held deep personal significance for the artist. The fellowship allowed Asawa to spend time with her parents, who were living in Los Angeles at the time, as well as with other family members who returned to the area following their incarceration during World War II.

In this series of etchings inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello, Ofili renders the Moorish general’s face in stark lines that encompass the entirety of the paper’s surface, which has been coated with black mica, giving it a subtle iridescent glow. In the figure’s forehead, he illustrates scenes from the tragedy.

Across the ten etchings (there is also a title page and colophon), varying in facial features and accoutrement, the artist collapses and endlessly refracts Othello’s personhood. Ofili presents the tragic Shakespearean figure as simultaneously one and many—viewed through the lens of the self and filtered through diverse moments in racial, cultural, literary, and visual history.

Richter’s TWIN MAO, depicting Chinese political leader Mao Zedong, is based on a photograph the artist took in 1968 of a newspaper illustration. Hazy and monochromatic, yet still instantly recognizable in its subject matter, this edition puts forth a new kind of abstraction that collapses distinctions between photography and printmaking.

Prints and multiples have played a crucial role in Richter’s practice since 1965, serving as a way for him to experiment with visual facsimiles and the interplay of mediums. TWIN MAO is one of three editions based on this 1968 photograph that the artist created in 2018–2019. These depictions of Mao are closely related to Richter’s iconic multipart painting 48 Portraits (1972), which was originally conceived for the artist’s solo presentation at the German Pavilion of the 1972 Venice Biennale.

Throughout his oeuvre, Marshall makes reference to the history of painting and its various genres, recasting familiar scenes with Black figures, often engaged in mundane, everyday activities.

As Susan Tallman notes in the artist’s catalogue raisonné of prints, the present work “can be seen in the tradition of the Dutch Golden Age tronie—portraits in which the identity of the sitter is unknown and yet the sense of individual personhood is communicated through body language, expression, and costume. (Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is one famous example.)”

To compose this work, Marshall used a Barbie doll he purchased from a thrift store near the print workshop as a model, fashioning her jacket out of tracing paper.

This suite of four portraits depicts iconic American female blues and jazz singers using only a few high-contrast tones. Together, the restricted, vibrant palette and the close crop on each woman’s face convey in sharp relief the expressive volume and emotion of their individual and collective voices.

The edition reflects Schütte’s ongoing interest in music, one of myriad influences apparent in the artist’s work. Like the portraits in a related series of watercolors and etchings, Blues Men (2019), Schütte based these depictions on famous photographs of the singers.

Man’s psychologically layered, resolutely enigmatic paintings often depict portraits of individuals from his milieu, cloaked in shadowed melancholia and suspended in a transitory, dreamlike psychical state.

This woodcut depicts a reclining girl with a human skull resting in the crook of one arm, referencing Francisco Goya, whose skull was discovered to be missing half a century after his death. The print also recalls Dionisio Fierros’s Vanitas (1849), inscribed “Skull of Goya” on its frame, as well as the centuries-old artistic motif of death and the maiden.

Katz became increasingly interested in portraiture in the late 1950s—when mainstream American art had turned decisively away from representational painting—and began to capture strong, straightforward likenesses of his subjects rendered in vivid colors, a style that has persisted throughout his work to date.

Through Katz’s unique manipulation of scale, in which he frequently paints his subjects with faces close-up or cropped by the canvas edge, his portraits evoke a distinctive combination of intimacy and detachment. He often portrays his own social milieu—painting fellow artists, family members (most notably his wife and long-standing muse, Ada, as in Black Cap (Ada)), and friends.