It is 1946. The war has just ended, and Henri Michaux, an avant-garde poet turned painter, finds himself haunted by faces: “As soon as I pick up a pencil or a brush, ten, fifteen, twenty of them surge up to me on the paper one after the other. And most of them wild. Are all those faces me? Are they other people? From what depths?” In Michaux’s works of the period, these questions are redoubled on the page, where the human face is reduced to a zero-point of legibility. A year earlier, Michaux had started on a series of faces using thin washes of gouache, watercolor, and ink to evoke the eerie cohort. Fugitive, tortured, these small works on paper distill the basic attributes of the face: the ghostly outline of a head and the bare, and occasionally grotesque, indications of eyes and a mouth. The faces came to him from within, Michaux claimed, each with its own persona: horror, misery, joy, and so on. They belonged to him, he concluded; they were his faces, the grimaces of a host of inner selves. But they were trapped on the inside, unable to get out:
Behind the face with its motionless features, deserted, now no more than a mask, another superiorly mobile face contracts, seethes, simmers in an unbearable paroxysm. Behind the set features, desperately seeking a way out, expressions like a pack of howling dogs . . . Lost, sometimes criminal faces . . . Faces of sacrificed personalities, “I’s” stifled, killed, by life, willpower, ambition, by a propensity for rectitude and consistency.¹
The story of modernist painting could be written as a story of the face—beginning with Manet’s Olympia and ending in crisis, with Jackson Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat, or the monstrous child-animal faces, as disturbing in their way as Michaux’s wraiths, that proliferate in the work of the Cobra group at roughly the same moment in the 1940s. In the period immediately after the war, however, representations of the face all but disappeared from painting. Why? And what explains the face’s uncanny return in the work of so many contemporary artists—among them Cathy Wilkes and Josh Smith, whose work I’ll examine below?