Some time after he completed his first portrait, in 1909, Oskar Kokoschka realized that "in my haste, I painted only four fingers on the hand he lays across his chest." He was referring to The Trance Player, a painting of his friend, an actor. "Did I forget to paint the fifth?" Kokoschka wondered. "In any case, I don't miss it. To me it was more important to cast light on my sitter's psyche than to enumerate details like five fingers, two ears, one nose."
This indifference to anatomical accuracy wasn't unique to Kokoschka. "Many artists reconsider the pursuit of external likeness—portraiture's usual objective—within formal or conceptual explorations or reject it altogether," states the web site of the Whitney Museum of American Art's current exhibition, Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection; it showcases portraits dating from Kokoschka's time up to the present. "Once a rarefied luxury good," the site states, "portraits are now ubiquitous."
It could have added that portraits are no longer restricted to just still images. Take the work of Bo Gehring. His video portraits offer an uncanny perspective on the human body and, in some measure, the mind. Once a professor of electrical engineering…
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