Contemporary Portrait Painting

About

Photography took over much of the portrait's everyday work in the 1800s, and many modernists left the likeness behind. Yet the painted portrait never disappeared. Alice Neel painted neighbours, artists and friends in New York for decades, and Lucian Freud's long sittings in London produced searching, heavily worked heads and nudes. Their example mattered to the painters who followed.

Barkley L. Hendricks made life-size portraits of stylish Black Americans from the late 1960s, setting them against flat, monochrome grounds. Kehinde Wiley later placed young Black men and women in the poses of European royal portraits, surrounded by ornamental pattern, and painted Barack Obama's official portrait (2018). Jenny Saville works on a vast scale with thick, fleshy paint, while Elizabeth Peyton makes small, luminous pictures of friends, musicians and historical figures. In China, Mao Yan has taken a quieter route, with muted, grey-toned portraits built up slowly over years.