ART REVIEW : Portraits That Probe Beneath Surface

The art of portraiture was virtually destroyed by the invention of photography, which left the modern artist faced with capturing something of the sitter the camera could not get at. The German solution was to go for a distilled essence of character, feeling or spirit, a kind of telling exaggeration not unlike caricature. Some exemplary results of this enterprise have just gone on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 50 prints, drawings and books from the Rifkind Center.

German art tends to be both earthy and dramatic, qualities greatly exaggerated in the movements that bracketed World War I, a time of Schoenberg-like dissonance and Freudian dislocation. Theater and literature felt similar effects. The novels of Hermann Hesse updated Romanticism with symbolic paradox. Bertolt Brecht’s drama promoted individuals to universal types in modernized morality plays.

All this offers the danger of turning everybody into a cartoon. Given that, there is surprising variety of style and nuance in this show. Herman Stuck used a brooding 19th-Century realism to capture the hirsute arrogance of his sitter. Alexis Jawlensky employed a scant dozen lines to transform a pretty woman into an abstract icon. He wasn’t the first one to picture woman’s status as goddess, fetish and demon.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcut “Girl From Kaunas” depicts a Polish maiden as an African mask. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s poster for the dancer Nina Hard sees her as a glamorized marionette. Erich Heckel’s “Standing Child” shows a favorite model named Franzi, nude. The figure has an erotic charge that exposes both the pedophile voyeurism of the artist and the precocious seductiveness of the girl. The encounter feels less like perversion and more like an expression of amused unstated understanding.

Almost all the work retains such shaded subtleties despite its directness. Not George Grosz’s “The Boss.” It is a malicious act of hostility against a slob worthy of contempt. One begins to question whether it is a portrait at all.

Odd. One is not inclined to such doubts about the iconic women or Emil Nolde’s “Head of a Man in Darkness.” And we can barely see his face. It’s as if the deep definition of a portrait involves an act of intimate complicity between artist and sitter. Every portrait that works here gives one the sense that the artist sees the subject in depths that he will neither ignore nor betray.

There is ample evidence of mutual familiarity in the notable number of portraits of wives, fellow artists, poets, publishers and patrons. Egon Schiele depicts his mentor Arthur Roessler turning away with his hands raised in a gesture of renunciation. It’s an extraordinarily telling move suggesting a character that combines prissy fastidiousness with discreet kindness. Schiele reveals the man without treachery.

The best single portrait on view is, not surprisingly, the most artistically superior. Ludwig Meidner’s drawing looks unblinkingly at the art writer and editor Paul Westheim. He sees a kind of upper bohemian Everyman, plump, balding, bespectacled in a three-piece suit. Meidner draws with a meaty line that equates a jacket’s folds with the fleshy faces of a beer-loving people. Westheim smiles with full, damp lips and we see an urbane man of generous tolerance and voracious appetite. Sitter and artist seem to share a Rembrandtesque sense of humanity.

It’s perfectly fascinating to compare Meidner’s version with two others. Otto Dix, not one to flinch, saw a directness in Westheim that matched his own. Oskar Kokoschka ascribed a certain petulance to the literary man. He clearly made some fairly formidable people a little uneasy.

Max Beckmann weighs in with three portraits of his friend the publisher Reinhard Piper. Lean as a whippet, the man depicted in the largest work is intelligent, suavely agreeable, even courtly, but as cool and vaguely dangerous as chromed steel. He is wearing a mourning band, perhaps restraining grief. One smaller sheet shows him smilingly at ease, another as detached as a stone head from Easter Island.

There is a smoky slowness of revelation about these thoughtful works. Others are as direct as children. Kirchner’s affable “Dr. Spengler” hits you all at once. So does Konrad Felixmuller’s gnarled homage to the painter Max Liebermann.

The show, put together by Rifkind curator Tim Benson, is an invitation to ruminate on individuality and stereotype. We like to think that our mere appearance does not reveal us. Yet if it does not, the arts of portraiture, the theater and romance are meaningless. We persist in believing in them.