Portraiture has been a subject matter of painting and sculpture since ancient times. Figures of authority long sought to project their power through their images on monuments and coins. Tombstone carving encourages us to remember the dead through likenesses of them in life. Moreover, portrait painting has preserved countless representations of royalty and aristocracy throughout history.
The 19th century saw a wealth of portrait painting. Most of the portraiture served to express the social status of its middle - and - upper - class models. However, for Impressionist painters like Pierre Auguste Renoir, making portraits of the people around them was a means to demonstrate the contemporaneity of their art. With the advent of photography and its ability to reflect unvarnished reality, portraiture opened to include a greater variety of forms to express the figure and an interest in the emotional state of the portrayed. Amedeo Modigliani and other artists of the Ecole de Paris sought new types of models, and their explorations into human interiority lead to singular painting styles. Later, using portrait painting to experiment with the plasticity of form, the 20th - century master Pablo Picasso created myriad diverse works.
Through paintings from our collection by artists such as Renoir, Modigliani, and Picasso, and works of academic painting and photographic portraiture lent by other Japanese museums, A Century of Portraiture -Renoir, Modigliani, Picasso, and other artists from the Collection will explore the ways in which artists of the 19th and 20th centuries viewed and represented the people around them.
Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of a Woman (Mme C.D.)
ca. 1916
Oil on panel
Edouard Manet
Woman on a Bench
1879
Pastel on canvas
Part 1
Pierre Auguste Renoir
Girl in a Lace Hat
1891
Oil on canvas
Part One, Renoir and the 19th Century Portrait, will introduce works of the Impressionists in France from the second half of the 1800s.
The first section of the exhibition also includes gPortraiture and Photography,h a special display surveying the situation surrounding the 19th-century portrait, featuring images by the photographer Nadar, a contemporary of the Impressionists, and academic paintings by William Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Jacques Henner.
Part 2
Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of Lunia Czechowska
1917
Oil on canvas
Part Two, Modigliani and Portraiture of the Ecole de Paris, presents portraits of the gSchool of Paris,h a group of foreign artists who flocked to Paris in the early 1900s.
In a special section called gFashion and the Image of Woman,h paintings by Kees van Dongen and Kisling reveal transformations in fashion from the late 19th-century Belle Epoque through the 1920s, which marked the growing social advancement of women.
Part 3
The many faces of portraiture that Picasso evolved during his long career is the subject of Part Three of the exhibition, Picassofs Portraits. Our museumfs collection includes examples of the early figure paintings, the Blue Period, his Cubist and Neoclassicist phases, and the later works of the 1960s. Through these paintings, viewers are able to trace the history of Picassofs changing portrayals of the people who became his models.
