Blake Gopnik trashes official portraits in Washington Post article

[Claudemir Bonfim]

This Blake Goblin is just mad because nobody wants to portray him.

[Robert McGee]

It seems to me that Gopnik's attack was more on the clients who commission the artwork, rather than the artists who give them what they want. It's unfortunate that he chose to use Tom's fine painting as an example of what he considers to be the bad side of official portraiture, but I think it's pretty clear to anyone who paints portraits for a living that you can't pay a lot of bills by painting people with "warts and all."

As a personal aside to Thomas, a similiar thing happened to me a couple of years ago when Texas Monthly called and asked if they could do a story on me after a piano competition in Las Vegas. (They had gotten a press release about the competition.) When the article came out, I was listed among the 100 most bizzare things that happened in the last year. I was mad at first, but I gotta say in hindsight that the article was the best thing that ever happened to me. There's no such thing as bad publicity.

Robert

[Thomas Nash]

Everybody puts on a clean shirt and brushes their teeth in the morning before they go out and face the world. No one should feel they have to apologize for wanting to look their best if they are to be painted and seen for hundreds of years.

I have always been a strong defender not only of what we do but of those that ask us to do it. Our clients appreciate portrait painting and make it possible for us to do what we love. We should be as staunch in our support of their right and motivations to commission a portrait as we are about our right to paint them.

I have found that the majority of portraits I am hired to paint are simply because someone wanted to celebrate and remember someone that they love, admire or wish to honor in some lasting way. Most portraits are initiated by someone other than the subject.

There are clients who make it clear they are concerned about how they will look, but ironically Newt Gingrich was not one of those. In all my years of portraiture I have never had a subject who was less preoccupied with his appearance. He is more into ideas. I could've painted a montage of the Contract with America he is holding and some other symbols of things he is interested in and left him out of the painting altogether and I don't think he would've cared.

I have written a response to the WP but I have no confidence they would print it. The article was nearly 3000 words long but you are only allowed a maximum of 700 words to respond.

[Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco]

Sorry for the intrusion, this has not much to do with official portraiture but there is a figurative painter among the finalists of the Turner Price, the most important art prize in UK, the one who was won a couple of years ago by an empty room with the light going on and off, by the amazing title of on/off.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...ixartleft.html

Painting is not that dead, after all
Ilaria

[Cindy Procious]

From the Gopnik article:

"Official portraitists don't share many of the tools, techniques and materials used by the contemporary artists whose work ends up in art museums -- they hardly even seem to share the same appetites. Recording a face for posterity and making it look fine and noble barely registers as something worth attempting in contemporary art, especially given how well it's been achieved before. What artist could hope to make a mark as a second Gilbert Stuart when there's hardly an American museum that doesn't already have a picture by the first ? When it comes to working in oil paint, the past's great portraitists have left so little breathing room that most artistically ambitious painters are likely to try their luck elsewhere."

Wow.

This is so patently ridiculous it's laughable.

[Thomas Nash]

Yeah, pretty funny isn't it? It kinda shows how much Gopnik is stuck in the confused 1970's or 80's art world mind set, far from being the "cutting edge" expert he would like us to think he is.

I think this concept has been pretty well debunked a long time ago. I addressed it in my response to the W. Post, we'll see if they print it.

He praised Gilbert Stuart for being an "important" artist of his day and never suggested that he should have been pursuing something "more cutting edge". Gopnik, (who has gotten his art history wrong in the past) seems to have forgotten that portraiture already had a strong tradition and the bar had been raised pretty high when Stuart decided to take a shot at it.

Many thought (and still do) that Anthony Van Dyck had taken portrait painting as far as it could go. Van Dyck had been dead 114 years when Stuart was born. Had Stuart been the more "artistically ambitious artist" that Gopnik envisions, and been afraid to even try to paint portraits, the folks lining up today at the National Gallery to see his work would be in for a big disappointment. Fortunately for everybody, Stuart didn't have access to Gopnik's wise council.

Gopnik has no problem labeling Sargent as an example of an "artist who mattered most" , despite the fact that by the time he took up the art form, BOTH Van Dyck and Stuart had already "left little breathing room". Fortunately Sargent didn't buy into Gopniks silly notion either. Aren't we all glad that our Mr. Sargent at least "gave it a try"?

Like you said, laughable.

[Michele Rushworth]

Tom, I'd be very interested to read what you wrote to the Washington Post, and I'm sure others would also. Could you post it here?