From Scorsese to Hockney: New York exhibition celebrates portraits of artists

Art

The portraits of Brigitte Lacombe, Catherine Opie and Tacita Dean are highlighted in a grand love letter to art and the artist

Perhaps literary critic Cyril Connolly was wrong when he observed, “There is no more sinister enemy of good art than that stroller in the hallway.” The coronavirus pandemic was an even greater enemy, forcing museums to close and people to dress up . Now that the virus appears to be in retreat, there’s something life-affirming about a photo exhibit celebrating famous faces.

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“When I thought about portraits, I realized, oh, of course I look at all these faces!” says Helen Molesworth, author and curator of Face to Face at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. “This is a post-pandemic show. We’re just coming out of the days when we were apart and masked. It made a certain silly sense to me that I was looking at these pictures of people I admired.”

The exhibition, which opened last month, features more than 50 photographs by French-born Brigitte Lacombe and US-born Catherine Opie, as well as two films by British-born Tacita Dean.

It is a love letter to art and artists such as Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Miranda July, Rick Owens, Martin Scorsese, Patti Smith, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker and John Waters. There is some thematic overlap between the three artists, inviting visitors to compare and contrast.

There was also a surprise for Molesworth. On the phone from Los Angeles, she says, “What I didn’t know but really happened in space is that all three of these artists are pre-digital artists who entered their craft during the analog period. Some of that analog sensibility is there.

“On the show you are very strong in the hands of experts. You have three artists who are past mid-career: they really know what they are doing. I organized the show on my laptop so I didn’t realize how much craftsmanship was going on here until we were in the room with the actual stuff.”

All three featured artists are women, but no, Molesworth is not attempting to make a statement of representation. “It’s such a boring situation. I find patriarchy pretty boring. I don’t feel like it’s a statement. I definitely feel like these three artists are exceptional and at the top of their game, and no one has ever asked a curator in the last 500 years, “Gosh, so many men!” You know what I mean?”

Brigitte Lacombe: Maya Angelou, New York, 1987. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

The exhibition includes a selection of Lacombe’s portraits taken in her studio or in the artists’ studios. In the catalogue, Molesworth notes how Lacombe captures intimate details: “The small gap between Hilton Als’ two front teeth, the way Joan Didion’s left eye stands slightly higher than her right, the sly almost-smile that pulls at Fran Lebowitz’s corners.” ‘ mouth.”

Lacombe has also spent decades photographing film sets and theater productions and has worked with directors such as Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Anthony Minghella, David Mamet, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack and collaborated with Sam Mendes, Michael Haneke and Federico Fellini.

The 72-year-old got her big break at the invitation of actor Dustin Hoffman while filming All the President’s Men (1976) in Washington and Los Angeles. She remembers from New York: “It was all new to me. I was new to America, new to the world of film, and it was pretty spectacular.

“Even though I was younger and not fully aware of everything, I could see the scale of the production and [director] Alan Pakula was quite an impressive character. It was the pinnacle of Robert Redford and Dustin’s fame. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were on set.”

Lacombe worked on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. Director Spielberg “was fascinated by France — a big Francophile — but he’d never really traveled or anything,” she says. “He offered the role of Professor to François Truffaut, one of his heroes.

“Truffaut’s character is called Professor Lacombe: she was named after me. I think I was the only French woman Steven knew at the time. I thought oh that’s nice, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that naming a François Truffaut character after you is pretty awesome! Everyone was young and that’s only in hindsight.”

But her most cherished collaboration is with Scorsese, stretching back two decades to Gangs of New York. She only wishes she had met him sooner. “I come like a guest with carte blanche to document as I please. It’s a wonderful position for me and he’s the most extraordinary man. Not just him, but everyone who works with him needs to be at the top. Everyone wants to do well with him and impress him and do their best.”

Catherine Opie: John Waters, 2013. Photo: Catherine Opie and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

When she photographs performers, Lacombe says she strives to build a sense of trust so that they lose their alertness and move beyond the fabricated image. “For me, a portrait is a one-on-one collaboration with the person I’m photographing. They can be, say, Tom Hanks or Barack Obama or any of the people I photograph, but it’s a unique moment between you and them. It’s an exchange.”

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore once gave Lacombe just five seconds to take his picture at the Cannes Film Festival. But one of her most touching experiences was with South African prisoner-turned-president Nelson Mandela.

“It went – and I have it on my contact form – from one moment this totally dazzling smile and then the second that smile was gone it was a very tragic face. I could not erase from my memory the incredible emotions I felt upon seeing this transformation. Looking at these two pictures side by side, it’s like the portrait of this man. I felt like I really see that person.”

Opie’s photos of artists in Face to Face span the years 1993 to 2019. These include Justin Bond, Thelma Golden, Miranda July, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall and Rick Owens. With many, the sitter is consumed by his thoughts and does not meet the gaze of the camera, but .

The 61-year-old has not yet fulfilled her dream of photographing Barack and Michelle Obama, but has had a memorable experience with Hollywood actor and activist George Clooney, who stood on a sound stage in an elaborate wardrobe – but someone forgot to bring theirs Shoes.

She says from Los Angeles: “So I have this portrait of George Clooney with his arms crossed, looking down – sort of like the portrait of John F. Kennedy in the White House – but he’s standing there in a beautiful, perfect suit with no shoes . There’s a flaw in this photo that I just love that feels very different than a celebrity portrait in a way.”

Opie first gained notoriety for using traditional portraiture, which brought members of the LGBTQ community into the cultural mainstream. “I did this work thinking I was screwing myself to get a job as a teacher and things like that. But in the end the work was immediately celebrated by curators and museum exhibitions and galleries that wanted to represent me.

“My own internal homophobia, which I thought would actually be a disadvantage for me in my career but I had to do because of the time we were living in, turned out to be the right thing to do. I always tell my students to follow what is truly important to you because that is where the work will be most worth doing for yourself.”

Nonetheless, there was some backlash from social conservatives over a show at the 2008 Guggenheim in New York. “I was threatened as a lesbian by a person who was a stalker and said they would track me down and go to any of my posts to steal my child from me because they didn’t want that child to grow up in a gay household that they would have to be in a Christian household.

Tacita Dean: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 2021. Photo: Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris

“It gave me tremendous paranoia because my son was born in 2002, so in 2008 he was just a little boy and just thinking that at these big museum openings someone is going to come and try to steal my son? That’s crazy.”

Born in Canterbury, UK, Dean has created a number of portraits of older artists including Cy Twombly, Mario Merz and Merce Cunningham. In Face to Face, her film One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021) chronicles a conversation between 99-year-old painter Luchita Hurtado and 49-year-old artist Julie Mehretu.

Dean’s fascinating 16-minute film Portraits (2016) captures Hockney’s approach to art at his Los Angeles studio. It begins with a shot of the artist standing with his back to the camera, smoking and reading a book.

From Berlin, where she lives, says Dean, 57: “He was very happy about it. I asked him, ‘Can I film you smoking?’ and he said, “Yes, I’ll be happy to sit for you” – he used the word “sit”. He’s just fanatically passionate about the right to smoke.”

She had previously noticed Hockney’s idiosyncratic way of smoking cigarettes. “A lit cigarette is still one of those things that looks better on film than on video. It looks great on film.”

Hockney painted a portrait of Dean’s 10-year-old son, Rufus, which hangs on a wall in the film. “It’s called Portraits because he had all his portraits and his portrait of my son and then my portrait of David with my son in the background and then the five cigarettes. The plural portraits, plural cigarettes.”

What is she hoping people will take away from Face to Face? “I hope for nothing. An exhibition is all about what happens between the viewer and the work, and that’s something the artist doesn’t have much control over. It’s about that relationship. I find such questions – sorry, forgive me – really banal.

“Obviously I hope people enjoy it. I hope people go off somewhere in their heads. I don’t know. I don’t think artists generally hope for such things. I personally don’t hope for anything. It all exists in that private space between the person looking at it and the work, and that’s all in someone’s mind, and that’s the relationship.”

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