Comparación de las tres propuestas de nube en función de los

In 1910, Picasso painted the portraits of the publisher and dealer Ambroise Vollard, the poet Uhde, and his friend and dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, representations that are often said to have marked the “death of portraiture”,72 _{but are also referred to as heralding} radical new perspectives for the portrait.73

If the identity of an individual portrayed involves recognition, then these portraits posed challenges to the realm of portraiture, a genre traditionally characterised by notions of likeness and truth.74 _{Picasso’s cubist portraits were not mimetic representations of the} portrayed, but rather explorations of forms and their relationship to each other, as signifiers of the sitter. For van Alphen, this marks a new mode of representation in which “no signifier forms a fixed unity with a signified”, and forms can be viewed as interchangeable (sometimes seen as a mouth, sometimes a nose, for example).75 _Referring to Yve-Alan Bois’s description of Picasso’s cubist portraits, van Alphen writes of Picasso’s representational signs as entirely virtual and nonsubstantial, with the subjects portrayed shaped mainly by “the differential process between the signifiers used.”76 _{This is} exemplified in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, in which Picasso’s use of splintered forms of faceted grey and brown hues is so tonally subdued that the painting’s near-monochrome nature renders the representation of the sitter almost indecipherable as a body.77

Yet the portrait ultimately is decipherable, and arguably recognisable, as a named and particularised individual. Van Alphen points out that while this may be so, it is the formal construction of the illusion of subjectivity that has become dominant rather than the presence or “essence” of the individual portrayed. This, then, problematises the portrait in

72 _{Benjamin Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture” in Melissa E. Feldman (ed), Face}

Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia,1994, p. 54.

73 _{Beyer, p. 353; Van Alphen, Art in Mind, p. 25.}

74 _{Marcia Pointon, “Kahnweiler’s Picasso; Picasso’s Kahnweiler” in J Woodall, p. 190.} 75 _{Van Alphen, Art in Mind, p. 27.}

76 _Ibid.

Figure F19

Pablo Picasso

Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910 Oil on canvas, 101.1 x 73.3 cm

its role of authenticating presence not only in mimetic representation but in the representation of individual authenticity. Picasso’s Kahnweiler offers a conception of the subject as “simulacrum instead of as origin”, depicting a “loss of self instead of its consolidation.”78

If Picasso’s cubist portraits can be said to challenge the traditions of portraiture in its authenticating role, Marcia Pointon offers a viewing in which Kahnweiler nevertheless produces identity or likeness and truth in the portrait. Pointon argues that the event of a portrayal sets up a relationship between artist and sitter, affecting both artist and sitter in a perpetual oscillation between observer and observed. The resulting image, she claims, recognises the naming of two individuals, not just the one portrayed. Here, Pointon aptly applies Paul de Man’s observation on the work of the anthropologist to the artist; the more intense and “truthful” the oscillation process between the observed subject and the observer grows, “it becomes less and less clear who is in fact doing the observing and who is being observed. Both parties tend to fuse into a single subject as the distance between them disappears.”79

With this notion of oscillation in mind, the resulting image comprising two individuals and the dynamic between them can be said to be irreplaceable with any other genre, thereby carrying uniqueness of meaning as a portrait. The portrait, however, does not end with the resultant image as product. It comprises the relationship of the artist and sitter, but it also extends to the afterlife of the image, including what is written about it. It is the combination of fiction and reality that Picasso has employed in Kahnweiler – “the avoidance of all but the slightest trace of resemblance” – that allows for the entry of that afterlife, that

78 _{Van Alphen, Art in Mind, p. 25.}

79 _{Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight:Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2}nd _{rev. edn, introd. W Godzich,}

“empowers Kahnweiler (the dealer/writer/friend) to portray his portraitist and, by so doing, to insert his own self-portrait into the arc of the oscillating pendulum.”80

Despite seeming to be a generic representation that is so removed in resemblance from the individual it claims to represent that it has “lost face”, Picasso’s Kahnweiler is linked to an inheritance of portraiture in ways beyond style and technique alone. This is demonstrated by the example of Ingre, one of France’s most distinguished nineteenth century portraitists. Pointon draws parallels between Picasso’s Kahnweiler and Ingre’s portraits of Charles-Joseph-Laurent Cordier (1811) and of M. Bertin the elder (1832). In artistic terms, the depictions share common elements of emphasis; the male subject in three-quarter length body, the triangular compositions, highlights of the face and hands, and a heaviness of image on the lower half of the canvas. In cultural terms, Ingre’s portrait of M. Bertin is one of France’s best-known national portraits. Besides being regarded as a deeply psychologically penetrating depiction, Bertin the man represents the ideal of French bourgeois masculine strength.81

The oscillatory relationship in the contract that exists between Ingres and his subject is implicated in the oscillatory relationship between Picasso and Kahnweiler. Pointon claims that by linking Picasso’s painting with a type of portrait by Ingres,

I am reinstating both the “Frenchness” and the “portraitness” that are mobilised in the coming together of the Spanish Catalan artist and German Jewish dealer … It is the portrait as genre and the academic French tradition (a tradition to which Cézanne, as precursor of Picasso, is also indebted) that are called upon as a language of grand gesture in an image that was through these invocations “canonised” and ensured an afterlife.82

Pointon presents Picasso’s Kahnweiler, then, as a shared experience of subjectivity, a constant oscillation between sitter and artist that culminates in a composite representation of identity, and isfirmly linked to the authority of the genre.

80 _{Pointon, p. 194.}

81 _{Pointon, p. 195.} 82 _{Pointon, p. 196.}