Katy Grannan (American, b. 1969). Anonymous, San Francisco, 2010. Inkjet print; 39 x 29 in. (99.1 x 73.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 (2010.351)
Artists often tell us that the Met is their favorite museum to visit, and their comments on works in the collection are among the most insightful one can hear (see, for instance, the fantastic results of The Artist Project, where a hundred artists respond to objects in the Museum's galleries are being assembled—forty episodes are already up). I was thrilled, then, when my colleagues Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Stephanie Herdrich asked for my advice last January about living artists they might approach to contribute to the Audio Guide for Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends. I agreed with them that an artist's voice, particularly in the context of an exhibition of a painter's portraits of his friends and acquaintances, would be vital and exciting.
Many contemporary painters have spent their careers making portraits of their friends and family. Works in the Met's collection by Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein, and Alex Katz are representative of the possibilities of paint to render familiar visages in new and exciting ways. And certainly, many younger painters also often depict friends in their work. Elizabeth Peyton comes to mind here.
It was interesting to me, though, to think instead about contemporary photographers. Modern portraiture has been so influenced by the camera, and recent work in that medium has, in my view, completely reinvigorated the portrait-making mode for our times. The list could be really long here, but Katy Grannan (born 1969, Arlington, Massachusetts) for me really stood out as someone who thinks deeply about what it means to make a portrait—and I also knew her to be an extraordinarily smart thinker and speaker.
Grannan's Anonymous (San Francisco), in the Museum's collection, is exemplary of her skill at plumbing the psychological depths of her sitters while simultaneously pointing out the impossibility on the viewer's part to understand who these people actually are. To make the series of works entitled Boulevard, of which this image is a part, Grannan spent time meeting her subjects on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. She would ask them to pose for her against the stark white walls of nearby buildings in the bright, sharp midday California sun.
In that these pictures are structured through her (albeit brief) relationship with the sitter, and in that they outline worlds of possible meaning through her subjects' stance, costume, expressions, and gestures, Grannan's photographs share much with Sargent's sensitive and intimate pictures of the many creative characters that inhabited his milieu. There is also more than a little bit of ambiguity in the relationship between portraitist and sitter—between what we think we might glean about someone from a picture of them and what we can never really know.
"It seems as though Sargent admires something in Dr. Pozzi that perhaps he's unwilling to reveal of himself," says Grannan. "It's like the painting is the communication. And it's filled with sensual details, rapture, and palpable pleasure. Dr. Pozzi seems unabashed about his physicality, about his power, about his lust for life, his narcissism. This quality of self-assuredness is one of the things that Sargent clearly admires so much."
Stephanie Herdrich and Katy Grannan speak about Sargent's Dr. Pozzi at Home on the exhibition Audio Guide.
You can listen to the complete Audio Guide for Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends here. Grannan's perceptive observations can be heard on the recordings about The Pailleron Children, Dr. Pozzi at Home, Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife, Self-Portrait, and Edwin Booth.
Related Links:
Katy Grannan's website
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends—Audio Guide