Download or read book How to Read Portraits written by Kathryn Calley Galitz and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2024-04-29 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraiture goes far beyond capturing a likeness. This intimate genre sheds light on the subjects’ and makers’ politics, relationships, aspirations, and insecurities. Featuring more than fifty works across time and cultures, from the lifelike Faiyum funerary masks of ancient Roman Egypt to Pablo Picasso’s and Marsden Hartley’s abstractions to likenesses imagined by contemporary artists, this publication probes the notion of what constitutes a portrait, beyond mere verisimilitude. Bestselling author Kathryn Calley Galitz illuminates how artists through the ages have exploited the genre to reveal character and convey power and status; how artists as varied as Rembrandt and Cindy Sherman embraced artifice and roleplaying to explore identity; and how the term “portraiture” encompasses a wider variety of works than typically thought. This reexamination of a deceptively familiar genre provides fascinating ideas about what these images can tell us about the sitter, the artist, the culture in which they lived, and ourselves.