Mask or mirror? Portraits in the age of Picasso: a survey of 20th-century portraiture in Europe poses searching questions about the role played in the modern world by western art's oldest genre

Of all the traditional genres of painting--landscape, still-life, the narrative--portraiture persisted into modern art with the greatest demonstrable success. From Cezanne and Van Gogh through Picasso and Matisse to the German and Austrian expressionists, right down to the School of London, portraiture has proved to be a central, ongoing subject for major art. Even Jackson Pollock contributed to the genre in his masterly Portrait and Dream (1953; Dallas Museum of Art). With numerous monographs and monographic exhibitions on portraits and self-portraits from Van Gogh to David Hockney, scholars and curators have hardly neglected the subject.

Curiously, however, 20th-century European portraits have rarely been the subject of a major survey. This exhibition, skilfully curated by Paloma Alarco of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Malcolm Warner of the Kimbell Art Museum, makes a stimulating and challenging contribution to the topic. They do not shy away from asking the big questions: what qualities in modern portraiture have enabled the genre to persist so successfully and how does portraiture in the age of Picasso differ from preceding periods?

The exhibition advances two principal answers. 'Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter': Oscar Wilde's famous epigram forms the basis of the first argument. The essential transition from the traditional portrait to the modern is from the appeal to likeness of the sitter to the appeal of the artist's sensibility. As Warner says in his trenchant and salient catalogue essay, 'in the modern portrait it was the will and style of the artist that would predominate'. Artists now had 'sitters on their own turf'; they were 'guests in the artist's world'. Such portraits are collected privately and publicly 'as works of art first and likenesses second'.

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The turning point in this fundamental re-evaluation of the portrait is, of course, Cezanne, who is wed represented with two portraits of the ever-patient, ever impassive Mme Cezanne (Fig. 5) and the Kimbell's own Man in a Blue Smock. Their implacable impersonality is the hallmark of their modernity. In comparison, Graham Sutherland's laboured and fussy representation of Lord Beaverbrook, seems to belong on the cover of Time rather than the art museum.

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But the argument takes us only so far. One of the highlights of the exhibition is Picasso's Ingrist Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Olga) (1923), still in a British private collection (Fig. 3). Seated in an upright chair but turning to reveal three quarters of her face, dressed in a monochromatic russet suit and set against a blank, grey ground, Olga's presence--not just her likeness, even though beautifully delineated--overwhelms the viewer. The traditional architecture of head, hands and drapery serves both the sitter and the artist. Only Picasso could have painted it, to be sure, but we are free to read her pursed lips, her rigid body, her austere beauty and note the unintimate relationship, the chilliness, between them. Modern portraiture is not just the art that consumes art and discards likeness.

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The transition from sitter's likeness to artist's sensibility did not pass without friction or difficulty. Ambrose Vollard sold Picasso's mighty 1910 cubist portrait of him within months of receiving it, although it had been a gift from the artist. Yvonne Landsberg rejected Matisse's electrically charged portrait of her after many sittings, both, one imagines, for the futurist arcs that leap from her body and the blank-eyed face, the perfect mask of shyness.

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The Landsberg picture introduces the second argument for the continuing vitality of 20th-century portraiture and its distinctiveness from earlier modes: the adoption of the mask as a new convention for portraits. John Klein in a thoughtful catalogue essay examines the possibilities and tests the limits of the argument. Naturally, he starts with the role of African masks as the principal source for the change, as the vital 'intercessors' for Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, enabling them to break with literal representation and 'to evoke otherness'. The idea of the mask marks another transition, from the portrait governed by appearance to the portrait governed by identity. It is a powerful idea and extends from the early 'primitivisers' to Dubuffet and Giacometti, even down to a startling Leon Kossoff Head of Seedo (1959), where the inch-think paint surface moulds the face.

The argument about the mask as key to modern portraiture, again, goes only so far. John Klein notes the paradox of the situation: the abstractness of the mask and its strategy of concealment versus the specificity of the portrait and its ambition to reveal the true self. He notes the limitations of the mask theory in the expressionist work of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele (Fig. 1): 'their portraits imply the sitters' active engagement with an interior reality, a psychological depth and vitality in which the mask has no part'.