Whose portrait is it, really?

Dr. Erel Shalit, Jungian Psychoanalyst

With the advent of photography, portrait painting naturally declined. The instant photograph is so much more accessible than the laboriously painted portrait. With the widespread use of the camera and the ease of automatization, there is no longer a need even to pose in front of the professional photographer. And with computerized digitalization, mass production and mass reproduction are at everyman’s hand. Even the subtle improvement by retouch is part of the global laboratory, for everyone to intervene, copy and change, paste and delete.

But every development arrives at its zenith and breaking point, dialectically creating the need for its own opposite. When ease and speed, zapping and browsing, shallowness and copying become the dominant perspective, then the need for authenticity and character, reflection and depth of soul constellate as urgent necessity. Thus, the painted portrait returns in the search for genuine identity, for identity in depth.
But that very moment, everything becomes more complicated, and we are obliged to inquire, “Whose portrait is it, really?”

Looking at the amateur photo of children, family and friends, we have no doubt who the person in the picture is, and that the picture is of the person portrayed. But with the professional photography, the photographer may be distinctly present, certainly in artistic photography. And when we arrive at the painted portrait, the boundary between the artist and the “victim” becomes even more blurred.
For example, in 1905-1906, Gertrude Stein sat eighty times as a model for Picasso, but every time he erased the painting, in fact, destroyed the face of his model. Only later did he paint it out of memory. Is it only she, Gertrude Stein, that appears in the portrait, or do we recognize Picasso there, as well?
Or, when we look at the paintings of Lucien Freud, we immediately see he has extracted archetypal themes from his object’s soul. In fact, he has used the painted person to emphasize universal motifs, prominently aspects of death and sexuality, Thanatos and Eros, which are of primary concern to him. He uses the painted object to artistically embody the issues of his, Freud’s, interest. He paints as if he were Freud, the psychoanalyst, who projects into his victimized patient his own counter-transferential preoccupations – but unlike the analyst, he has the freedom of the artist to do so.

Hagit Shahal relates differently to the person whose portrait she paints. She facilitates the extraction of the fullness of individual identity. She brings out the life and the soul, anima and character, which merge with the exterior features of the person. In her portraits, Hagit Shahal restores the depth of character, and they become truly three dimensional, not only by the master’s stroke, but marked by the soul of the artist.
This is the very counterpoint to transient mass production and mass reproduction. It is the restoration of depth in lieu of post-modern fragmentation.

In classical theatre the actors wore masks, ‘personae,’ from which we also have the word ‘person.’ As a matter of fact, the mask hid the private face of the actor, thus enabling the voice that rises from archetypal depths to be heard – per sonare, ‘by means of voice.’ That is, we must not attend solely to the external features, but we have to see and to hear from within the depths of our personality. Thus, for instance, among the Greek gods, only Hestia is not visually depicted in art. Hestia, goddess of the hearth, fills the home, or the soul, with warmth, with feeling, with care and compassion. She is pure interiority and can not exist solely by herself, since she has no tangible physicality. But without her, the house becomes cold, empty and alienated. In profound portrait painting, we notice Hestia’s mark when the colours of mood and the fleshiness of soul come alive.
Therefore, at the final account, the portrait belongs to the painted person whom the artist, like Hagit, has helped to come alight by integrating external physicality with internal subjectivity.

Dr. Erel Shalit, Jungian psychoanalyst, author of several professional articles and books. A new revised edition of his book The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel has recently been published