art and portraits

[cacian]

is there a difference between a genuine portrait of a real person and a made up imaginary one?
what examples of made up portraits are there?
and can the artist tell the genuine from the imagined one?

[North Star]

I suppose it depends on how a 'made up portrait' is defined. Rembrandt certainly didn't have Aristotle sitting for him in this picture. I find it troublesome to think of portraits, or art in general, as either 'genuine' or 'imagined'. Art is artifice, it is never entirely 'genuine', even if there aren't winged children flying around.

[Lokasenna]

Cacian, as a French-speaker, will appreciate René Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images:



Magritte, when questioned about this, said:

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying!"

The intention seems to be to provoke the idea that a thing and the image of a thing are not the same.

[stlukesguild]

Matisse famously responded to a woman who was critical of one of his paintings of a woman:

Woman- Monsieur Matisse, that woman's arm is entirely too long.

Matisse- Madame, but you are mistaken. That's not a woman; that's a painting.

[stlukesguild]

To respond to the OP, a portrait is a painting (or drawing, or sculpture) of a specific person. It is usually made from direct observation, but it can be made from memory, or symbolic.

This painting, by Pierre Bonnard, is a portrait of the artist's wife:



Bonnard portrays a young woman bathing... although his wife, Marthe, was by then probably already in her 60s. He paints her as he remembers her... and as he imagines her in his mind's eye.



This portrait is also of the artist's wife... although it was painted some years after Marthe had died. She had an obsession with bathing, often taken 3 or 4 baths a day. The artist remembers her in the tub... as he had seen her so many times... but he also imagines her magically transformed through light and color... and perhaps he even imagines her as a princess enclosed in her sarcophagus within a Byzantine church in which everything seemingly melts away or disintegrates into fragments of light and color dancing across mosaic tiles.

[Danik 2016]

Seated-Woman-Marie-Therese-By-Pablo-Picasso.jpgThat´s a portrait of one of Picasso´s loves. He captures her essence by distorting the image.

[cacian]

I suppose it depends on how a 'made up portrait' is defined. Rembrandt certainly didn't have Aristotle sitting for him in this picture. I find it troublesome to think of portraits, or art in general, as either 'genuine' or 'imagined'. Art is artifice, it is never entirely 'genuine', even if there aren't winged children flying around.

great painting :
interesting what you have just said i am not sure i understand why troublesome however
art is genuine because it means something to the artist
and imagined because art allows one that,

[cacian]

Cacian, as a French-speaker, will appreciate René Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images:



Magritte, when questioned about this, said:

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying!"

The intention seems to be to provoke the idea that a thing and the image of a thing are not the same.

could the opposite be true?
ceci est une pipe?

[cacian]

Matisse famously responded to a woman who was critical of one of his paintings of a woman:

Woman- Monsieur Matisse, that woman's arm is entirely too long.

Matisse- Madame, but you are mistaken. That's not a woman; that's a painting.

which leads to think what is a painting?

[Lokasenna]

could the opposite be true?
ceci est une pipe?

Nope. That's the point.

[North Star]

which leads to think what is a painting?

Painting is a work of art that is made by applying paint on canvas, wood, stone, or on any other medium.

[cacian]

Painting is a work of art that is made by applying paint on canvas, wood, stone, or on any other medium.

indeed but
metaphorically speaking it is more then that.

[cacian]

Nope. That's the point.

i see. I get the feeling that denying one's owning can be contradictory to art expressive or implosive.

[North Star]

indeed but
metaphorically speaking it is more then that.

We must not run before we can walk.

i see. I get the feeling that denying one's owning can be contradictory to art expressive or implosive.

As usual, I have no idea what you are saying, or trying to say.

Magritte's point is that art is art, it is not reality. You cannot grab the image of a pipe and smoke it. You cannot kill Odysseus and marry Penelope - they only exist as words on paper [and perhaps as images in film adaptations...]. No matter how 'realistically' a work of art is painted or written, it is not real in the sense that they exist in the actual world as anything more than the works of art.

[tonywalt]

I miss these discussions.