Figures of the Art World

Portraits of artists, critics, patrons and their circles, painted or photographed by their peers.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Figures of the Art World are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Artists have always pictured one another, along with the critics, patrons and friends who make up their world. Group portraits declared allegiances. Henri Fantin-Latour's A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870) shows Édouard Manet at the easel among admirers including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Émile Zola, and Max Ernst's At the Rendezvous of Friends (1922) lines up the future Surrealists alongside Raphael and Dostoevsky.

Photography made the studio visit a genre. Hans Namuth's photographs and film of Jackson Pollock dripping paint in 1950 shaped the legend of Abstract Expressionism, and Gianfranco Gorgoni followed Land artists such as Robert Smithson into the desert. Alice Neel painted Andy Warhol in 1970, shirt open to show his surgical scars, and in the 1980s Tseng Kwong Chi photographed Keith Haring drawing on New York subway walls. Benjamin Katz spent decades photographing German artists including Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter.