Portraits without a Face
Portraits that identify a person without showing their features, through backs, hidden faces, objects, symbols or colour.
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A likeness does not always need a face. Painters have long turned figures away: the lone walker in Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818) stands with his back to the viewer, and René Magritte's Not to Be Reproduced (1937) shows a man whose mirror reflects only the back of his head. Magritte later hid a face behind a floating apple in The Son of Man (1964).
Other artists portray people through what surrounds them. Charles Demuth's I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) honours the poet William Carlos Williams with a speeding fire engine, city lights and fragments of his name. Byron Kim's Synecdoche (begun 1991) is a grid of small panels, each matched to the skin tone of a different sitter. The painter Shaina McCoy works from family snapshots but leaves the faces blank, so posture and clothing carry identity.
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