“Every portrait is, in some sense, a self portrait that reflects the viewer. Because ‘the eye is not satisfied with seeing,’ we bring to a portrait our perceptions and our experiences. In the alchemy of the creative act, every portrait is a mirror.” In his opening paragraph of the chapter entitled, The Image as Reflection”, in Reading Pictures: Images of love and hate, Alberto Manguel explores the role that the representation of the human face plays in art in our psychological connection to a work of art.[1] From the moment of birth, we are linked to one another through the primal action of eye contact. We see others seeing us, and that provides a sense of safety and reassurance. Fine Art Magazine

In the most recent works of Kathleen Gilje, the eye is the point of entry into the soul and spirit of her subjects. Drawing on the portrait work of 19th century painter, John Singer Sargent, Gilje revisits and reinvents a series of forty-eight works by an artist known for his elegant, stately portrayal of women of wealth and station in England and France at the height of the industrial era. But, unlike Sargent’s women, who posed, conspicuously displaying the symbols of their wealth and social prominence in the form of formal dress, elaborate jewels and luxurious settings, Gilje’s women are naked from the waist up. The artist bestows upon them the proud bearing of their Victorian counterparts. In a faithful and skilled rendering of the original angle and position of the head, the artist matches her subject with the body of a contemporary model, completing a revision, or ‘restoration,’ of the individual portrait. Careful research of Sargent’s women reveals that each was likely the subject of his portraiture because of her husband’s economic success. But, each woman, masked behind her husband’s name and the accoutrement of social standing, had a story of her own to tell. Strong and intelligent, determined and committed to social causes, some endured the stigma of a Jewish heritage or sexual preference that would no doubt meet with scorn, yet each presents as strong and resolute. With the trappings of social status removed, the human qualities—of beauty, strength, conviction and self-assurance—are revealed.

Kathleen Gilje is an artist accustomed to dealing with great art and artists from the past. Trained in Italy and at NYU’s Conservation Center, she has restored paintings by artist such as El Greco, Goya, Carpaccio, Cranch and Tintoretto and others for museums worldwide. She believes that conservation is more art than science and that only by delving into the mind of the artist can the restorer achieve an authentic outcome. Beginning in the early ‘90’s, Gilje undertook the challenge to reconfigure the process of looking at paintings from the past. Combining her knowledge of restoration techniques with her own artistic style, she began creating replicas of great paintings by the Old masters and others. By altering these works, either subtly or more overtly, she incorporates contemporary themes that alter our way of looking at the work of art. In 1997, she told curatorial associate, Amy Oliver, as part of her, Contemporary Restorations show at Williams College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, “Old masters carry with them a narrative that defines ‘culture,’ wherein we view mysterious, perhaps important people, now forgotten, who encompassed the political and cultural events of our time. My ‘contemporary restorations’ revitalize and reconnect these images by introducing new narrative implications that reflect contemporary common culture: nude tattoos, condoms, electric chairs, etc. These paintings are an extension of my experience as both a painter and conservator…they are a critique of art history as well, and a discourse on painting.”[2]

In Gilje’s ‘restoration’ of Northern Renaissance painter, Petrus Christus’s, Portrait of a Lady, the addition of a pierced nose, lip, eyebrow and ear on the figure were designed to make a cultural statement. She notes, “Piercing for purposes of self-mutilation, or as a symbol of beauty is gaining popularity now. I decided to use piercing as a restoration technique here because Christus’s image of this young girl is otherwise so pristine and perfect. Marring her appearance in this way is a shock to the viewer. It is incongruous and causes us to re-examine our contemporary view of ‘beauty’. It moves the impression of a regal, 16th century figure into the realm of contemporary punk culture. The ‘restoration’ is subtle, but profound in its impact.

In another work, violence is played out in a different way—directed outwardly rather than self-imposed. Gilje chose the Portrait of Cardinal Nino de Guevara, the Grand Inquisitor, by El Greco. The original hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has fascinated her for years. Frederick Hartt, the art historian, has described the cardinal: “The direct and piercing gaze, which makes one wonder how many heretics the Inquisitor has committed to the flames. The dry features, the grizzled beard and the glasses are all rendered with the same close observation that picks up on the nervous clutch of the jeweled fingers of the left hand on the arm of the chair.”

Gilje’s ‘restoration of this famous El Greco work includes the addition of Andy Warhol’s, Orange Disaster in the background. A series of electric chairs, with a sign that reads ‘Silence’ can be seen in the space behind the cardinal. The artist says, “You see the electric chair in the exact three-quarter turned position as the Inquisitor’s throne. This addition echoes the wooden panel that appears in the original painting. It is horrifying to me that this man’s face reflects a calm behind which is so much destructiveness and the word, ‘Silence’ just reverberates. It is chilling.”

In another, more recent project, Gilje applied her ‘restoration’ skills to a more contemporaneous subject. Working with a number of well-known art experts in the area, she polled each to learn which famous painting or artist they felt most closely akin to. Based on their responses, she merged the persona of her subject with the painting that had been his or her inspirational work over the years. Not only capturing the shift in painting style, palette and mood of the original work, she was able to recreate the subtle personal characteristics of her subjects, lending a humorous and ironic blend of old and new–the central theme of the artist’s work since taking up her brush.

In critiquing the show, Curators, Critics and Connoisseurs of Modern and Contemporary Art, at the Francis Naumann Gallery in New York in 2006, art critic and painterly subject of the show, himself, Robert Rosenblum wrote, “ The range of Gilje’s anthology covers not only an encyclopedia of styles—from ancient to soft-grained photographs, from the hard archaic clarity of Ingres’s hyperrealism to the pulsating warmth of Ruben’s living flesh; but with the widest range of human situations that can switch abruptly from public personae to domestic intimacies.” Rosenblum is pictured in a portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingress of the Comte de Pas Toret (1826), which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago and was reported by friends to bear a resemblance to him. Of his own visage, suspended magically above the form of Ingres’s Comte and the other familiar personalities appearing in the show, Rosenblum wrote, “I began to believe not only in my own Second Coming, but in that of the other people I knew whom Gilje had transformed into what often seemed their perfect ancestral figures, unique and indissoluble matches.”[3]

Returning to the present and the current collection of Gilje’s interpretation of Sargent’s works now on display at the Naumann Gallery, there is an understandable context and historical grounding for the artist’s bold transformation of these familiar paintings into their ‘restored’ form. Coincidentally, the current show at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY, also features Sargent’s portraits of legendary and aristocratic women. The exhibition delves into his contribution to the world of fine art in the late 19th and early 20th century. He spent much of the 20th century widely unappreciated and fairly unknown. Considered only a deft technician, if anything, who played a larger role in our historical understanding of power and wealth than he did within the confines of art history, Sargent was seen as out of touch with modern art, modern times, and modern women.

Curator, Paul D’Ambrosio cites Sargent with a more astute observation of his privileged subjects than history gives him credit for in the museum’s three-part show: Portraits in Praise of Women, Women of Beauty and Women of Substance. For the latter group, he wrote, “Sargent’s, ‘Women of Substance’ are strikingly different. Dressed predominantly in black with their busts carefully hidden and wearing little to no makeup, they exude confidence and humility—though these attributes are, in many ways, just as manufactured as the long necks, creamy skin, and cinched waists of their less-substantive counterparts. And while some of these women were indeed brilliant, pioneering forces at the time (including Mary Elizabeth Garrett, founder of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and M. Carey Thomas, president and dean of Bryn Mawr College), others just hoped to appear as such. It’s a cunning move not unlike those famous Eve Arnold photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses in a Long Island park, yet one that subtly nods to the new sort of standards that women—especially wealthy women—held themselves to at the onset of the 20th century.”[4]

In spite of this renewed perspective on the work and intent of the artist, himself, Gilje moves the viewer closer to the realm of the sociopolitical and economic realities of that period in history. Sargent’s heroines, as portrayed by Gilje, are gifted with a 21st century version of liberation—not only from the constricting gowns, ponderous jewelry and elaborate settings in which they posed– but from the restraints of social propriety and station that could both empower and encircle them, depending on their strength and determination to move from the shadows of their wealthy and titled husbands and to secure an identity of their own. Reviewer, John Yau, writing about Gilje’s Naumann gallery show says, “By removing the women from their social circumstances, [she] dares viewers to see her subjects anew and full of untapped potential, to see Sarget’s women differently and to make a break with the past as well as to understand it differently…Some of the women look at us quiet and assured, others are depicted in three-quarter view; they are reflective or gazing off at something we will never know. All of them are self-contained, open and distant…we certainly can’t pin any of them down or say who they are, which is their great strength…they are both particular and anonymous…No matter who we are and what we have done, this anonymity is what we all share in the face of time.”[5]

It was Mark Twain, writing during the same period that Sergent was painting who said, “Nothing of any lasting value has ever been accomplished by a naked person.” The history of modern painting could challenge that aphorism as our collective consciousness has been thoroughly remixed and re-directed by the arrival on the scene of French academic painter, Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s, Nymphs and a Satyr (1873), the bold and shameless glance of Eduard Manet’s nude prostitute in Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), his Olympia of the same year, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s, The Bathers (1887), Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905-06) or Pablo Picasso’s ground-breaking Cubist masterpiece, Les Damoiselles d’Avignon (1907), to name a few. American historian Bram Dijkstre makes it clear in his lengthy study of the female image in the 19th century, Idols of Peversity, fin-de-siecle woman existed mainly in her reflection; either as a mirror for the world of man, civilized and tame, or as the mirror of nature, bestial and unleashed.”[6]

Kathleen Gilje liberates many of these women of the past, empowering and enabling them in ways that both magnify and celebrate what they could have or did accomplish in their own time. Whether reinterpreting the paintings of the Old Masters or, in her latest ‘restored’ series of transformative images of Sargent’s portraits, the artist holds a mirror up to us as viewers and challenges our assumptions. She could have been recalling Augustine, as he wrote a commentary on the Psalms: “…God will show you his features…and his radiance will show you who you truly are. If you see yourself with blemishes, you will displease yourself and will already be on the path to beauty. Pointing out your faults, you will learn to become beautiful.”

In her freshly-defined, intimate interpretation of the familiar, Gilje has conjured a new identity in which the sitter, artist and observer become all at once, one and the same.

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

(right) K. Gilje, portrait of a Lady Restored (Lady Lisa) (1995)

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References:

[1] Alberto Maguel, Reading with Pictures- A History of Love and Hate, Random House (2001)

[2] Artworks: Kathleen Gilje, Contemporary Restorations, Williams College Museum of Art (1997), text by Amy Oliver, Curatorial Associate.

[3] Kathleen Gilje: Critics and Connoisseurs of Modern and Contemporary Art, Francis M. Naumann Gallery, NY (2006). Exhibition essay by Robert Rosenblum.

[4] Portraits in Praise of Women, at the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, through December 31, 2010. Exhibition text by Paup D’Ambrosio, Chief Curator.

[5] Kathleen Gilje: 48 Portraits- Sargent’s Women Restored, Francis M. Naumann Gallery, NY (2009). Exhibition essay by John Yau.

[6] Bram Dijkstre, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Oxford Paperbacks (1988).