How to Read Portraits (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

This latest volume in The Met's acclaimed How to Read series explores the meaning of portraiture across time and cultures--from funerary masks to realism to abstraction

Portraiture goes far beyond capturing a likeness. This intimate format, the subject of the latest title in The Met's How to Read series, sheds light on the subjects' and makers' politics, relationships, aspirations, and insecurities. Featuring 50 works across time and cultures, from the lifelike Faiyum funerary masks of ancient Roman Egypt to Pablo Picasso's and Marsden Hartley's abstractions to likenesses imagined by contemporary artists, this publication by bestselling author Kathryn Calley Galitz explores the notion of what constitutes a portrait, beyond mere verisimilitude. Galitz illuminates how portraits through the ages have been used to reveal character and convey power and status, how artists as varied as Rembrandt and Cindy Sherman embraced artifice and role-playing to explore identity, and how portraiture can encompass a wider variety of works than typically thought. This reexamination of a deceptively familiar genre presents fascinating ideas about what these images can tell us about the sitter, the artist, and the culture in which they lived, and ourselves.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press