The New York Times - Sunday, November 7, 1999

Preserved in Oil

Society portraits, many in a formal style worthy of Sargent, are in vogue again.

by Ruth La Ferla

Her spine buttressed by a pillow, her coppery hair set off by the russet shawl draped behind her, Elena Patterson sat for Hilary Cooper, a New York portrait painter, a picture of comely repose.

In a lambent corner of the studio where Ms. Cooper works in Long Island City, Queens, the two savored a moment of easy intimacy. "What's really fun is to watch the artist at work," Ms. Patterson said, glancing at Ms. Cooper, who stood in a beat-up crew-neck sweater and jeans, applying steaks of rusty brown to her canvas.

So restful was the scene, so evocative of the languor once famously captured in oils by John Singer Sargent, that you half expected a retainer to appear bearing a bright silver tea service.

Ms. Patterson, 57, who sat for the portrait to please her husband, a banker, found the embience enchanting. "This is another world," she said, brushing aside a stray swatch of hair. "I'd say that it's old-fashioned, and that definately appeals to me."

The scene did indeed conjure up an earlier epoch, a more gracious and leisurely age, when people embarked on grand tours, collecting bibelots along the way and having their likeness rendered by the leading painters of the day. As well it might. The finde-siecle tradition of society portraiture is back at the fin of this century, with clients ranging from Diane Von Furstenberg to George Plimpton to Hilary Auchincloss. Portrait shows of Sargent and Ingres, whose names once elicited yawns, are suddenly proving to be hot at the box office.

"A big fact of the late 20th century is that portraiture is on the rise," said Robert Rosenblum, the art historian who wrote the introductory essay for the catalog of the current Ingres show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Bravura painting of a Sargent or a Giovanni Boldini "used to be thought of as totally irrelevant trash," he continued, adding, "Now these artists are hot stuff again."

The effete sophistication and formality of earlier masters has lately cropped up in the works of contemporary portrait painters and photographers as disparate in style and technique as Paul Benney, a British artist who paints urbane Londoners in a 19th-century style, right down to their elegant frock coats; Adam Fuss, a modern photographer who is currently experimenting with daguerreotypes; and Lorenzo Poccianti and David Seidner, two photographers whose portraits, inspired by old masters, depict New York's ambitious young plutocrats in hyperglamorous fancy dress.

A similarly studied indolence shows in the work of Francesco Clemente. A latter-day Andy Warhol, if not in style then certainly in attitude, Clemente is driven, like his famous predecessor, to document the reigning divas of the hour, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Jerry Hall.

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, stern in the jeweled choker, as painted by Francesco Clemente.
From "Life is Paradise: The Portraits of Francesco Clemente"(PowerHouse Books)

"He does fashion portraits of glamorous people -- the Vanity Fair world," Rosenblum said. "I think up to a point, he has tried to step into that role."

His skills, and those of his peers, are feverishly sought after by clients who just a few years ago would no sooner have commissioned a portrait than they would be likely to vote for Donald Trump for president. During most of postwar art history, portraiture of prominent subjects, and especially commissioned portraits, were associated with fawning, sentimentalized images of children clutching posies, crusty dowagers and overfed captains of industry.

But the genre, once the art world's fallen woman, has dusted itself off and reclaimed its respectability.

"Ten years ago people would have been embarrassed to have their portraits done," said Martine Assouline, an aristocratic Frenchwoman, who, with her husband, Propser, published the portraits of Seidner, who is known for his hyperglamorous images of men and women in fancy period dress, like Pia Getty, Judith Peabody and Anderson Cooper. Mrs. Seidner died in June. "But today if he were alive, he would have 10 commissions a day," Ms. Assouline contends.

Demand for what her husband calls the "portrait mondain," portraits of worldly subjects, is indeed on the climb. "People want elegant, sophisticated images of themselves," Assouline said.

Visit the homes of affluent new Yorkers, stroll into many Manhattan galleries, or flip through the glossy magazines, and you will likely be greeted by pictures as formal, lavish and unabashedly gorgeous as any Sargent might have wrought. Here are the Boardman sisters, Serena and Samantha, modern society swans swathed by Seidner in old-fashioned tulle; here is Gale Hayman, the cosmetics entrepreneur, limned in a vintage green Halston dress by Aaron Schickler, the painter who memorialized Jacqueline Kennedy in a picture that hangs in the White House, and more recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Here are the children of Carol Mack, the society decorator, portrayed like tiny potentates in the period of the raj, as envisioned by Poccianti, a Florentine who photographs his subjects and transfers them to canvas with the aid of computer technology.

Here, too, are Clemente's self-regarding odalisques: Ms. Von Furstenberg stretched out on a divan and the Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, stern in a jeweled choker, and as impervious to the passage of time as a bug in amber. They are among the procession of models, society queens, tycoons, film stars and fashion makers clamoring to be mythologized on canvas by Clemente, whose sketches and portraits of Ms. Paltrow were used in the film "Great Expectations."

Some of Clemente's commissioned portraits, which he paints for fees of $50,000 to $100,000, are on view at the Guggenheim Museum and have been collected in a new coffee-table book, "Life Is Paradise" (PowerHouse Books, $TK). In becoming a portraitist for hire, the artist, a leading light of 1980s Neo-Expressionism, is continuing in a tradition at least as old as Rembrandt, but one that has always carried a built-in risk. If he frets that the need to flatter the socialites and celebrities who commission him might compromise his integrity, it doesn't show.

"Who wants to be respectable?" he recently told W magazine, scoffing at the matter.

Some of contemporary portrait sitters hope to recapture the languor of a vanished era or halt time in its tracks, a preoccupation increasingly common among those baby boomers now well into their middle years.

Others commission portraits as an unabashed act of self-veneration. In today's celebritocracy, "if somebody is known, they want to document their fame," Poccianti said.

"But if they're not an icon, they want to create a beautiful image, both for themselves and for their posterity," he added.

Penelope Weld, a social figure in New York, who quipped, "Most of these people don't have ancestors or family portraits -- but you've got to start somewhere." Ms. Weld commissioned a portrait of herself last year by Juan Fernando Bostos, known for his paintings of velvet- and pearl-freighted Washington ladies.

Marian MacKinney, the president of Portraits Inc., a storefront gallery on upper Park Avenue, said, "People come into the gallery and say, 'I want to have my portrait done like a John Singer Sargent,"' Ms. MacKinney, who represents about 200 artists and receives about the same number of commissions each year, said that about 60 percent of the business used to come from institutions like banks seeking portraits of directors for the boardroom. But these days, it is equally divided between industry magnates and private clients and their families, she said. She ascribes her clients' interest in part to millennial fever. "Portraits speak to people's sense of history," she said. "Our clients want to connect with the century they're in."

For some people, sitting for a portrait is an act of self-expression, something like having a couture dress designed or a room lavishly redecorated. Poccianti tells of a patron in San Diego who wanted a portrait to go with his house. "I have this great old castle," the client told the him, and the client wanted a medieval-style portrait to suit it. "He was really into the vibe," Poccianti recalled, chuckling.

For others, however, a sitting can be more profound. Ms. Weld, who elected to pose in the attitude of annunciation, said the painting, which hangs behind a curtain in her Upper West Side living room, meant for her eyes only, was symbolic, intended to celebrate the fact that Ms. Weld, who is in her 40s, was receptive to her own creative impulses.

Such whims can be costly. Artists' fees range from about $10,000 for a portrait by Ms. Cooper, who has done likenesses of Plimpton and young plutocrats like Hilary Auchincloss (a wedding commission from the subject's mother) to $25,000 and up for the work of top portrait artists, and into the hundreds of thousands for a painting by a world-renowned figure like Clemente.

But sums like these aren't apt to put off young Wall Street hotshots, newly arrived gentry and self-styled grandes dames commissioning portraits nowadays. Billy Sullivan, a New York artist whose work was featured as that of the character played by Greg Kinnear in "As Good as It Gets," has painted likeness of Hollywood notables like Sophia Coppola and Gina Gershon. He remembers being importuned by a caller from Mexico City.

"'Everyone in Mexico has done my portrait except Diego Rivera, and that is only because I was too young,"' the diva crooned into Sullivan's telephone. Some weeks later, he recalled, she materialized on his threshold, a pair of yelping terriers in her arms.

Clients of Poccianti, readily part with $10,000 to $15,000 for the privilege of being photographed in the regalia of real or imagined ancestors, in the opulent style of an Ingres or Bronzino. "They like the theatrically, the feeling they are playing a role," Poccianti said. "You can even sense a certain state fright when they are having their hair and makeup done."

Serena Boardman, who posed for Seidner last year for a photograph assigned by Vanity Fair, approached the project with bemused detachment. "It was fun, almost like playing dress-up," said Ms. Boardman, who was photographed in a frothy couture evening dress by Christian Lacroix."

"It would be great to commission a painting," she added, but conceded that might be intimidating. "It seems an awfully grown-up thing to do," she said."

Her feeling is shared by sitters of all ages, many of whom will do almost anything -- from slouching to dressing in gingham or jeans -- to avoid appearing stuffy. "Our clients come with lofty expectations -- they want to look as attractive as they can," said Ms. MacKinney of Portraits Inc., who customarily tells her artists to shave five pounds and at least as many years off their subjects. But they rarely ask to appear in costume or be portrayed as grander than they are. "I haven't seen any Napoleons lately," she said Nor has anyone approached her asking to look like an Ingres. "But who knows," she added. "It could happen any time."