An exploration of the portrait art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, focusing on his studio practice and his training of students.

Om portrætter af den franske maler Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

The fourth book of the Drawing Gallery Series is devoted to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Considered one of the greatest French draughtsmen of all time, the artist left thousands of preparatory drawings for his paintings, along with an incomparable series of almost five hundred graphite portraits that have always been deemed the highest expression of his genius. The Louvre collection offers excellent examples of these two aspects of Ingres' graphic activity; each work is accompanied by a brief comment.

This book examines the critical writing and journalistic reportage on Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, from the time of his renunciation of the Salon in1834 until his large retrospective at the 1855 Universal Exposition, the crucial middle decades of his career. This massive body of writing demonstrates how Ingres shaped his career in the rapidly evolving art world of mid-nineteenth century Paris. Enjoying the benefits of his affiliation with the Academy, the artist also employed certain modes of presentation, most notably the single-artist exhibition and illustrated monograph, through which he distanced himself and his work from the embattled world of artistic officialdom.

Ingres’ portrait drawings rank among the art’s supreme achievements, exhibiting the artist’s brilliant draftsmanship and rare ability to capture character and personal style. This splendid volume presents Ingres portraits of many affluent and distinguished men and women of his age, among them the celebrated French composer Charles Gounod. Sources include the Louvre Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) produced a body of work that strongly appealed to his contemporaries while disconcerting them. Even today, the odd qualities of his work continue to fascinate scholars, critics, and artists. In this handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book, Susan L. Siegfried argues that the strangeness associated with Ingres's paintings needs to be located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itself, as well as in the artist's very powerful--if often perverse--sense of artistic project. She shows that his major re-thinking of pictorial narrative - in his classical literary, historical, and religious subjects - was as central to his achievement as his distinctive rendering of the female figure in classical nudes and portraits. He was engaged in a complex process of giving visual form to narrative, which he did in new and unusual ways that involved him in a close reading of the texts on which he drew, including authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Dante, as well as religious narratives and stories about medieval and early modern French history.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by and presented at The Art Institute of Chicago, Sept. 25, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011.

Kehinde Wiley painted President Obama's official portrait and this is an early book from him documenting his extraordinary talents. "For most of Kehinde Wiley's very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects." -National Portrait Gallery "My intention is to craft a world picture that isn't involved in political correctives or visions of utopia. It's more of a perpetual play with the language of desire and power." -Kehinde Wiley "Wiley inserts black males into a painting tradition that has typically omitted them or relegated them to peripheral positions. At the same time, he critiques contemporary portrayals of black masculinity itself.... He systematically takes a 'pedestrian' encounter with African-American men, elevates it to heroic scale, and reveals-through subtle formal alterations-that postures of power can sometimes be seen as just that, a pose." -Art in America Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists-including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others-Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world. By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, imbuing his images with ambiguity and provocative perplexity. In Black Light, his first monograph, Wiley's larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men. The models are dressed in their everyday clothing, most of which is based on far-reaching Western ideals of style, and are asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures representative of the history of their surroundings. This juxtaposition of the "old" inherited by the "new"-who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak-immediately provides a discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope. Without shying away from the socio-political histories relevant to the subjects, Wiley's heroic images exhibit a unique modern style that awakens complex issues which many would prefer remain mute.