Portrait 1951

This print, ‘Portrait’ by Germaine Richier, is an etching which means that the image is created by scratching into a metal plate, covering it in ink, and running it through a press. You can see these scratches in the web of lines making up the face, a face that is both present and absent, knowable yet obscured by geometry. I always get a kick out of how this process, like drawing or painting, is additive as much as subtractive – the artist makes marks but also cleans them away, reworks and redefines. The head is bald, or capped, and surrounded by a thick, dark outline, a dramatic contrast of tones, making the figure seem isolated, floating on the page. The geometric lines dissecting the face remind me of Picasso, or even Cezanne, a kind of Cubist dissection of form. But whereas those guys broke things down to build them back up, Richier’s portrait feels more like an unveiling, searching for something hidden beneath the surface. Maybe it’s that the eyes are so simply rendered but still so expressive, gazing out, confronting us. Art is about seeing, and being seen, and here, in this ghostly portrait, we find both.