{"id":153802,"date":"2021-07-30T09:01:04","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T13:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153802"},"modified":"2021-07-30T11:49:31","modified_gmt":"2021-07-30T15:49:31","slug":"on-the-faces-of-strangers-michael-borremanss-pandemic-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/07\/30\/on-the-faces-of-strangers-michael-borremanss-pandemic-portrait\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Faces of Strangers: Micha\u00ebl Borremans\u2019s Pandemic Portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Vincler\u2019s column\u00a0Brush Strokes<\/a>\u00a0examines what is it that we can find in\u00a0paintings\u00a0in our increasingly digital world.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Micha\u00ebl Borremans, Study for Bird<\/em>, 2020, oil on linen, 14 1\/4 x 11 3\/4″. \u00a9 Micha\u00ebl Borremans. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.<\/p><\/div>\n

I didn\u2019t understand how much I needed to look at the faces of others until I drove into Manhattan this past December to stare into a stranger\u2019s unmasked face on my birthday. The sole reason for this trip was the stranger\u2019s face\u2014a portrait by\u00a0Micha\u00ebl Borremans, an artist I had taken to describing for nearly a decade as my favorite painter whose work I had never seen in person.<\/p>\n

I knew Borremans\u2019s work mostly from the giant monographs and exhibition catalogs on his work I\u2019d check out from the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library several years ago while I was working as a rare-book librarian a few blocks south at the Morgan Library & Museum. I\u2019d lug these giant books from one library to another and then home in my backpack on the train from Midtown back to Brooklyn, renewing them over and over until they could be renewed no longer, sometimes requesting them again immediately, repeating the cycle. These paintings, or at least their reproductions, had a special resonance for me then. In the Morgan\u2019s reading room, I routinely looked at the miniatures painted in the medieval manuscripts requested mostly by visiting academics. And when I would reshelve the printed books housed in J.\u2009P. Morgan\u2019s former study in the old library, I\u2019d always take a moment to look upon Hans Memling\u2019s panel painting Portrait of a Man with a Pink<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

J.\u2009P. Morgan\u2019s Study (West Room) showing Hans Memling\u2019s Man with a Pink<\/em>, May 2016. \u00a9 The Morgan Library & Museum. Photo: Graham S. Haber.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This day job rhythm fueled an almost ambient thinking about the relationship between medieval manuscript illumination and what I still think of as \u201cearly Netherlandish\u201d panel painting, to use the art historian Erwin Panofsky\u2019s now-antiquated phrase for this work created during the transition from the late medieval to early modern periods. In Borremans\u2019s paintings, I saw a contemporary inheritance of this dawning moment. Borremans lives and works in Ghent, home to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck\u2019s Ghent Altarpiece<\/em>. Begun in the 1420s and completed in 1432 (probably primarily by Jan after Hubert\u2019s death and following his initial design), this landmark historical artwork was one of the first paintings to use oil paint and a series of transparent glazes to create radical effects with light. Ghent is some twenty-five miles from Bruges, where Memling was the leading painter in the second half of the fifteenth century. In Memling\u2019s work, the uncanny renderings of skin tones alive with light and paired with lushly textural treatments of often brocaded and jeweled clothing captivated me with their detail. Skin and clothing, faces and postures are also essential elements of Borremans\u2019s work. As I pored over the reproductions of his paintings in those giant library books, I sensed a genealogical connection across generations to his geographically proximate forebears. This is not to say that his paintings are antiquarian-seeming curios; rather, he takes on figuration as if in a sort of dare, rendering his subjects with a freighted ambiguity. In Borremans\u2019s work, it is as if the Catholicism of the early Netherlandish painters\u2019 cathedral setting has fallen into ruin and been replaced with a desolate absurdist stage set. The people in his portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb)<\/em>, 1432, twelve interior panels, open view, 11 \u00d7 15′. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

On that blustery Saturday in December, I put on my mask, left the shelter of my car parked on the mostly empty streets, and ran across the pavement through the freezing rain to the David Zwirner Gallery, where my partner, Kate, had booked me a timed socially distanced appointment for my birthday. The trip to Manhattan to see the single Borremans was my second attempt to reengage with looking at paintings after the onset of the pandemic. I appeared to be the only visitor in the gallery that morning. In the large skylighted room farthest from the entrance, I was able to gaze upon the smallish canvas I had come to see. Measuring less than twelve by fifteen inches tall, Study for Bird<\/em> is an intimate work painted by Borremans during the pandemic. In scale it echoes that Memling I spent years looking at in the Morgan. Returning to the Zwirner gallery was entering a familiar but seemingly altered space, not abandoned but haunted by the too-real fullness of the year\u2019s history. It was a rare gift of solitude. Kate stayed with our baby still asleep in the car, as my eldest finished drawing on a birthday card. I had the gallery to myself, except for two attendants, one at the front desk and another in the gallery itself. They had pointed me in the right direction to see my first Borremans in the flesh.<\/p>\n

What did I see? A human face, a stranger\u2019s, unmasked. Settled, contemplative, resolute, yet melancholic. An inward look. Softly femme. Slight makeup, most noticeably blush high on the cheeks. Or perhaps they were pink with exertion. A touch of gloss on the lip, which caught the light, but so did the bridge of the nose and the peak of the left brow. A ballet dancer, a player onstage? Or maybe, as the hooded costume suggests, a pilot or a fencer. The collar floating, otherworldly, tracing a circle below the neck.<\/p>\n

The problem here seeking a solution by the painter is the face the hood encloses, part transcribed realism and part affective invention. The figure is set before a dark ground; the darkness is drafted, filled as an afterthought. There\u2019s something cursory, vague about this darkness, which serves to hold the figure in a field of contrasting tone and then get out of the way, to be the shadow uninvolved in the otherwise complex play of light across the face and its surrounding costume. The bit of darkness in the space behind the neck creates an area where the image peels away or falls apart, but just for a flash, a blip, just for a moment. (Maybe this is where long hair is secreting out the back of the hood.) This ambiguous bit of fabric or hair behind the head flares slightly up from the body and creates an area of just enough strangeness to reveal the plasticity and thus the inventiveness of the painting itself, as if the painting were paused just before the stroke of completion.<\/p>\n

The attendant, maybe curious that I seemed principally interested in the Borremans painting, mentioned that it related closely to another by Borremans, titled The Pilot<\/em>, that was concurrently being shown at the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp. I had seen The Pilot <\/em>online along with paintings of rockets and people dressed in rocket-like costumes. Of Study for Bird<\/em>, she said the figure looks to be playing a pilot, \u201clike Amelia Earhart.\u201d It felt awkward and exhilarating having a conversation with a stranger about painting, attempting to remember how to do that, keeping our distance, wearing our masks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

View of \u201cColoured Cones,\u201d 2020, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. From left: The Pilot<\/em>, 2020; and Large Rocket<\/em>, 2019. Photo: We Document Art. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thinking back on that moment before the painting in the gallery, I now realize I would usually have taken the subway. I have only just started taking the train again, which has reminded me that the experience of New York usually is an experience of a sea of innumerable faces. Taking the subway means daily having at least one person\u2019s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can\u2019t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones.\u00a0In staring at the face in Borremans\u2019s portrait, I wasn\u2019t left thinking about the history of early Netherlandish panel painting. I was instead reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person.\u00a0Isn\u2019t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John Vincler is a writer and visual artist who has worked for a decade as a rare-book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at\u00a0<\/em>Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project about cloth as subject and medium in art.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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