monumental Beheading in Malta. It’s his
only signed work.
Further down the line, the 20th
century put lots of energy into evok-
ing presences, but also into disguising
them. Duchamp was constantly hiding
people in his art. Although his notorious
Fountain, the upturned urinal signed
R. Mutt, was meant to be a porcelain
vagina rather than a human somebody,
it was aimed cunningly at Katherine
Dreier, one of the judges who rejected
the work from a 1917 exhibition. Dreier
became a reliable patron of Duchamp—
he always knew how to charm ladies who
lunch—but not before she had produced
her own snippy 1918 portrayal of him as
a nasty spike penetrating a delicate hole.
Yup, that’s Marcel.
When the feisty American surrealist,
Dorothea Tanning, sought to memorialise
her own presence in art, she presented
herself as a topless Amazonian in a sea-
weed dress, attended by a befuddled little
monster cowering at her feet. Only when
I went to the big Dorothea Tanning show
at Tate Modern did I recognise the little
monster as a preguration of Tanning’s
paramour, Max Ernst, made recognisable
by his interesting haircut.
Funnily enough, these flighty con-
ceptual allusions end up feeling more
direct than the more recent and more
numerous efforts at portraiture by
Francis Bacon or Frank Auerbach. By
giving their sitters initials and names, we
might assume that Bacon and Auerbach
had specic ambitions to record specic
sitters. But the opposite seems to happen.
Auerbach may have painted Catherine
Lampert 60 times, but none of his repre-
sentations of her feels like a portrait. It’s
an insistent paradox. Auerbach’s heads
are real people, but don’t feel like it. Lots
of art through the ages is not a record of
real people, but feels as if it is.
And you wonder why we love art!THE REAL ME
Above: Birthday, 1942, by
Dorothea Tanning, is a Surrealist
self-portrait depicting the artist
as a topless Amazonian in a
seaweed dress, with a winged
creature at her feet that feels
suspiciously like Max Ernst, the
man she would go on to marry.
Right: Catherine Lampert Seated,
1990, by Frank Auerbach. He
painted her 60 times, but her
TANNING; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK AND LONDON ©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD 2019
AUERBACHpresence proves elusive
NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR ON ARTThe little
monster at
her feet is
Max Ernst
11-19-Abstract-Portraits-Waldermar.indd 71 19/09/2019 10:2871