Powerful Acts of Portrayal
Sackler Exhibition Explores Asian Portraiture's Many Facets

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 9, 2006; Page N01

Portraits have a thousand uses. "Facing East: Portraits From Asia," a sparkling exhibition of about 70 works culled from the collections of the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler galleries of Eastern art, shows off a lot of them.

A portrait can venerate our predecessors, as in the ancestor portraits of Qing Dynasty China, whose solid symmetry and elaborate ornament do honor to the honorable kin they show.

It can titillate, in a tiny topless miniature of a woman painted in India in 1628.

It can evoke camaraderie and gratitude, as in a group portrait commissioned by a British commander in colonial India, which proudly commemorates the squad of native troops he'd trained to serve the Raj.

When a portrait is made of stone and shows an Old Kingdom pharaoh, it can speak of secular power and sacred potency, and for how they are permanently combined in the single royal figure the statue stands in for.

A portrait can also do its very best to record the particular face and form of a Confucian master in Japan in 1824 and act as the occasion for him to think deep thoughts about the nature of resemblance, and then inscribe them on a pupil's reverent depiction of him.

Oddly enough, the vast range of roles these portraits served, across the full breadth of Asia over something like 4,000 years, can make you think that maybe looking at the way these pictures were used isn't quite the way to come to grips with them.

The show gives you the sense that some kind of basic urge to portray comes first. Function may come along later, to take advantage of that urge and maybe justify it.

Perhaps humans are so solidly wired to care about other humans and their faces, and so well equipped with hands and eyes for making pictures of them, that portraiture is sure to crop up in nearly any culture, anywhere, anytime.

Portraits may be almost like the stars in the night sky: They appear before us for reasons we don't really understand, and then we read a ton of meaning into them. We may even go on to find a use for them in navigating through our world -- a complex social world, in the case of portraiture. That fits with my own introspection: I take photos of people who are close to me and am happy to view snapshots of others whom I barely know, and yet I'd be hard-pressed to say why. The whole thing seems a tiny bit irrational and function-free, and that's a crucial part of the true "feel" of portraiture as you come across it in the everyday.

Or maybe the notion of "spandrels," developed by evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, can help account for how people pictures work: Sometimes the haphazard course of evolution produces a feature -- the egg chamber of certain snails, or portraiture -- that only comes about by accident, as a byproduct of the development of other, more crucial evolutionary traits, such as spiral shells or oversize brains and nimble hands. Once that Darwinian byproduct -- that "spandrel" -- is at hand, however, it's not long before some use pops up that it can be recruited to.

It's not that the functions of portraits don't matter. A huge amount of the meaning of a portrait comes from its use. When the Persian ruler Fath-Ali Shah had himself portrayed in 1814 in the guise of his legendary forebear Rustam, decked out in jewel-encrusted mail with the beard and ruddy cheeks of a great he-man, the picture proclaimed his prowess -- and maybe helped deny the huge defeat that Persian forces had suffered the year before. That made the picture something very different from, say, a similar image of Rustam used to illustrate a fancy volume of heroic tales put together during a period of peace.

But while those functional descriptions can give a decent account of the kind of thing a portrait is and how it works at a specific time, they don't provide its final explanation. There's a "why" to portraiture that simple function never seems to answer.

For one thing, use alone doesn't seem to say why one culture's portraits are full of color, while another's favor a duller palette. Or why the Mughals saw the profile as the most distinctive, satisfying view of an aristocratic face, whereas Qing Dynasty China preferred to see the faces of the mighty from directly in front.

This exhibition's portraits demonstrate a widespread pleasure taken in the act of capturing a likeness that transcends the varied uses they're put to.

That pleasure in depiction is evident in the 1824 portrait of the Japanese sage and also in a thumbnail drawing done around 1615 of the Mughal prince Khurram, so exquisitely precise it truly takes a magnifying glass -- there are several hanging not too far away -- to take in all of its immaculate particularities.

Even Mehmet the Conqueror of Turkey, who first brought image-hating Islam to Constantinople, a city famous for its love of holy Christian icons, couldn't resist the tug of highly realistic portraiture. In the late 15th century Mehmet imported realist painters from Venice and Ferrara to help their style take root in his court. A picture from the Freer collection, apparently by an Ottoman or Persian artist, has all the illusionistic virtues of the best Italian work. It even seems to celebrate those virtues in the subject that it shows, since it depicts a painter busily at work on a portrait, seemingly of yet another artist or scribe. No greater purpose here, apparently, than to revel in the way portrayal works.

Once photography arrives, you could even argue that its impressive reality effect helps undermine the functions that earlier portraiture could serve. In a photo taken somewhere around 1895, an Iranian dervish looks less mystical than he might have in a portrait painted 100 years before; the photo absolutely fails to capture his devout search for God, and yet it depicts flesh so well that that seems like enough.

Empress Dowager Cixi, one of the last royal rulers of China, is known to have been as self-obsessed and status-conscious as any ruler ever. And yet she was happy to pose for photographs that leave her stripped of all the regal poise achieved in her predecessors' painted portraits. When Cixi poses for her picture as the Bodhisattva of Compassion, amid painted waves and cheesy artificial lotuses, the 1903 photo makes her seem all too frail and flawed and human -- as though she knows that Chairman Mao is not too far away and that she'd better do her best to manufacture status while she can.

The photo lets us watch her faking it in a way no painting ever would -- and yet the aging ruler knows it captures her, and that's a charm she simply can't resist.