Portraiture's Harsh Lessons

David Lenz, awarded $25,000 as the best of this show's lot, has painted up what seems to be a fisheye photo of a crew-cut little boy in front of a barbed-wire fence, then added in a giant, searing sun above him. Second-prize winner Yuqi Wang, who got $5,000, also gives us a dream's-eye photographic view, this one of him and his pretty, naked wife perched on a rooftop with the Manhattan skyline in the background.

What's more boring than listening to someone else's dream? Seeing it in art.

Warts-and-all is just skin deep.

The idea that there is something bold about showing ugliness in a portrait instead of beauty has a history at least five centuries old. Think Leonardo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Mary Cassatt and Lucien Freud. (Roman sculptors were also into warty faces.) By now, it's just another cliched way for portraitists to flag their "serious" intent. There are more old men's wrinkles in this show than you could shake a stick at. (If you happen to get kicks from shaking sticks at wrinkles.)

If it's ugly, make it hurt.

If a portrait wants to prove it's more than empty flattery, it had better go much further than just throwing in some wrinkles -- as Doug Auld does in a close-up of a burn victim named Shayla, whose black skin is a tight mask of scars. It's one of the only pictures in the exhibition that need their links to the grand tradition of painted portraiture: By making a monumental oil painting of a badly disfigured face, Auld evokes the absence of such faces from the art of the past -- and from the larger social consciousness that past represents.

On top of that, the simple freak-show voyeurism implicit in this painting is so vexed, it's compelling. Shayla seems proud to present her damaged self to us in a portrait; should we also be proud of staring at it?

A signature is just graffiti by another name.

Titian signed his pictures on their fronts. So did Rembrandt and Manet. That was back when marking the active presence of the artist meant something. Now a signature just seems like empty advertising. Some clear marking on a picture's back is all posterity -- and the market -- demands of any artist. A picture's front should be so great that a signature would only mar it. In this competition, however, artists' names are flourished everywhere. (It yields a new axiom we might call Outwin Boochever's Law: The duller the picture, the more flamboyantly it's likely to be signed.)

A child's toy can outdo oil paints.

An interesting, less staid option for portraiture, explored by New York artist Steve DeFrank: First, grab a vintage snapshot of your paunchy parents, nude (from circa 1972, judging by dad's groovy sideburns); then render the couple life-size in Lite-Brite -- the illuminated, brightly colored pegs that kids were playing with back when the shot was taken. DeFrank's plug-in picture, titled "Mom and Dad," gives some spark of inventiveness to one corner of the portrait exhibition. There's a hint of transgression in the idea that little Stevie has used his favorite Christmas gift to craft a nudie picture of his folks.

Save sentiment for greeting cards.

Laura Karetzky's "Veronica Lean Back" is one of 51 finalists in the competition.( - Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)

What's the difference between expressiveness and sentimentality? Maybe it's the ease with which the emotion is triggered and the triteness of the feelings involved. Some Hallmark moments in this show: young couples bravely facing up to meet life's challenges together; a little girl with a far-off gaze reclining on a windowsill; a woman in a half-lit empty house at dawn. Art teachers everywhere call these "girl-in-a-room pictures." They try to wean students off them by junior year.

Portrait art shouldn't have to be complacent art.

The most striking difference between this portrait competition and one of the country's big roundups of contemporary art isn't so much the look of the work or even its quality. It's the sense of adventure and consuming creative ambition that is missing from this show and that is there, at least as an overarching mission, in most serious contemporary work.

In many of these portraits there's a sense that it's enough just to look like a fine example of the kind of portraiture that's come before, and that has always earned some cash and pleased its clientele.

It's the attitude of a short-order cook -- even of a great short-order cook -- who aspires to making yet another fine fried egg but never thinks of recasting what breakfast could be.

The Outwin Boochever 2006 Portrait Competition Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, runs through Feb. 18.