Portraiture as a Genre – From Oil Painting to Poster

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been looked at so much that it's hard to see it with fresh eyes, but that's exactly what makes it worth returning to. The painting is famous for its smile that never quite settles – a face that refuses to give the viewer a clear answer. That was novel for its time: portraits were supposed to be idealised, not ambiguous.

The same artist painted Lady With an Ermine, a portrait where the gaze is just as enigmatic but the posture more dynamic – the head turned, the animal in her arms alive rather than merely symbolic. Both works show a Renaissance painter experimenting with what a face could communicate without smiling, without speaking, through direction and light alone – an early version of what would later grow into a broader tradition of art where the human figure is the main subject.

Few artists have examined their own face as systematically as Vincent van Gogh. Over just a few years, he painted an estimated thirty-odd self-portraits, often because he couldn't afford to pay models. The result became something other than necessity – a series of studies in how one and the same face can look completely different depending on light, brushwork and mood.

The self-portrait with the bandaged ear is the most famous, charged with a story that's hard to separate from the image. But it's in the less dramatic versions – the stubble, the pipe, the blue background vibrating with short strokes – that you see his real obsession: painting himself until the face became a landscape of colour rather than a likeness.

In Vienna around the turn of the century 1900, artists like Gustav Klimt broke the portrait tradition apart from within. The face kept its realism, but everything around it – clothing, background, hair – dissolved into ornament and gold. The portrait of Helene Klimt shows that tension clearly: a quiet, almost shy face surrounded by patterns that nearly take over the image.

It was also a turning point in how women were portrayed. A work like Porträt Einer Dame balances between comfortable bourgeois fashion and an artistic language moving towards something more abstract, while the portrait of Inga Maria Thiel shows how line itself – sharp, almost graphic – began competing with colour to carry the expression.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec moved the portrait from the salon to the street. His lithograph of the dancer and performer May Milton is a portrait shaped by the demands of poster art: quickly readable, bold in outline, built to catch a glance in passing rather than hold it for hours. It's still a portrait, but with an entirely different pulse than the Renaissance's quiet studies.

That logic lives on in later reinterpretations of famous faces – Marilyn Monroe keeps returning as a subject, as much icon as individual, while works like Girl With Pearl – the Undead Edition show how contemporary artists have no qualms about twisting classic portraits into something darker and more playful. The genre has never been sacred.

Contemporary portrait art is rarely after likeness. The face remains as a structure, but is often fragmented into fields of colour, rough brushstrokes or geometric shapes – as if the artist trusts that the viewer will still recognise the human, even once the details are gone. It's a movement that feels related to how we relate to identity today: less fixed, more fluid – a further development of the entire figurative tradition of depicting the human being.

Works like Modern Abstract Woman 4 and Abstract Face Portrait work with exactly that tension between recognition and dissolution, while Minimal Art Girl and Girl In Red No.2 show two different routes to the same goal – one stripped down to a handful of lines, the other saturated in colour and pattern. The portrait simply keeps finding new ways to ask the same old question: what is a face, really, once you take everything else away?