Celebrity Soul: Lenbach’s Portraits

A solo exhibition of portraits by Franz von Lenbach focuses on the shifting relationship of painting to photography, as well as changing notions of celebrity, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Lenbach enjoyed international success as a portraitist, painting some of the most celebrated European figures of his day. He first established himself as a successful portraitist in Vienna, painting figures such as composer Richard Wagner and Emperor Francis Joseph I. Later in Munich he painted a large number of portraits of Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” as well as Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke, and Pope Leo XIII. A useful comparison to Lenbach and his success as a portrait painter is twentieth-century pop artist Andy Warhol, who is best known for his portraits of some of the twentieth century’s most famous American pop media icons such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe.

Lenbach and Warhol both worked from photographs. Lenbach took hundreds of photographs of Bismarck, for example, trying to capture the shifting psychological states of this complex personality. These photographic studies were complemented with rare sittings by the subject from which Lenbach created his portraits in oil. In contrast, Warhol relied exclusively on photography to capture the image of his subject. Often using commercial photographs reproduced in magazines and newspapers, he used photomechanical reproduction techniques to enlarge and transfer the image onto a canvas.

Where these artists diverge is in their concept of celebrity. Lenbach strove in his paintings to depict the private person behind the notable personage, creating intimate psychological portraits of some of the most public figures of his place and time. Warhol’s serigraphed heroes and heroines don’t tell one much about their interior lives, only about their currency as tabloid icons. Warhol’s insights into fame include the observation that famous people are, after a while, famous simply by being famous, as well as his most memorable and prophetic statement that “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” This notion of celebrity has so infused our culture that it might be difficult for post-Warhol viewers to imagine earlier ideas of celebrity like those explored by Lenbach.