'This is a Portrait' Exhibition Described as 'Witty, Ironic and Excellent' (Portland Press Herald)
By Tom Porter
Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), “One Portrait of One Woman,” 1916, oil on composition board. Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, bequest of Hudson D. Walker from the Ione and Hudson
Freelance writer and art historian Daniel Kany described the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s current exhibition, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, as “an excellent launching point for thinking about how art works.” Writing in the Portland Press Herald, he also described the show as “informative, entertaining and challenging.” The exhibition, which runs until October 23, 2016, features more than sixty abstract, symbolic, and conceptual portraits. It is, said Kany, “premised on the idea that people may be represented by qualities other than physical likeness.”
