Breaking the Pose

Breaking the Pose – alternately titled Breaking the Pose (The Art Class) – is an oil painting from 1986 by the painter Jerome Witkin. Completed when the artist was 47 and working as a professor at Syracuse University, the work demonstrates why Witkin has been called one of the greatest contemporary artists of his time and one of today’s great narrative painters.

Breaking the Pose
Breaking the Pose (The Art Class)
Artist	Jerome Witkin
Year	1986
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	224 cm × 180 cm (7 ft 4 in × 5 ft 11 in)
Location	Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY

Jerome Witkin was born in Brooklyn, NY, 1939, to a Roman Catholic mother, Mary, and a Jewish father, Max. He had an older sister and was born an identical triplet, though the third child was stillborn. Jerome Witkin's living twin is artist and surreal photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. Both parents influenced Witkin’s art in different ways. Before the Great Depression, Mary’s family had wealth and promoted the arts to their children with music lessons and poetry. Her family lost everything in the Stock Market crash of 1929, but she passed her love for the  arts and culture onto her children. Witkin’s father, Max, played a darker role in Witkins life. When Mary and Max were still married, Max tended to be an unpredictably violent man who abandoned his family when Witkin was 4 years old. Witkin graduated high school in 1957 and spent time in Berlin for artistic study. He married his first wife, Kieny, in 1962 and had their first child, Christian, in 1966, and their second, Gwendolyn, in 1967. Witkin reflected on the failure of his first marriage, taking the blame due to his self-absorption and over-demanding art career. In 1971 he was offered a job teaching at Syracuse University’s School of the Arts.

Witkin began his artistic career capturing life's beauty through still life's and architectural  landscapes. This shifted in the mid 1970's when Witkin began to focus more heavily on what he refers to as the trauma of the “human condition,” feeling as if his talents could be put to better use representing issues of social significance. Breaking the Pose was Witkin’s brief mental reprieve from the looming destruction and chaos in which he had surrounded himself for over a decade, while still tapping into his need for social expression.

Witkin uses his paintings as a platform to speak the visual language of the human subconscious and by doing so had inserted himself into the narrative movement of the post-modern art scene. His paintings have a cult following due to the current-ness of his social commentary within his pieces. Witkin has been described as having the skill of old Masters with the current oeuvre of a social realist or an abstract expressionist.

Critics compare Witkins skill, style and psychological thematic content to artists such as Lucien Freud, Manet, Ingres, and Goya.

Description

Breaking the Pose is an oil on canvas painting which stretches 88 by 71 inches, making the human figures depicted nearly life-size. With frenetic and overlapping impasto brushwork, as well as large sections of canvas devoted to wrinkled cloth and other unidentifiable blocks of color there is a strong initial appearance of disorder in the painting. Intentional, thick brushwork, such as the dark heavy line of the artist's easel and the deep, rhythmic shadowing of the backdrop contrast with the backdrops silver and the highly saturated primary colors of the models coverlet.

The three prominent figures within the painting plus the hand protruding from the lower right corner, are linearly positioned diagonally with Witkin's self portrait(s) as the in-painting artist at the lower right corner and a brunette nude toward the upper left corner; both of whom help frame the dominant subject of the center of the scene.

The artist is staring intently at the blonde model and the disembodied hand, painted with fierce, energetic brush strokes and is incompletely outlined in red, protrudes from the lower right corner of the canvas, pointing all 5 of its fingers in the models direction. The blonde’s right breast, ribcage and hip are accentuated with a thin stroke of highly saturated red which stands out in contrast to the bright yellow of her coverlet. On her right side the thick streak of blackish-green which runs along the contour of her waist calls attention to the blonde's naturalistic ivory skin tone and the sideways, feminine “v” of her posture. Both brushstroke techniques cause the woman to “pop” out of the canvas.

Witkin also uses masterfully implemented coloring techniques to frame his intended focal point within the painting in order to keep his audience focused. If Witkin’s placement of figures creates one visual path, the progression of primary colors intercept to form an X which creates a clear radial structure, with the blonde at the center. With her orange strawberry hair, and the candy-apple red and banana-boat yellow of her blankets, she is intensely highlighted by the only warm hues, with very minor exceptions, of the entire painting. The farther away the painting gets from the blonde, central figure, the more monochromatic and lackluster the color becomes. In front of the central figure is a muted blue coverlet and the artist dons a green shirt of low saturation, the exact color of the brunette model's coverlet.

Execution

Witkin claims to be impeded by the use of popular, inexpensive materials of the young and inexperienced artist. He finds that, instead of cotton-duck Witkin prefers linen primed with two coats of acrylic gesso. Witkin agrees that there is a reason that “artist”-grade material is more expensive. Witkin has discovered the universal media recipe he concocts before starting any painting. By mixing “six parts gum-turpentine with one part stand-oil and one-and-one-half parts Damar varnish,” Witkin ensures a long lasting matte finish. Linseed oil helps to quicken the drying process.

To add the finishing touch to his work, after the painting has had a month to dry, Witkin will go over it one last time with a mixture made of the same ingredients as he used to begin his painting. A prominent key to Witkin’s process is one that every artist must discover for themselves: how to feel the paint they’re working with and allow the paint to guide the artist.

Witkin is an impulsive, emotional painter. Witkin chooses to draw up preparatory sketches of his figures before applying paint to the canvas as they are how Witkin documents his artistic ideas and his journey of the investigation into his painting, but claims that too much prep drawing causes frustration. Once he begins painting he prefers using rigger brushes. With this tool he can masterfully manipulate the thickness and intensity of the brushstrokes.

Preparatory charcoal sketch for Breaking the Pose with Lisa Pannella as model.

While Witkin is spontaneous, he also has a clear, non-negotiable vision he wants to portray. Sometimes he must paint and repaint a figure multiple times in order to get the result he sees in his head. No matter how difficult the subject is to paint, the end result must look effortless to the viewer.

Witkin uses photography as a technical influence in his paintings to add a sense of movement and activity. He achieves this technique by blurring forms closer to the edge of the canvas as if a shutter was trying to keep the focal point in focus.

Witkin also uses the theater to influence his work and claims each piece is a dramatic collaborative effort between painter and model. Witkin has conversations with his models to discuss how best to capture the intended human experience within each scene.

Breaking the Pose is a nearly-life-size painting that captures a snapshot moment of models posing for a painting within a studio setting. Witkin painted himself as the artist within the piece who is painting the models. Witkin used model Lisa Pannella to create Breaking the Pose’s preparatory charcoal sketches.

Influences

For inspiration and contrast in creating Breaking the Pose, Witkin used 17th century Spanish master and court painter, Diego Velasquez’s ambitious royal portraiture, Las Meninas. Las Meninas is a Baroque painting, finished in 1656. It is considered one of the most important works of Western art and currently hangs in El Prado Museum in Madrid. Witkin pays subtle yet direct homage to Velasquez in a number of exciting and fascinating ways. First with his addition of his own lady in waiting. One of the two watches placed within the painting is held by the brunette model in the upper left corner. Witkin has obscured her face to state that she is secondary, as is a servant to a princess. Her broken pose, captured forever on the canvas, shows her taking  the opportunity to check the time. She is literally a lady, waiting.

While not a similarity explicit in the works of art themselves, both Witkin’s and Velasquez’s pieces have multiple titles. On its art gallery tombstone, and in essentially every online mention, Witkins work has a single title: Breaking the Pose. Jerome Witkin's biography, "Life Lessons The Art of Jerome Witkin," written by Sherry Chayat, is one of the few places a researcher can find the pieces subtitle The Art Class. This detail isn’t even on the piece’s tombstone at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG). What’s arguably more interesting is that the MAG tombstone speaks almost entirely on how Witkin modeled this painting after Velasquez’s Las Meninas, even including a reproduction of the Spanish masterpiece. Witkin’s biography, which goes into some depth about this little discussed piece, implies its meaning is fairly shallow and was purely intended to be a mental reprieve from the emotionally taxing societal discourse Witkin had been exploring for years. The biography fails to mention Las Meninas as inspiration for Witkin at all.

The mirror also further represents the dichotomy found in the two very different interpretations of the painting; One from the Memorial Art Gallery's tombstone and the other from Witkin’s own biography. The tombstone strongly suggests that the young man in green is Witkins self portrait. Witkin's biography in which the alternate title The Art Class is recorded, explicitly states that the hand protruding from the lower right corner of the canvas is Witkin, calling it a “metaphorical self-portrait.” By leaving the meaning of the painting open-ended, Witkin strongly encourages viewer participation. The painting is full of symbolism, allusion, and allegory, but there is no single, definitive interpretation. Witkin himself has said that he does not want to dictate the meaning of the painting, preferring instead to let the viewer find their own meaning. This open-endedness is in keeping with Barthes's idea that the author is dead and the meaning of the art is created by the audience.

Witkin’s art recalls Rolland Barthes argument in his revolutionary 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” which claims that the author is not the only (or most important) source of meaning in a text. Instead, the reader, or viewer, plays an active role in constructing meaning by bringing their own experiences and interpretations to the text, or artwork. By bringing one’s own experience to a work of text, Barthes says of literature, one creates the text’s meaning. Translating this concept to visual art, it can be inferred that an audience of the graphic arts, too, is free to interpret the image in their own way, without being constrained by the artist’s intent. Barthes's essay is particularly relevant to Jerome Witkin's painting Breaking the Pose, as Witkin deliberately invites the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning.

This extension of Barthes’ hypothesis is supported by Witkin’s use of a mirror reflection within his work. Historically, mirrors are used in works of art to both highlight the truth and distort it. In Witkin’s mirror, we can see the canvas being worked on within the painting in the reflection. This reflection is particularly significant in Breaking the Pose, as it mirrors the young man in green who is often interpreted as a self-portrait of Witkin. By placing himself in the painting, Witkin blurs the lines between artist and viewer, inviting the viewer to step into the artwork and experience it from their own perspective.

Witkin's use of mirrors and open-endedness can also be seen as a response to the ideas of Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that power is not held by a single individual or group, but is instead distributed throughout society. This idea is reflected in Breaking the Pose, as the painting suggests that power is not held by the artist, but is instead shared between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork itself.

Foucault's notion of power as a diffuse and pervasive force is evident in Breaking the Pose. The painting's open-endedness and the ambiguity of its symbolism suggest that power is not solely wielded by the artist but is instead dispersed among the elements within the painting, the viewer, and even the artwork itself. Witkin's use of mirrors further reinforces Foucault's ideas about power relations. The viewer's reflection in the painting's mirror implicates them in the artwork, blurring the lines between observer and observed. This mirroring act suggests that power is not a one-way street; it is a dynamic interplay between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork itself.

Foucault's concept of "biopower" is also subtly alluded to in Breaking the Pose. The young man in green, often interpreted as a self-portrait of Witkin, holds a watch, a symbol of time and its constraints. This suggests that even the artist is subject to the biopolitical forces that shape our lives. Moreover, Breaking the Pose challenges the traditional notion of the artist as a singular author, aligning with Foucault's critique of grand narratives and the authority of the individual author. The painting's open-endedness invites the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning, democratizing the artistic experience and shifting power away from the artist alone. In essence, Breaking the Pose serves as a visual commentary on Foucault's ideas about power, knowledge, and the shifting dynamics between artist, viewer, and artwork. The painting's ambiguity and open-endedness invite the viewer to engage with its symbolism, question the power structures at play, and ultimately participate in the construction of meaning.

Exhibition

Breaking the Pose by Jerome Witkin was exhibited at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY in 1986 and has been on display in the Hawkes Gallery since the summer of 2019.

In 2014 the Witkin brothers collaborated under a single exhibition titled “Twin Visions: Jerome Witkin & Joel-Peter Witkin" which showcased the brothers' shared interest in exploring the human condition through their art, often using unconventional and provocative imagery. The exhibition was a unique opportunity to see how two artists with a shared background and a shared interest in art could respond to the same source of inspiration in such different ways.