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Masks of the Primitive

In Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife Hortense and the country people of his native Aix the human being is stripped of all expressive eloquence and becomes an archetype. Together with Gauguin’s Synthesism, Henri Rousseau’s Primitivism and tribal art these had a key influence on the development of the avant-garde portrait. During the early years of the 20th century, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Derain’s iconoclastic decision to deliberately replace the sitter’s individual facial features with an abstract mask definitively opened the way towards the consolidation of the modern portrait.