by Jon Lackman | 3 April 2006 | Contemporary
From Artnet: “Kathleen Gilje … known for her mastery of Old Master technique, has convinced a host of art-world movers and shakers — largely art critics, but also curators and art historians — to pose in the costume of art history masterpieces. Thus, Studio Museum in Harlem president Lowery Stokes Sims is shown in the extravagant royal regalia of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Portrait of Napoleon on the Imperial Throne (2006), while performance-art expert RoseLee Goldberg poses as the slinky bullfighter in Edouard Manet’s Young Man in the Costume of a Majo (1863). Manet also provides the model for Venice Biennale curator Rob Storr, who poses with his musician wife in the manner of Edgar Degas’ sensational portrait of Manet and his wife (which Manet dissected to occlude his wife’s face), and feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, who is depicted as Manet’s famous barmaid at the Folies-Bergère … Other subjects in Gilje’s pantheon include Robert Rosenblum (as Ingres’ Comte de Pastoret), Arthur Danto (as Socrates), Leo Steinberg (as Peter Paul Rubens) … Rosalind Krauss (as herself, in the manner of Degas) and the late William Rubin (as Pablo Picasso, in Rubin’s final portrait). Will the critics buy their own portraits? They’re pricey — around $50,000 and up.”
