Work by the luxembourgish artist Roland Schauls (*1953)

Show all 504 portraits

Questions posed by Schauls

The Portrait Society: The Concept

“… if 500 people are famous, no one is, and so to find someone you can call a recognizable personality, a man who stands out, at least 490 must be pushed into the background. This is not benign neglect. Those 490 must be positively unrewarded in the same measure the 10 are rewarded; by denial as much as approval, a few people will then be brought forward as recognizable individuals.”

Richard Sennett,
The Fall of Public Man

The Picture: 504 Portraits

Between 1995 and 1998, the Luxembourg artist Roland Schauls set himself an unusual task. 504 artistic personalities, selected from the world’s largest and most important collection of self-portraits at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, provided him with the model for a large-scale tribute to the history of Western painting.

Given equal weight in the collection of 504 individual panels, their fame or failure are relativised. Highly-esteemed artists such as Durer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez or Delacroix appear in 100 sqm. of exuberant confusion, no more or less prominent than their precursors, colleagues and successors who have since been forgotten.

Roland Schauls’s tableau of equals can be seen as a monumental tribute to his own brotherhood, a kind of memorial to those who are mostly unknown today, illuminating as much as it counteracts the historical and contemporary exclusion strategies of the art and academic establishments.

It is the ironic and yet revealing manifestation of an artist who knows all about the market's dubious star-making machinery, and the cult of genius that history has passed down to us. The artificiality of both the ascent from and the sinking into obscurity, into ahistoricity and thus into namelessness, is easier for us to appreciate through the rigorous structure of an impenetrable kind of order.

However, behind every physiognomy there is an artistic personality who was highly thought-of in their own time, and valued for their skill as a painter — a landscape artist, a portrait painter, a painter of historical subjects or of still lifes, and therefore the creator of a commendable lifetime’s achievement, averaging over 300 works each.

The Idea: the portrait society

But who were these painters? Who were Carlo Dolci, Robert Doblhoff or Willem Drost? Which works of art did they create? Who were their teachers, their students and their patrons? What made them the famous artists of their time?

These are questions that need to be answered. The painted presence in the picture is clearly only the spectacular prelude to a large-scale undertaking with far-reaching cultural and political dimensions. When these questions are addressed to a public interested in art, they provide a starting-point, in the sense of a „social sculpture”, for an interactive, action-directed strategic plan and form the nucleus of a restorative new beginning, which could mean freedom from historical oblivion for every single one of these artistic personalities.

With the idea of allowing art and the artist to “have their say”, this undertaking is directed mainly at those who feel that art collecting has more to do with spiritual passion and committed support than with speculative ownership. Since the ensemble of pictures will remain as an entity for some time, buying a single panel is not the same as actually owning, and having free access to, of one of these paintings. Instead, a buyer joins an alliance of art promoters which has evolved along with the picture, and becomes a member of the “portrait society”, a charitable interest group which has made itself responsible for the artistic, cultural and historical reappraisal of the 504 artists.

Questions for the artist

Marita Ruiter: Was the idea of an interactive concept there from the beginning, or did it evolve with the picture?

Roland Schauls: During each of my many trips to Florence, | visited the collection of self-portraits in the Vasari corridor of the Uffizi. It bothered me that out of a collection of well over 1000 self-portraits, only the better-known artists were displayed. | was far more interested in those that were not being shown, and the reason for their neglect. The Vasari corridor was closed for several years for renovation work, and during this time | decided to set up my own “corridor” and — taking my lead from the Uffizi collection catalogue — discover, through painting and drawing, more about the reason for this lack of attention. My aim was to enable a direct comparison to be made by hanging the paintings next to each other in an arbitrary fashion, all on the same standardized canvas format of 50 x 40 cm.

Marita Ruiter: One thing that stands out in your arrangement is the lack of any female portraits.

Roland Schauls: Yes, that is true, and it is one of the most frequently-asked questions, but there are, in fact, very few female artists represented in the original collection, and | did not want to either conceal or play down this regrettable but culturally-influenced fact by introducing any „token women".

Marita Ruiter: How long did you work on the project?

Roland Schauls: The drawing work alone took 3 years, with interruptions. Then there was the elaborate business of putting together the forty-two blocks of 12, because | wanted to leave open different hanging options. Work on the concept is still continuing today. | want to allow future collectors and partners to have a say in it and help to organize it.

Marita Ruiter: What is the significance of the striking, wax-like brown layers over the picture?

Roland Schauls: Of the 800 portraits that | painted originally, about 200 were damaged by the application of a thick layer of acrylic, which was opaque when applied and so difficult to control. The brownish incrustations are the visible, dried remains of this process, by which | intended to symbolize, using something like time-lapse photography, the danger and random destruction facing many works of art throughout their existence. One aspect is the virtual obliteration of a piece of work by consciously ignoring it, as described by Sennet, and the other aspect is actual physical destruction through the vagaries of fate.

Marita Ruiter: What criteria did you use to select paintings from the 1000 or more self-portraits at the Uffizi?

Roland Schauls: As | indicated before, | allowed the principle of random selection to prevail. What mattered was that there should be a great many of them, in order to show clearly the aspect of accumulation, and, through sheer volume, to analyse the individual desire for uniqueness which each of these artists surely wanted to convey. In addition, the unexplained proximities cancel out the usual hierarchical evaluation structures of normal art history categories. This also gives the viewer the opportunity to re-evaluate the object without any preconceptions. Occasionally, | have had fun playing with styles, which has confused some art historians, in particular, who are used to applying the norms bequeathed by Wölflin for dating paintings.

Marita Ruiter: Which is really just Vanity Fair...

Roland Schauls: Right. And | even had the nerve to smuggle myself in amongst the rows of my artist colleagues. Apart from that, the synthesis of all these portraits is just a kind of gigantic self-portrait, or the essence of the genre of painting called self-portrait, or self-portraiture itself.

A criss-cross of impressions...

Many visitors to the Abbaye de Neumünster are convinced that Roland Schauls’ monumental work, „the portrait society”, exhibited under the imposing glass roof of the entrance court, was specially conceived for this spot. It is certainly true that this work, which measures one hundred square metres, installed in the southern side of the Agora, fits wonderfully into this luminous space, itself the result of an audacious encounter between venerable walls and a glass roof with a gossamer structure, a genuine technological marvel. However, Roland Schauls’ creation was completed prior to the restoration of the abbey and if it fits so well into its surrounding, the reasons for that go beyond mere aesthetics. If Schauls’ creation was not conceived and made with a specific setting in mind, it certainly found in the Abbaye de Neumünster the framework which allows it to display all its qualities, while benefiting from a cultural approach which enhances its relevance.

As an immense mosaic of faces and visual perceptions, “the portrait society” places the visitor from the outset in a position of exchange and sharing, and opens his mind to the „federating” theme of the Centre Culturel de Rencontre Abbaye de Neumünster: dialogue between cultures and a culture of dialogue. The perception of a contemporary artist concerning the view hundreds of artists of different origins and historical periods have had of themselves, puts into perspective the mission that this cultural institution sets itself, namely to allow encounters, debates and the confrontation of different means of expression.

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