UM’s ‘Potential Self’ exhibit highlights depth of collection

ORONO – If “portrait” makes you think of a man in a powdered wig, posing stiffly in an armchair, the University of Maine Museum of Art’s latest exhibit will change your mind.

“The Potential Self … Portrait as Signifier,” which runs through Oct. 20 at the museum, stretches the conventional bounds of portraiture. Sure, the show includes oil paintings of the rich and marginally famous, along with photographs of artists and other people of note. But there are also political cartoons and abstract prints, a picture of a gravestone, dogs in motion, a sly black cat, and a swaggering Mick Jagger, dolled up with swaths of gold and pink ink.

The Jagger print is by Andy Warhol. It shares gallery space with a couple Picasso lithographs, a Lichtenstein screenprint, a Mary Cassatt drawing, a Magritte print, a Renoir etching, a Goya etching, a Diego Rivera charcoal and pastel drawing, a Matisse linocut and a pair of prints that David Hockney cooked up on a photocopier. And those are just some of the familiar names you’ll see if you peek at the title cards.

Yes, they’re all in Orono, and yes, they’re all part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Since the museum’s founding by then art department head Vincent Hartgen in 1946, Hartgen and the curators that followed have focused on works on paper. This exhibit highlights the quality and the breadth of the collection that has been amassed, through purchase and donation. Featuring more than 115 works by 93 artists, “The Potential Self” fills most of the space on the gallery walls.

It’s a little overwhelming, but that’s just the way museum director Wally Mason likes it.

“This makes a case for what we have and what’s been sitting around in storage,” Mason said. “It’s pretty easy to respond to these things.”

After the success of last summer’s water-themed show, Mason decided to play with the idea of portraiture this year.

“Typically what happens is that if there’s not some thread going through the works, someone walks out of here remembering one or two works,” Mason said. “I learned last year, when we did the water show, that you could easily draw comparisons from one piece to another.”

It has become a summer tradition for Mason to pull out all the stops and fill the galleries in Carnegie Hall as full of work as possible. It gives the museum a chance to show more of its permanent collection. Plus, people have more time to spend with the work if they visit during their vacation. And the exhibits stay up through October, giving students a chance to see the show as well.

With “The Potential Self,” the museum has outdone itself. Last summer’s “Jump Into It: Water as Muse” was a hard act to follow, but somehow, Mason found a way.

The portraits here show depth and variety – when you walk through the door downstairs, the first thing you see is the giant Warhol print of Mick Jagger, his ruby lips sneering. To its left, an equally large oil painting of former UM President Merritt Caldwell Fernald looks sternly in Mick’s direction.

Roy Lichtenstein’s “The Melody Haunts My Reverie,” a bright, comic-style, pop art screenprint, shares a wall with a blocky Picasso linocut print of a woman’s head and a striking print by Kara Walker in black and white. What at first looks like a woman diving into a basket of popcorn is, on second glance, a biting commentary. The woman is the silhouette of a slave falling into a bale of cotton.

On another wall, a vivid she-male self-portrait by Francesco Clemente blurs the boundaries of sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about the etching beside that, Auguste Renoir’s “Femme Nue Couchee,” which shows a voluptuous nude woman reclining on a sofa. Nearby, a demure etching by Mary Cassatt depicts “Sarah Smiling.”

Upstairs, the portraits range from Hanne Greaver’s tender sketch, “Young Child,” to a surreal print by Rene Magritte depicting a man whose head and torso have been replaced by a birdcage and a red cape. And William Gropper’s “The Hunted Black Cat” stalks forward as a pink man hovers in the background with a gun.

Some of the photographs in the exhibit challenge the notion of portraiture, while others are more traditional. In “Spanish Civil War,” longtime Life magazine photographer Robert Capa captures a man as a bullet knocks him to the ground. Evelyn Hofer depicts Diego Rivera by photographing his bedroom. And Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s “Senor de Papantla” leans against a white wall, looking directly into the camera.

To be sure, “The Potential Self” is a big show that pulls out many big-name artists. But the most interesting portrait doesn’t bear a signature. While looking at the faces on the walls, a clearer picture of the museum emerges, showing the many faces that shaped the history of the institution and its collection.

The University of Maine Museum of Art is located in Carnegie Hall on the Orono campus. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Admission is free. For information, call 581-3255.