Portraiture — The Traditional Art of the Portrait Commission

The portrait in painting carries within itself the cultural tradition of the last 2500 years of art history. It begins, according to legend, with the silhouette profile of a loved one before his departure into foreign lands. It is culturally anchored within the culture of remembrance and mourning, becoming part of the cult of the dead. The portrait transgresses the boundary of transient existence and manifests the cultural community's desire to preserve the value-enrichment of a singular human being beyond the reach of time. The portrait marks the evolutionary step toward a society shaped by empathy, familial bonds, and social consciousness—a society that develops values that become vital beyond strictly evolutionary survival: for the human being as a cultural entity.

We cast a glance into the writings of Pliny the Elder (77 AD) not merely to trace the early testimony of the portrait in art, but also to ascertain the artistic motivation behind the founding of this tradition. According to the statements of Pliny the Elder:

"[...] the potter Butades of Sicyon was the first to discover the art of modeling portraits in clay. This took place in Corinth, and he owed his invention to his daughter, who was in love with a young man. As the latter was departing for foreign lands, she encircled with a line the contour of his face, which was projected onto the wall by the light of a lantern. Her father applied clay to the sketch, fashioned a relief from it, which he caused to harden in the fire along with the rest of his pottery after having let it dry. This work, it is said, was preserved in the Nymphaeum until Corinth was sacked by Mummius [146 BC]."

According to the appraisal of the art historian Prof. Dr. Andreas Beyer, Professor of Art History, in "L’art du portrait" (Citadelles & Mazenod, 2003), "the legend of Butades, which draws inspiration from the contours of a face," can, according to Beyer's analysis, "be regarded as the true founding myth of the portrait."

Andreas Beyer continues at a later juncture that, according to his interpretation of the ancient writings of Pliny the Elder, "[...] love [is] the sole motif that leads to the creation of the very first portrait. [...]"

It is remarkable that within the legend of Butades, the craftsman and the daughter—persona of the human soul's motivation—initially manifest themselves in two separate personae, which only within the artistic-interpretative unity of poetological motivation and material shaping arrive at the actual form of art. 

Within the continuum of this tradition's essence, "the portrait" fulfills itself down to the present day through the practice of the classical artist and portraitist. He operates as an empathetic poet, an observist, and a shaping artisan of material—the unyielding foundation for Bernhard Karlowitz’s portrait painting of a New Modernism. 

The systemic appropriation and alienating-hierarchical functionalization by the hierarchy-portrait, which became state art primarily within the antiquity of Rome, corrupts the founding myth and primal form—the art form—of the portrait. With the Renaissance and Modernism, artists awoke to a recollection of the portrait's significance: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) discovered the self-reflective dimension of the portrait, shattering the decorative form of the smooth brushstroke with his formally avant-garde self-portraits.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660) painted the members of the hierarchy unvarnished, precisely as was their due; he painted in stark contrast—profoundly, with a nuanced interest in human nature—his fellow human beings who moved him as an empathetic artist. His portraits of dwarfs—such as those of the court dwarf Don Diego de Acedo ("El Primo") or Francisco Lezcano—document Velázquez’s revolution as an artist in contrast to the documentary force of his unvarnished, appropriate characterization of certain members of the Spanish royal family around King Philip IV. He refused the artistic execution of the hierarchical-social racism expressed within the hierarchy-portrait.

This thus-initiated tradition of modern portrait art, which reclaims and fights for the founding myth, is continued by Bernhard Karlowitz today in his own manner. He paints the subject within the personal–interpersonal dimension of the encounter, becoming an empathetic artistic medium for the characterological, human dimension of the portrayed individual, and deploying his technique, specialized over more than 30 years, to react painterly and seismographically to the slightest observational findings of the painterly observation.

The postmodern attempt to "re-align" the hard-won, empathetic, and artistically free portrait of Modernism is not merely expressed in the return of the hierarchy-portrait's dominance: the systemic assertion of photorealism castrates painting of the artistic act of experience and encounter. The artist is forced to execute the person as an unquestioned, aesthetic surface assertion—relegated to a mere copyist through the purely formal discourse of the two-dimensional surface aesthetics of printed paper.

Throughout his artistic biography, Bernhard Karlowitz has fought against the dictate of the times, clinging to real-time portraiture despite exclusion from competitions and commissions, evolving and specializing within it as a painter.

Within his painterly stance, Karlowitz develops a radical counter-position—his New Modernism. Utilizing a modified tempera painting technique, he shatters the rigid form of the portrait session. He paints the subject where they feel reflected as a human being or within activities that define them as a personality; he no longer paints the subject statically, but develops dynamic portraits in which the portrayed individual manifests their essence within the image through structured movement patterns and gestures.

In the double portrait "Brüderportrait" (Portrait of Brothers) from the year 2023, the painter finds a concept that characterizes the young men completely differently as individuals across two separate formats—yet the symbolically conceived background depictions merge across the boundaries of the diptych's pictorial panels, characterizing through the grand painterly dynamics of the diptych as a whole the fraternal relationship of the seventeen-year-old and the twenty-year-old on the threshold of adulthood.

The artist proved his exceptional conception of the portrait within our contemporary epoch  already within his diploma thesis in the year 2001. For his experimental portrait project "Das Portrait beim Hausbesuch," he visited the people he painted throughout all of Europe, immersed himself as a guest into their lives, and found the moment for the perfect portrait within the characteristic everyday situations of the subjects; he also painted musicians within the deep absorption of their music-making.

This highly acclaimed diploma project and exhibition received a distinction from the Kassel Academy of Art, which explicitly honored Karlowitz’s historically novel approach to the portrait. The diploma exhibition received a grant from the State of Hesse. Throughout his primary professional activity as an artist, Karlowitz painted portraits of workers: the "Portrait of the Signmaker" from this series was presented within its controversial artistic positioning during a special exhibition at the DOM Bad Mergentheim.

The painter even painted toddlers while they played on the ground before him, or artistic personalities in single encounters at various locations, as for the portrait project in Stuttgart, 2008/2009 (information on the project "Die Staatsgalerie-Serie" can be found in the blog and within the oeuvre monographs on this website). In an experimental painting session, Bernhard Karlowitz painted the legendary Chinese erhu soloist Xu Jiangde during her dress rehearsal for a guest performance at the Linden Museum, Museum of Ethnology, in Stuttgart.

Since 2014, Karlowitz has developed a process for the most challenging form of the classical portrait: the full-length, life-sized standing portrait. The subject is painted in 1:1 dimensions on a canvas 200 cm in height over several real-time sessions as a full-length figure. Since 2016, the artist has fulfilled commissions within this monumental format. In a painting measuring 200 x 120 cm, he painted a pair of siblings—a fifteen-year-old girl and her "big," seventeen-year-old brother—in the garden of the family estate that commissioned the painting, set before a fruit tree and a garden pond in natural, summery real-time light.

It will be of interest to the reader to demonstrate, by means of a precise example, what constitutes the difference between Karlowitz’s art and both the copyist photo-portrait and the traditional "sit-still portrait"; how it manifests through the artist's procedure and technique, emerging into the pictorial space.

To this end, let us examine an example from a portrait session with a female artist and author from Southern Germany, who was painted by Bernhard Karlowitz over several consecutive summer afternoons in her garden in 2024.

The painting was completed. The painter and the artist-author observed the canvas, which stood in the grass leaning against a garden bench, situated among the paint pots, brushes, and pigment bottles that characterized the artist's mobile studio spread across many square meters of the estate's vast garden. The subject's eye became locked upon a subtly emphasized painterly passage depicting the area around the right corner of the mouth. She appeared unsettled, irritated; stating it seemed peculiar how this very corner of the mouth appeared slightly raised, subtly accentuated in the painting.

Despite prolonged observation, the painter could scarcely detect this imperceptibly seeming issue; nevertheless, he relied in incremental steps upon the artist's perception as he once more applied hand and brush to the canvas, questioning her after each minimal-nuanced alteration of stroke and value at that specific area as to how she perceived the new painterly situation of the spot, feeling his way toward what she discerned. Ultimately, two additional sessions were arranged, during which painter and model intended to occupy themselves with the analysis of the matter.  

Following the third "session of the mouth-corner," the author-artist declared her profound recognition—not only of the detail—but of the very essence of the woman who returned her gaze within the image: "I have prepared a dinner to celebrate the day!"

In a later correspondence, Bernhard Karlowitz asked the artist and author how her nickname, by which he was now permitted to address her, had actually originated. The eighty-one-year-old subsequently related that as a young laboratory assistant in training—whenever she worked with a sensitive specimen—she was highly nervous when high-ranking colleagues were present in the male-dominated scientific field, observing her from the corners of their eyes or watching judgmentally over her shoulders. She concentrated on her delicate task of the organic preservation of the sensitive specimen without allowing herself to be distracted by her insecurity. The male colleagues repeatedly smirked and gave her a nickname derived from the fact that in the silence of the laboratory, an almost imperceptible hissing could be heard when Christel Lehmann, as one of the first female preparators of her generation, strove for her professionalism through the intuitively restrained, calming expulsion of breath through an inconspicuously, slightly shifted corner of the mouth—a professionalism she indeed asserted before the doctoral students and professors of the institute in Bonn. 

The nickname that adorns this story is "Fiepe"—an onomatopoeic moniker derived from the German word fiepen, which refers to a faint, high-pitched hissing or squeaking sound, akin to the subtle vocalizations emitted by amphibians—Fiepe Lehmann. 

At what moment during the painter's encounter with the complex personality of Fiepe Lehmann had he—not observed—for he was not conscious of it—but rather observationally scanned this movement that had transitioned into deep reflection?

It must have been incidental, fractional moments within the numerous painting sessions, characterized by friendly collegiality, interested exchange, and the grateful, shared participation in the situation of art. The painter Bernhard Karlowitz does not operate in a primarily psychological or analytical manner—utilizing his specialized tempera technique, he mixes every single value anew across a vast palette of pigments, using no pre-mixed colors. Even finally placed highlights are individually observed and mixed in their specific chromaticity.

The impressions collected over many singular observations of the painting session in the summery Lehmann garden were continually shaped through increasingly nuanced color densifications and gestural stroke variations, carefully modeled, capturing even barely perceptible movements in transition.

The painter functions as a channeling medium, a "hunter and gatherer" of innumerable impressions of the painterly observation. He painted something that was neither static nor photographically reproducible—into the portrait painting of Fiepe Lehmann. The painting continues a small picture gallery there, which depicts both the great-grandmother and the mother as a young woman with family.