The selections in An Artist’s Eye: The Lukas Charles Collection don’t read as a manifesto for a particular ideology, but rather as something eclectic, a sampling of individual artists working within academic conventions.
As all portrait artists know, there is something solemnly ceremonious about the full-profile position. We do not make eye contact—that being somehow beneath the authority of the subject—just as the set mouth seems to be not just momentarily, but eternally, silent.
The Met is an excellent venue for an intergenerational viewing experience because everyone, regardless of age, can find an object to look at in wonder within its vast collection.