"Davis was a folk artist who did very flat portraits of common folk in southern New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island," Mr. Liverant said.
Then, finding Pop Art insufficiently intimate, he insisted he was never part of the movement and parlayed its cool, flat surfaces into cool, flat portraits of the friends and relatives and cats in his life.
He also presents two monumental but inert nude torsos, one male, one female; bland portraits carved from flat panels; and two small giraffes.
"Mother and Child" (1961), for example, a flat, stylized portrait of Mr. Barnet's wife and young daughter, is all angles, curves and crisp edges tightly integrated in Mr. Barnet's old abstractionist manner.
Alice tells the tale of a banquet that Picasso hosted in his studio in honour of Henri Rousseau, a customs official who painted delirious visions of jungles and deserts and flat, bold portraits.
That precision came slightly unglued on a Tuesday morning in January when a group of small children streamed into the industrial hall that houses "Trace," a sprawling collection of flat Lego portraits of imprisoned activists from around the globe.
She invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace.
Rapold concludes, "'Son of God' may have hit the mark if part of the goal was to create a portrait flat enough to allow audience members to project their own feelings onto the screen".
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What is striking, though, is how flat and dull his portrait of a Genoese noblewoman looks alongside his master's masterpiece.
