By 1879, when Hodler settled in Geneva, he was producing massive, simplified portraits owing something to the French realist painter Gustave Courbet.
Mose Tolliver's subtly hued, comically simplified portraits; J. B. Murry's small paintings on paper, made of rough daubs of watercolor; and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's square picture of what looks like an explosion in outer space made with a finger-painting-like technique all evince a keenly sensuous responsiveness to pigmented liquids and pastes.
moma shows them side by side: a very tough, ugly, proto-Cubist still-life by Picasso, and a cartoonishly simplified, sweet portrait of Matisse's daughter Marguerite.
The Matisse was followed by one of Picasso's simplified Cubist portraits from his later period.
Slavish imitation of Matisse drains the life from a standing female nude with a masklike, vaguely Asian face, by Jean Heiberg (also Norwegian), and a simplified, brusquely painted portrait of a young woman — the artist's wife — by Per Lasson Krohg (again Norwegian).
Dating from 1983 to 2001, they include simplified but recognizable portraits of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, as well as a number of renditions of curvy, knob-headed female beauties and a stout tree whose branches have morphed into gold heads of lively snakes.
After Che's assassination in 1967, Korda's portrait - now starkly simplified, with the beret lifting off to form a halo and its red star holding out a remote hope that heaven might still be established on Earth - found its way on to posters, lapel badges and T-shirts.
His progression to more simplified forms can be seen in the portrait heads Baudelaire (1911) and Maggy (1911), which were virtually reduced to simple geometric shapes.
A rather simplified treatment of the face in the early "Self Portrait With Flute" contrasts with his later, more nuanced style, but it suits the cartoonlike anecdotal character that he inserted into work that blended a straightforward technique with a down-to-earth subject matter.
