Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Josephine Baker, Norman Rockwell, Marion Anderson, Elizabeth Taylor, Dr. Martin Luther King—these are some of the faces that defined the twentieth-century.

These faces are among those featured in the KEITH DE LELLIS GALLERY’s new show FACE-TO-FACE, a study in modernist portraiture. The portraits of the famous and celebrated became increasingly significant from the early decades through the middle of the twentieth century. The portrait is a dialogue, a conversation between the subject and the photographer, a discourse whereby the sitter’s face seduces the viewer through the gaze of the camera. The portraits selected for this exhibition are stellar examples of this dialogue. They are revealing likenesses that capture the spirits and souls of the subjects; writers, artists, movie stars, politicians and other accomplished figures. The images reveal a further collaboration between the photographer and sitter showing that the subject, as well as the photographer, is invested in the process of defining individual character and persona. The genius, of course, resides with the photographer and his ability, talent and instinct to magically capture this individual essence.

The portraits selected for this exhibition cover a wide range from the somewhat famous to the legendary. People, whose lives obviously touched one another in some historical moment of fate, like John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters and Marian Anderson are represented in this exhibition, their faces and poses capture the personalities that made them symbols of African–American achievement.

In the fine arts, Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, Max Weber and Norman Rockwell are juxtaposed as major figures in the world of painting whose connection is only through six degrees of separation. The photographers in the exhibition worked professionally mostly for magazines, their ability to communicate crucial to their art. After all it is through magazines and newspapers that we become intimately familiar with the personages that so define their times.