Susan Hauptman (1947–2015) was an American artist who worked exclusively on paper with charcoal, pastel, and later, other elements such as gold leaf, wire mesh, and thread. She is best known for her stark, enigmatic, often expressionless self-portraits in which she depicted herself with precise and candid detail. Critics described her works as strikingly androgynous and confrontational toward cultural notions of beauty, reality, femininity, and masculinity. Hauptman's exhibitions were held at several esteemed institutions, including the Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; the

Oakland Museum Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...

, Oakland, CA; the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Founded in 1869 by philanthropist William Wilson Corco ...

, Washington, D.C.; and the Jeremy Stone Gallery. Her works at the Jeremy Stone Gallery further cemented her reputation for challenging traditional gender representations through art. Her later

still life A still life (: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, human-m ...

s were of porcelain figures and fruit-box-type labels, fanciful and often romantic. They are thought to be narrative. Susan Hauptman's self is drawn both life-scale and larger-than-life. She draws close to a traditional definition of drawing, where the drawing fundamentals of value, tone, shading, composition and, to a lesser extent, line, are formal elements within each work, modulations of elemental light and shadow. These fundamentals are transformed by her— the artist as

alchemist Alchemy (from the Arabic word , ) is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first ...

. Her work transcends its materiality in and as drawing, offering us both the noun and verb of drawing, until we are presented with seemingly autonomous, illusionistic imaginative drawings, moments in an overarching narrative.Boettger, Suzann, "Face to Face," (exh. cat), Forum Gallery, 2002; Meskimmon, Marsha and Sawdon, Phil, "Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing," 2016 Her work is in the collections of numerous of major galleries and museums, including the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

in New York City, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States. Founded in 1962 and opened in 1968, it is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Its collections focus on images of American artists, politicians, scientists ...

, Washington D.C., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fl.,

Arkansas Art Center The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA), formerly known as the Arkansas Arts Center, is an art museum located in MacArthur Park, Little Rock, Arkansas. The museum's most recent expansion and renovation was designed by architecture and urban des ...

, Little Rock, AR, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco, CA, California

Palace of the Legion of Honor The Legion of Honor, formally known as the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, is an art museum located in San Francisco, on the West Side of the city. Located in Lincoln Park, the Legion of Honor is a component of the Fine Arts Museums o ...

, San Francisco, CA;

, Oakland, CA, and the

Yale University Art Gallery The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University. Although it embraces all cultures and period ...

, Richard Brown Baker Collection, New Haven, CT. She held numerous teaching positions, including the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair at the University of Georgia from 1997 to 2000. She was married to Leonard Post, whom she often drew.

Gallery

File:Self Portrait with Feathers.jpg, ''Portrait (with feathers)'', portrait of the artist (on the left) with her husband, Leonard Post, on the right. 2007. File:Selfportrait La Perla 2.jpg, ''Self portrait (La Perla #2). 2006.'' File:Still Life Pear.jpg File:Susan Hauptman.jpg

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hauptman, Susan 1947 births 2015 deaths University of Michigan alumni 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American artists 21st-century American women artists Artists from Michigan Wayne State University alumni University of Georgia faculty National Endowment for the Arts Fellows American women academics