John I. H. Baur

1974

John I. H. Baur, head of the Brooklyn Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture from 1936 to 1952, here appears seated in an interior space, perhaps his office. His body, cropped at the head and ankle, fills the frame. Alice Neel captured idiosyncrasies such as his lightly rumpled suit, wrinkled face, and veiny hands. One of her guiding principles as a portraitist was, in her words, that “every person is a new universe unique with its own laws.”