On View
Not on viewObject number2024.1
Portrait of a Scholar
Artist
Jane Lund
(American, 1939)
Date1995
Mediumpastel on paper
Dimensionsframed: 46 1/8 × 30 1/8 in. (117.2 × 76.5 cm)
Credit LineGift of Judith Kirsch Van Solkema and Sherman Van Solkema
Exhibition HistoryKIA Collection Highlight (Spring 2024)Label TextCollection Highlight: Born in 1939 in Queens, New York, Jane Lund attended the Pratt Institute, Queens College, and the New York School of Social Research. Lund’s vibrantly colored and meticulous pastels are meditative and incredibly realistic. The nature of Lund’s practice is painstaking—one work can take almost a year to complete. Rather than drawing from direct observations, Lund prefers to create intimate portraits from numerous photographs and studies.
Rendered in the hyper-realist style for which she is best known, Portrait of a Scholar depicts an elegant woman staring outward toward viewers. This approach, from the positioning of the sitter to her expression, is typical of Lund’s practice. Despite her somber demeanor, this does not allude to the sitter’s character. Instead, Lund relies on traditional portraiture tactics–props and attire–to provide further clues about this scholar. Wearing large hoop earrings, the woman holds a book in her left hand while bracelets adorn her right wrist. Her deep blue tunic bears very ornate forms of shifting designs around the sleeves and collar. A larger hexagonal patterned prism fills the center of the caftan and connects to the patterns trailing below it and across the woman’s chest. Lund combines aspects of adornment and emotion to suggest her subject’s complex nature. Furthermore, by not using the person’s name as the title for the work, Lund challenges viewers' understanding of who is and what a scholar looks like.
The subject is Dr. Eileen Julien, who became Lund’s friend when they were Bunting Institute Fellows in the Radcliffe College at Harvard University from 1985 through 1986. A Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, French, and Italian in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, Julien’s research spanned African and American literature and oral traditions. Says Julien, “In the African context, I have been especially interested in the perceived tension between being ‘modern’ and being ‘ourselves’ and what this implies for understanding the relationship between’indigenous’ or ‘local’ resources…” Lund’s creation of life-like compositions like Portrait of a Scholar are homages to her close friends and relatives.
