There was a new flowering of portraiture after the end of Abstract Expressionism. The painters involved were representational, and so not like De Kooning at all, in that they did not want their figures to disappear into the swaths or streaks of color. But neither were they realists, in that their object was not to accurately portray those they represented but to develop new ways of representing people so that each painter had his own signature style, that not just what happens because a painter paints in the way he knows how to paint, but because the creation of a distinctive style was the basis of his accomplishment: his models served his style rather than the other way round. The inspiration for this movement was Andy Warhol who did not enhance our understanding of the figures he portrayed, like Mao and Marilyn Monroe. It was, rather, that the figures were already popular icons and what he did was to industrially produce a large number of copies through a silkscreen process that allowed each of the standard images to be produced in different colors. Warhol’s imagination rested on standing aside from his images to note that they were images rather than on enhancing the images, and so what he produced seems to me very cold and devoid of the life of the people who lend him their images, but that may be what he was, after all, out to do, postmodern art, now included in what is called contemporary art, prizing coldness and irony rather than depth of feeling or character analysis as its primary virtue. Now those who entered this common project of making the art more important than its subject did not see Warhol as their inspiration and one, Alex Katz, thought that Warhol had stolen from him, but artists throughout the centuries view with their competitors for stature and are most upset with those who would claim to be their betters. Consult Vasari to see professional competition at play, or consult any biography of Picasso. Let us consider the different ways some contemporary artists did their number on the artistic presumption they shared that the model served the artist rather than the other way around.