Susan Hauptman (1947–2015) was an American artiste who worked exclusively upon paper once 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 truthful and candid detail in ways critics described as strikingly androgynous and that confronted cultural notions of beauty, reality, femininity and masculinity. She has had one-person shows in several museums including the Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Her later still lifes 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 near to a time-honored 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 buoyant and shadow. These nitty-gritty are transformed by her— the artiste as alchemist. Her perform transcends its materiality in and as drawing, offering us both the noun and verb of drawing, until we are presented in the same way as seemingly autonomous, illusionistic imaginative drawings, moments in an overarching narrative.
Her feign is in the collections of numerous of major galleries and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fl., Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco, CA, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, and the Yale University Art Gallery, 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.
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