The Return Of The Silhouette

It's an art form that has long existed in the shadows: The silhouette, a portrait fashioned from paper and a pair of scissors.

But these days, the silhouette is not just a static shape. You may know silhouettes from iPod commercials. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring a collection of silhouettes, and they have been a fixture at Disneyland in California for 50 years.

With a sharp scissors and a sharp eye, artist Sylvia Fellows can create a likeness in less than two minutes.

"When I tell people I'm a silhouette artist, they say, 'A what?'" she told Sunday Morning co-anchor Charles Osgood. "And I have to explain it."

But you don't have to travel to New York or Disneyland. Kathryn Flocken sets up shop at colleges around the country.

"Every single face is different," Flocken said. "What I do is I look at the person as a series of shapes and I just start. Starting from the chest and going all the way up their face, and then come up and do the back of the hair."

"The vogue really developed in the mid-18th century," Wendy Reaves, curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, said. "They were often called shades. They were often copied from shadows."

The Smithsonian has paper-cut portraits that date back to the days of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. Silhouettes were all the rage in the era before photography. Reaves said the name "silhouette" originated in France, after Etienne de Silhouette, the French finance minister.

"A very parsimonious finance minister, who was so unpopular for his cutting of budgets and pension that the term 'a la silhouette' came to mean anything on the cheap," Reaves said.

She says that since a likeness could be cut for a lot less than it cost to do an oil painting, these cameo-style portraits were accessible to everyone.

"A lot of these artists were itinerants," Reaves said. "And they would advertise when they came to town, set up their shop, and just about anybody could come through their doors."

Some artists used drafting instruments and traced profiles from shadows.

"It's really extraordinary how accurate these profiles are," Reaves said. "How specific the countenance is. You still really get a sense of the person and of the time that they lived in."

The most famous of the itinerant paper-cutters was Auguste Edouart. He usually cut full-length figures freehand with scissors and, sometimes painted in details with a bit of whitewash. While the profiles are distinct, Reaves said he took a few shortcuts and made all the feet look exactly alike.

Though the silhouette was sold to the sitter, the artist always made copies, and preserved them in portfolios. Works by Auguste Edouart and others are part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"What I like about silhouettes, in particular these traditional silhouettes by Edouart, is their static quality and their air of politeness," artist Kara Walker said. "In its simplicity, it's just a line, you know? A line drawn with a knife. But it's also a solid."

Walker is a contemporary artist who has integrated this Victorian art form into her own work. She uses silhouettes to challenge racial stereotypes.

"What can a viewer glean from this figure?" she said. "How do you interpret a figure as being a black figure when there's no detail?"

Walker and other artists have put silhouettes back in the limelight, and not just as portraiture. Paper-cutting artist Beatrice Coron cuts entire cities in silhouette.

"I think I started the cityscape when I arrive here," she said. "It becomes a kind of medium to say stories. Because usually you have windows to look out on things. And I'm doing windows for looking in."

Though it's now in the hands of a new generation of practitioners, this old art form is still just as popular for its original purpose, a portrait of record.

"It captures them at the moment," Fellows said. "And they change over the years. And it's a nice tradition to maintain."