20th century

Early 20th-century artists expanded the repertoire of portraiture. Fauvist artist Henri Matisse produced powerful portraits using nonnaturalistic, even garish, colors for skin tones. Spanish artist Pablo Picasso painted many portraits, including several cubist portraits, in which the likeness of the subject is inferior to the stylistic appearance. Expressionist painters provided some of the most haunting and compelling psychological studies ever produced. German artists such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, as well as Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, produced notable examples of expressionist portraiture.
A modern family portrait.Portrait production in Europe and the Americas declined in the middle of the 20th century, a result of the increasing interest in abstraction and nonfigurative art. More recently, however, there has been a revival of portraiture. English artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon have produced powerful paintings. Many contemporary American artists, such as Chuck Close, have made the human face a focal point of their work.
The end of the 20th century marked a revival of figurative art and as a side effect the market for painted and sculpted portraits increased significantly. Beside the market for corporate and clerical portraits, that has been quite stable through the ages, it became common practice for the middle-class to commission portraits of children, beloved ones, whole families or even pets.