It strikes chords that resonate in our senses and memories. Though a smile, even a laugh, may be imbedded in many of Stout's works, the chord his art strikes often contains, as an essential and identifying ingredient, a deep empathy for the individual personage he has created. He is able to invent faces that speak movingly of complex histories. The ability to convey emotion through an individual depicted in a painting is one most modernist painters would find of little use. The presence of a figure with a layered personality in a Cezanne or Matisse would surely distract from the formal intent of the work.
Exceptions stand out in art history.
Famous among them are Velasquez's Pope Innocent X , in which anxiety and rage gleam through the pontiff's ostensible calm, and Goya's portraits of the royal family, as well as other less satirical but even more penetrating portraits by this master. Alice Neel , Lucian Freud, and Chuck Close zero in on the particular, but the examination of the mind does not go deep. But Stout is on a different level, along with those few magic-makers who depict a mind to engage our own, among them the contemporary sculptor Daisy Youngblood and photographers Dorothea Lange and W. Eugene Smith . When Stout was a student at the Boston Museum School in 1949-50, American painters Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, then at the height of their fame, impressed him with their classical glazing and scumbling techniques. Levine's satiric multifigure paintings seem particularly related to Stout's later work.