The following excerpts are from an article in the UK newspaper The Observer, originally published on July 5, 2009.
Written by Laura Cumming
On a winter’s day in 1905, a museum guard was patrolling the Alte Pinakothek in Munich when he noticed that one of the paintings had changed since the last time he looked. The eyes of Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait – the most famous eyes in German art – had lost their piercing charisma. Ferocious little rips were discovered in the pupils that had probably been made with a hatpin and whoever attacked the painting may well have used such an easily concealed weapon, for it seems that nobody noticed. Somebody unseen, who would never be caught, had tried to put out Dürer’s eyes.
Dürer’s eyes – that’s what we say, not bothering to distinguish between the painter and his self-portrait; and we do the same with portraits too. Mona Lisa is what we call both the picture and the woman who sat for Leonardo. But it feels more natural with self-portraits, since artist and sitter are one and the same, personally inter-related. And in the case of Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, one would become the counterpart of the other as never before in painting.
This old picture of a man with prodigious hair and alarming eyes has been kissed and excoriated, worshipped and attacked, carried through the streets and mounted on an altar like an icon. It has been accused of self-love, sacrilege and shocking froideur. Women have loved it like a man. The German writer Bettina von Arnim became so infatuated with it that she had a copy made for her own private purposes. But was she in love with the portrait, or the man, or the idea of an artist who could create such a transfixing image?
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The artist as his own masterpiece: I took Dürer to school and was astonished when my art teacher disapproved. “There is too much of the artist,” he shrugged, “in the picture.” It’s a common charge – self-portraits are too personal, essentially promotional, all front; certainly they’re often treated this way, reproduced on the covers of monographs and fictional lives, displayed at the door of the museum retrospective like the party host, a preface to the real work that follows. But my teacher’s words were revealing none the less. With all portraits, no matter how mediocre the image, how brief and faltering its illusion, there is always the sense of coming face to face with another person before that person reverts to an image. Self-portraits go further. Whatever they show of the outer appearance – and they may be fanciful, flattering or downright inconsistent, Rembrandt being a case in point, never the same from one picture to the next – they always offer a special class of inner truth, a pressure from within that determines what appears without, how an artist chooses to picture himself both in and as a work of art.
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If one thing connects them, for me, it is that the behaviour of people in self-portraits has a strange tendency to reflect the behaviour of people in life. One might say this of portraits too, but it is not so easy to think of a portrait in which the sitter tears at his face, pulls out his hair, looms up at a mirror in disbelief or recoils quite openly from it; still less where the sitter is masturbating like Egon Schiele, or, like Tracey Emin, wallowing stark naked in cash. Nor do many portraits express what it is like to live deep inside the sitter’s mind. Rembrandt’s depth of knowledge is not an illusion. Van Gogh’s mind teems like his brushstrokes. Velázquez senses the brevity of our life’s brief day in the sun as few other painters in art.
We all have a self and a public existence, however limited, and it is the daily requirement that we put together some sort of face to the world. The thought of having to create a definitive face for all time might make even an extrovert falter, so it is no surprise that stage fright is so common or that many artists produce serial self-portraits as if giving themselves another chance. The opportunity to put oneself across as completely as one cannot in life has its obvious appeal – and terror.
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to read the entire article go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jul/05/laura-cumming-praise-of-self-portraits