5. The View in the Mirror.
Why do so many artists paint self-portraits? For economic reasons: they do not need to pay a model. For
educational ones: it is a convenient way to experiment. For professional ones: to sign a larger picture;
to attract future commissions; and to sell to a growing market among collectors. Over history, we see a
gradual change in the status of the artist from modest artisan working in the shadows to master asserting
genius in his own right. Or her own right; much of the first hour will be devoted to self-portraits
by women claiming the respect commonly accorded to men.
The latter part of the class will focus on individual artists who, for one reason or another, have made
self-portraiture a significant part of their oeuvre. Most obviously Rembrandt, but also more recently Vincent
Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Lovis Corinth, and Frida Kahlo, dealing increasingly with normally-private feelings.
Unlike other classes in this course, this session will be devoted almost entirely to painting, with little or
nothing in other media. Images, videos, and text will be posted immediately after class.
TO THINK ABOUT
André Derain and Henri Matisse were friends and founding members of the Fauves around 1905. The four pictures
here are self-portraits by each of them plus portraits that each painted of the other. Question: which is which? It
doesn't matter if you can't tell which sitter is Matisse and which Derain; the point of the game is to see whether
there is any difference between a portrait and a self-portrait when both artists use a similar style. Click the
image to see larger versions, then click here for the [ANSWERS].
Here are brief bios of the artists, composers, and writers considered in the class, listed in order of birth.
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Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1378–1455. Florentine sculptor.
He came to prominence in 1401, defeating Brunelleschi for the design of doors for the Florence Baptistery. He followed these up in 1437 with the design of an even grander set of doors, dubbed by Michelangelo the "Gates of Paradise."
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Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni), 1401–28. Florentine painter.
Though he died at the age of 26, he brought about a revolution in painting and is one of the founding fathers of the Italian Renaissance. His finest work is probably the fresco cycle on the life of St. Peter in the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1425–28), working alongside the painter Masolino; the names mean "big Tom" and "little Tom" respectively.
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Albrecht Dürer, 1471–1528. German printmaker and painter.
The greatest German draughtsman of the Renaissance and a formidable intellect, he produced an astonishing series of woodcuts and engravings throughout his career, as well as a number of devotional paintings and portraits, plus numerous sketches and watercolors that testify to his extraordinary powers of observation.
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Raffaello Santi (Raphael), 1483–1520. Italian painter and architect.
One of the towering geniuses of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael was born in central Italy, and worked there until 1508, when he moved to Rome to decorate several stanze in the Vatican for Pope Julius II, and later his successor Leo X. The influence of these and other works of the period can be seen in religious art for many centuries to come. He was also one of the many architects of St. Peters.
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Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola), 1503–40. Italian painter.
This precociously gifted painter was a leading figure in the Italian Mannerist style, characterized by elongated figures and somewhat chill lighting. He was also a skilful portraitist, starting with his own Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror painted when he was 21.
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Sofonisba Anguissola, 1532–1625. Italian painter.
Though given a good humanist education by her noble parents, she obtained her artistic training through apprenticeships with Cremona painters. Her long career, mainly as a portraitist, included a decade as painter to the Spanish royal court.
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Peter Paul Rubens, 1577–1640. Flemish painter and diplomat.
One of the giants of baroque art, Rubens developed the style of Titian into a powerful rhetoric applied equally to sacred and profane subjects, and exerted enormous influence in Spain, England, and France as well as in his native Flanders, continued in the work of his many pupils. His position at so many courts also made him invaluable as a diplomat.
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Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593–1653. Italian painter.
Trained by her father Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia began producing work in her teens that outstripped his in dramatic power and psychological observation, especially in her portrayals of strong women. She was the first woman to be elected to the Florentine Academy and, at 23, one of its youngest members.
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Diego Velázquez, 1599–1660. Spanish painter.
Velázquez was the great master of the Spanish baroque, and with Rubens and Rembrandt, one of the giants of his century. He had been appointed court painter in 1624, at the age of only 25, with the exclusive right to paint the royal family. His historical, mythological, and genre scenes show an increasingly intricate imagination, especially as concerns the relationship of the painter to his work.
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Rembrandt Harmenzoon van Rijn, 1606–69. Dutch painter and printmaker.
The greatest artist of the Dutch Golden Age, he nonetheless retained his own style which set him apart from his contemporaries. There is a strong baroque influence earlier in his career, but his later work developed a quality of deep introspection in which the subject seems to glow within rich layers of paint.
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Johannes Gumpp, 1726–?. Austrian painter.
Coming from a famly of painters, little is known about Gumpp as an individual other than his extraordinary triple self-portrait in the Uffizi.
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Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, 1749–1803. French painter.
Specializing in portraits and miniatures, Labille-Guiard was one of the first women admitted to study at the French Royal Academy, and the first woman allowed to open a teaching studio at the Louvre.
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Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1755–1842. French painter.
Specializing in portraiture, Vigée-Lebrun had charm and wit to match her talent, which won her many influential patrons, most notably Queen Marie Antoinette. She fled France at the Revolution and lived in London, Italy, Vienna, and St Petersburg, where she was part of the court of Catherine the Great. Her memoirs are a vital testament of her times and her own remarkable strengths as a woman.
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Théodore Géricault, 1791–1824. French painter.
Géricault's monumental Raft of the Medusa (1819) was a seminal work in French art, treating a contemporary political scandal with searing humanity coupled with a monumentality that owes much to Michelangelo. His many studies for this work, including corpses and severed limbs, his portraits of the insane, and above all his numerous paintings of horses, made him a key figure in French Romanticism until his death from a riding accident at the age of 32.
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Gustave Courbet, 1819–77. French painter.
A fiercely realist painter from the provinces who stood proudly outside the academic tradition, Courbet was nonetheless one of the most powerful figures in 19th-century French art. His vast Burial of Ornans was a succès de scandale at the Salon of 1850, and established him as the leader of the Realist movement.
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Edvard Grieg, 1843–1907. Norwegian composer.
A member of a musical middle-class family in Bergen, Grieg studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, then moved to Copenhagen, where he began his career as a pianist. It was only then that national characteristics of folk-song, rhythm, and harmony began to enter his work. He became in effect the leading composer of Norwegian nationalism, much as Sibelius was in Finland, but less aggressively so, expressing himself mainly in shorter forms, belonging to the salon rather than the symphony hall.
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Paul Gauguin, 1848–1930. French painter, sculptor, and ceramicist.
Influenced at first by the Impressionists, Gauguin soon abandoned that style for one that involved large flat areas of pure color. He is associated with three areas: Brittany, where he developed his style; Provence, where he lived with Van Gogh; and Tahiti, perhaps indulging a taste for the tropics inherited from his Peruvian mother. He is considered one of the giants of the Post-Impressionist period.
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Vincent van Gogh, 1853–90. Dutch Post-Impressionist painter.
Beginning in his native Holland with dark paintings of peasant life, his style was transformed when he went to Paris in 1886, and thence to Arles, where he lived with Paul Gauguin. Although prolific in his output, he suffered from severe depression and eventually brought on his own death, while living close to his doctor in the north of France.
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Lovis Corinth, 1858–1925. German painter.
After training in Paris, he was hailed as a proponent of "German Impressionism," although his affinities were more with Rembrandt and Manet. Two things affected the Expressionist freedom of his later style: marriage to one of his young students, and his recovery from a crippling stroke in 1911.
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Edvard Munch, 1863–1944. Norwegian painter and printmaker.
Tormented by the legacy of childhood trauma (he wrote "illness, madness, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle"), Munch nevertheless managed to turn his neuroses into art that can stand with the most advanced painting in the rest of Europe and makes him a prime exponent of Expressionism.
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Richard Strauss, 1864–1949. German composer.
You might say that Strauss had two careers: as an orchestral composer, and as an opera one. His tone poems in the 1890s such as Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel brought him immediate fame, but he wrote his last big orchestral work in 1915. Meanwhile his operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) continued his radical Expressionism, but with Der Rosenkavalier (1911), he began a stylistic retreat that continued until his last opera, Capriccio, in 1942.
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Émile Bernard, 1868–1941. French painter and critic.
As a painter, Bernard was closely associated with Gauguin and worked in a gentler version of his style. He was also a prominent writer on art.
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Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1876–1927. German painter.
Paula Becker was a leading painter in the German Expressionist movement, and the only significant woman in the circle. She was the first woman to depict herself both nude and pregnant, and also the first woman to have a museum (in Bremen) entirely devoted to her art. In 1901, she married Otto Modersohn, an older and less adventurous artist.
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Frida Kahlo, 1907–54. Mexican painter.
Although she had successful exhibitions in Paris and New York in the late 1930s, Kahlo's fame was largely overshadowed in her lifetime by that of her much older husband Diego Rivera. Since her death, however, interest has grown exponentially in the self-revealing nature of her work, which unites traditional Mexican qualities to a touch of Surrealism.
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![[Self] portraits by Derain and Matisse](WebPic01a.jpg)
![[Self] portraits by Derain and Matisse](WebPic01b.jpg)
![[Self] portraits by Derain and Matisse](WebPic01c.jpg)
![[Self] portraits by Derain and Matisse](WebPic01d.jpg)
