Self-portraits make artists present as the embodiment of their art; it sounds so neat and succinct. But they often do so only to ask who or what this person is who is looking back from the mirror, how dismaying it is to be alone, how hard it is to represent or even just to be oneself in the wide world of mankind. I only know for certain the exact circumstances in which one such self-portrait was made but my sense is that something in this artist’s experience may speak to a universal truth.
She was my mother, Elizabeth Cumming, studying painting at Edinburgh College of Art not long after the Second World War and surrounded by men who fought that war, many of them still in uniform at the easel. Compared to these heroes who had seen – and changed – the world, she felt she knew about nothing more significant than herself. College days were spent painting the external world of which she had such a powerless grasp, but one night when everyone else had gone home she took a canvas into a studio and made a rapid self-portrait in secret. There was more conviction in that image, she said, than all the heaped apples and male nudes she ever painted. My mother had made herself real, momentarily, to herself.
She would be horrified to think that a painting kept hidden ever since should be mentioned in the same pages as Velázquez, but they have something in common. Self-portraits stand in the same relation to each other as human beings – possessed of a self, members of the same infinitely various race.
I don’t say that this puts them beyond criticism, far from it. But if this book has the slightest hint of a unifying theory of self-portraiture (and it is by no means obvious that any theory which could be made to stretch all the way from Las Meninas to Andy Warhol in his fright wig would be of much ultimate value) 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 an example 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 or wallowing stark naked in cash). Nor do many portraits express what it is like to live deep inside the mind of the sitter. Rembrandt’s depth of knowledge is not an illusion. Van Gogh’s mind teems. Velázquez senses the brevity of our life’s day in the sun as few other painters in art.
This is a book of inquiry as well as praise; it examines how and what self-portraits communicate and why they come to look as they do. And it considers something else that unites us – the representation of our selves – in terms of artists’ self-portraits. 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, though, might make even an extrovert falter and there are chapters here on stage fright and the serial self-portraiture in which artists give themselves another mollifying chance. On the other hand the opportunity to put oneself across as completely as one cannot in life (pace those conflicts of interest, such as boasting and lying, also discussed here) as a rehearsed address instead of an off-the-cuff ramble has its obvious appeal. The most poignant self-portrait I know is the little picture by Carracci, reproduced at the end of this book, where the artist makes his address even while wondering whether any of his attempts to communicate will ever succeed.
Art historians do not concern themselves much with the power of art to move, disturb, inspire, indeed to affect the emotions of the viewer; yet it is hard to think of many artists even in the last century whose own concerns and ambitions are exclusively formal. Self-portraiture offers a perfect instance of this dichotomy. Historians sometimes treat it as the remote and insignificant twig of the far greater branch of portraiture, finding in self-portraits a profession’s collective representation of itself, a way of signing works, signalling skill, exemplifying style; where there is no written evidence concerning a self-portrait, they prefer to avoid remarking on its human content. But I cannot believe that self-portrayers are never thinking of themselves and their lives, or that self-portraits have no subjective or personal significance, that they are not in some profound sense a fragment of someone’s self. I cannot see Rembrandt’s self-portraits solely in terms of the art market in seventeenth-century Holland any more than I can look at Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, even after historians have tried to put out its fire with theological explanations, and not be amazed. These self-portraits have ineluctable mystery as part of their content.
A history of self-portraiture may one day be written, though such a work would have to concede that there is no straight path in any case, that self-portraiture is a series of fits and starts, cul-de-sacs, detours and strange digressions. Still, these separate essays are approximately chronological and linked, one to the next, as a narrative with its own story. Most of the self-portraits discussed are paintings. No prejudice is intended towards video or sculpture, although sculpted self-portraits are comparatively rare; it is simply that paintings have fascinated me more.
Many of them fulfil Dickens’s ideal of the lasting monument, are among the artist’s greatest works, if not the greatest of all; others struggle with the multiple personalities that Borges imagines must have afflicted Shakespeare. Peculiarly testing in its demands upon the artist who has to hit upon some form of self to represent, peculiarly rich in the self-knowledge on which it can call, self-portraiture draws forth some of the most profound and advanced picture-making in art. It turns the subject inside out, and remakes him or her as an indivisible trinity: there is the work of art, the image of the maker and the truth of what he or she sensed, imagined or believed about themselves and how they chose, as we all must choose, to present themselves.
‘The world so conceived, though extremely various in the types of things and perspectives it contains, is still centerless. It contains us all, and none of us occupies a metaphysically privileged position. Yet each of us, reflecting on this centerless world, must admit that one very large fact seems to have been omitted from its description: the fact that a particular person in it is himself.’
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere.
Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), 1433 Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441)
On a clear day, when the sunshine is bright, we cannot help glimpsing ourselves as spontaneous reflections, vividly present in polished metal and glass, more provisional in opaque surfaces. The pianist becomes aware of his fingers echoed in the sheen above the keyboard. The caller sees his face in the mobile phone. The writer becomes a shadow in the computer’s screen when the glare gets too harsh, coming between her thoughts and her words as maddeningly as those vitreous flecks that drift across the optical field when staring at a white sky or during the prelude to a migraine; each is an involuntary manifestation of oneself.
At home we only have to draw a curtain to deaden our own image but the wider world is not so conveniently adjusted. We spot ourselves large as life in the windows of shops, tiny in wine glasses and spoons, in others’ eyes and the lenses of their spectacles. Mainly we ignore these inklings of ourselves, except when the object that contains them is big enough to be exploited as a face-checking device, but the truth is that nobody actually needs a mirror to see how they look. The daylight world is a sphere of endless reflections in which we are caught and held, over and again,