Like the old man, Europa is building her visual world, its physical and human spaces. At the centre of it is herself. The earliest humans saw themselves reflected in water, and there have been mirrors since at least the Bronze Age. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the most visual of written languages, ankh, the sign for life, was also the word for mirror. A child’s fascinated encounter with its own image in a mirror has been much discussed in psychoanalysis, and most people will look at themselves regularly throughout their lives, more so in the ages of photography and digital.
What do they see? In a mirror, our heads are exactly half the size they are in real life, but we do not notice the smallness because seeing ourselves outside ourselves, as an object in the world, is stranger than the mirror’s optical illusion. The billions of selfies now taken happen because of the fun of seeing ourselves from outside our own visual cortex, in space and time, with our friends or in a famous place. Painters have been particularly good at looking at themselves. Their self-portraits reveal the obsessiveness, neurosis, ego and pathos of being alive. Van Gogh and Rembrandt used their own faces to chart their anguish and ageing. This self-portrait by the French painter Gustave Courbet is sometimes called The Desperate Man, but perhaps more than desperation, it is possible to see in it the shock of catching sight of yourself.
He pulls his hair back and seems to say, Is that really me? He was about twenty-four when he stared at himself to paint it, and would live for more than three decades after this, but his picture registers his fascination with the Big Bang of himself.
In comparison, the German artist Albrecht Dürer, who was only a few years older than Courbet when he did this painting, is way beyond the shock of self.
He did a remarkable pencil sketch of his right profile when he was thirteen, the first of many self-portraits (including a naked one), and he is perhaps the first artist ever to have his own logo – the famous ‘AD’, on the left of this painting. This is a man who is very comfortable with looking at himself and seems to see Jesus Christ in his geometric symmetry, handsome stillness and almost sculptural confidence. There is no flicker here, no rush to the canvas like Courbet’s. As did many, Dürer thought that the Day of Judgement would come in 1500, so when it did not, he perhaps felt that he had to reimagine himself on a longer timeline. He is seeing himself as a god: the self-portrait as an act of love. The word mirror comes from mirari in Latin, which means ‘to marvel at’.
Like Dürer, Egon Schiele painted himself often. He is usually naked in the sketches, and they have a dash about them. He drew rapidly, lifting the pencil from the paper as little as possible, then often coloured around the figure, making it look thinner still than its whippet proportions. The self he saw in the mirror was attenuated.
Often, as here, the darkest things in his watercolours are the eyes and genitals. They look at each other. The body is just the skeletal, angular, runway in between. The fingers, like Dürer’s, are long and bony. Schiele was bad at everything in school apart from art and sport, the body and the line. His short active years as an artist (he died, aged twenty-eight, in 1918) coincided with the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise to prominence of his fellow Austrian Sigmund Freud. Sexuality was surfacing. Human beings were being figuratively unclothed, their social pretences stripped away. When Schiele looked at himself, he undressed. He removed the old varnish of empire as if to say We have been hiding, behind our hands, as here, like the child who thinks she disappears when she covers her eyes, but also behind our old-world, nineteenth-century, uniformed bourgeois rationalism. Schiele was not edified by what he saw, but was compelled to look.
The same is true of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In this picture from 1932, she stands on a plinth on the border between Mexico and the United States.
At first glance it seems that the smoke, factories and skyscrapers on the right show the America she hated, and that the flowers and cacti, ancient sculpture, pyramid and electric spark between Sun and Moon on the left are symbols of the elemental Mexico that she preferred. She even holds the Mexican flag. But the painting is not nearly so binary. Kahlo was a modernist and leftist, so she was not averse to smoke stacks. It says FORD on them, and she had just had a miscarriage at the Henry Ford clinic, so the image starts to seem as much about personal loss as nation. The stoves on the right almost look like cannons which could have fired the skull or stones piled on the left. They are lined up like the flowers, and the sun has its echo in the orange heater in the bottom right.
What is striking is how Kahlo – or Carmen Rivera, as she signs herself on the plinth, using her husband’s name – plants herself so squarely into this nation-dream. Everything is within touching distance. It is an image of the proximate. Anguissola set Europa into a network of glances. Kahlo, here, is presenting the Mexico she has seen and the America she has seen, the two societies she is torn between, and has herself rise above them, once on the plinth, a second time by showing us the ground underneath it. Artists like Kahlo, Dürer and Schiele or, later, Joseph Beuys or David Bowie, show that to look at yourself, and so consider your place in the world, is to see something hidden, surreal (which we will come to later) and even mythic. For the looker, the self is the most available object in the world. It is inescapable, a thing that contains looking and interacts with other lookers.
LOOKING AT HOME
Homes are extensions of selves, exoskeletons that shelter and express. They are where we look from. So far in our story we have been mostly outdoors. Now we build a cocoon around ourselves and, suddenly, we make a new distinction between in and out, here and there, safe and unsafe.
The first image in this book looks out into the dawn from the shelter of a home. As we build our sense of the looked-at life, it is time to imagine our early lookers in their homes. Caves at first, but then structures built of mud, wood, stone, brick, concrete, steel or glass. What kind of looking do homes allow us to do?
Consider this image, from the Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film Mirror.
The first thing we notice is that the home creates darkness, an opaque enclosure. Looking needs light, but homes exclude light. We are inside, already here, rooted. The hunter-gatherers have stopped, and have been here some time; the floorboards are well worn. Inside the home, the children we see will have looked at each other, their family, the table on which food is served, and so forth. Most still life paintings in the history of art capture such looking – the half-peeled lemons in the pictures of Dutch artist Willem Kalf, the peel dangling over the edge of a table which is covered with a damask cloth. Édouard Manet’s bunch of asparagus, quickly painted, is less showy than Kalf’s lemons: it is not trying to be elegant or posh. The asparagus is just there, to capture the way it lies. In the Tarkovsky