Self Portrait

We expect self-portraits to be more true to life than other pictures, as Laura Cumming argues in A Face to the World, her thought-provoking book on artists’ images of themselves. In a self-portrait, the fusion of person with picture seems to be total. When we look at any portrait “there is always the sense of coming face to face with another person before that person reverts to an image”, but self-portraits “go further in claiming the two to be one and the same”. The artist’s appearance as author of him- or herself makes a bid for verisimilitude that goes far beyond simple realism – here we somehow expect to get the soul, too.
The results, from Jan Van Eyck’s ghostly appearances in the margins of his art to Tracey Emin’s frantic self-exposure, are rich in human interest. Self-portraiture is an opportunity for the artist to put across his or her side of the story, and as Cumming points out, it has been used at times “as a love letter, mission statement or suicide note by other means”. As a tradition, self-portraiture starts off quietly enough. At first, artists generally appeared in their own paintings as extras, their image serving as a form of signature. The Dutch Masters, in line with their all-you-can-eat approach to realism, developed tricks for expanding the visual field of a painting by using reflections to depict what was just out of sight: a room in a polished bowl of fruit, a distant town in a shiny archer’s helmet. That Van Eyck should choose to represent himself in this way, reflected as a tiny figure in the convex mirror of “The Arnolfini Portrait” – a witness not only to the prosperity of this couple posing in their plush house, but to the act of artistic creation itself – seems to be a natural extension of the inclusiveness of his art: he, too, was here. In this painting “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic”, written across the wall in painstaking calligraphy, is the Renaissance equivalent of Kilroy’s insistent phrase.
Cumming’s keen and occasionally irreverent eye makes us look afresh at some by now well-worn faces. Van Eyck’s reticence had given way, by the sixteenth century, to the self-portrait proper: Tintoretto’s soulful, shadowy stare, Lorenzo Lippi’s mischievous sidelong peep, Titian’s account of himself, at seventy-two, as a world-weary old man who would rather be anywhere but here. The most immediately recognizable of these is Albrecht Dürer’s full-face self-portrait of 1500, with its fur collar and long streaming hair, “a triangle of metal-bright locks, not a single tendril out of place”. Cumming is excellent at annotating the picture’s “peculiar golden radiance”, its charisma and almost oppressive vitality. It is the defining advertisement for Dürer the man and artist, an icon rather than a representative image (as Cumming notes, the painting “was obviously never meant to stay quietly at home with the family”). And it seems to have been worshipped as an icon by future generations of German artists, appearing in numerous later prints and in Georg Vischer’s “Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery” as the face of Jesus.
Cumming argues with great brio that this most pictorialized of self-portraits in fact embodies the fusion of art and artist. The serenely detached pose, shoulders squared, the finger of Dürer’s right hand pointing meaningfully at his own chest, is baffling until we look at it closely. That triangular mass of hair, the crossbar of the beard: what are they other than the counterpart, writ large, of the A of Dürer’s own trademark initial in the top left-hand corner of the painting? The maker and his image, the product of his prodigious talent, are one. Yet Cumming, perhaps dazzled by the self-confidence of that face, stops short of drawing the obvious conclusion. If the face is Christ-like, it is a Christ meant for a humanist age, exalting the divine in man. “Whatever he feels, whatever he senses in his fingers, ought to connect straight up to the face, but when you get there all explanations are frustrated.” Really? Look again. The finger, the face, are quite clearly saying “Ecce homo”. Dürer’s is, as Cumming rightly claims, the alpha and omega of self-portraits.
Among the book’s revelations are the ways in which our preconceptions about some of these artists fall poignantly short of the way they represented themselves. (Dürer, incidentally, was teased for his long locks in an age of collar-length styles, referring to himself mockingly as “the hairy bearded painter”.) There is an almost comic pathos in the way that Velázquez, whose art so unflinchingly confronts the fact of our mortality and the transitoriness of earthly honours, goes back to his self-portrait in “Las Meninas” three years after its completion and carefully adds to his breast the badge of the knighthood he had since received from Philip IV. “Delacroix, passionate in painting, has a prim little toothbrush moustache . . . . Rothko, his aim so spiritual, is a heavy lug in blue-tinted glasses.” Goya draws himself as an urbane, top-hatted man of the world. Michelangelo, the most monumental of painters and the sculptor of gigantic marbles, appears in his “Last Judgement” as something nearly formless, lending his features to the flayed skin of a repentant sinner.
For self-knowledge at its most unsparing, however, one must turn to Rembrandt. An indefatigable portrayer of himself, he painted more than eighty self-portraits in a career spanning nearly forty years, “a record of change and decay unparalleled in the history of art”. Although he is cavalier with the details of his own physiognomy – the colour of his eyes, the shape of his nose, never seem to be the same from one picture to the next – the whole adds up to an unrivalled sense of truth to life. Cumming’s discussion of Rembrandt’s evolving originality as a self-portraitist and the frank disclosure of personality in these images – a personality that remains, to the end, restless and unresolved – powerfully counters the argument, still sometimes put forward by art historians, that artists before the nineteenth century did not have a developed idea of self. By all accounts Rembrandt was litigious, careless, vain, irritable and charmless, and that is how he depicts himself, not just in “the porky adenoidal youth or the cackling prodigal in the tavern”, but in some of the late self-portraits where he appears “sweating and absurd in his hats, making an old curmudgeon of himself”. He is a disappointed soul, ageing, tired and without any sustaining illusions left, and the self-portraits aren’t afraid to show it.
Rembrandt’s self-appraisal is the opposite of that of Gustave Courbet, who had the mixed blessing, for a narcissist, of living in the age of the camera. Courbet painted and Courbet photographed are not much alike. Cumming suggests wickedly that “he had what psychologists call residual self-image: the slim beauty of his youth lingers on in self-portraits made when he was a bloated old drunk”. Extravagantly proud of his good looks, he produced his self-portraits at speed and for immediate dissemination. He paints himself as a cellist, though he couldn’t play the cello; as a medieval sculptor (he was never a sculptor); as a Byronic lover; an elegant Old Master; a wounded duellist, “eyes drowsily lidded, mouth half-open and just asking to be kissed”. And yet there is an energy and a brilliance of colour to these images – Courbet’s paintings are unusual for being as bright in reality as they are when reproduced – that make us willing to forgive him an awful lot.
Courbet would never merit a place in Cumming’s chapter on “Victims”, which features artists suffering various forms of immolation, usually by arrow. The self-portrait as martyr is a risky undertaking. When Caravaggio paints himself at the end of his life as the severed head of Goliath being held aloft by David, he manages to turn his own face into a memento mori, “coarse, blank, waxy, the eyelids swollen and drooping, the teeth dark stumps in a mouth fixed with a silent cry at the moment of death”: in spite of its drama, this is a self-portrait devoid of ego. Not so Egon Schiele’s poster for his first show, in which he appears as St Sebastian being skewered by arrows. Schiele had recently been charged with the kidnap and sexual abuse of an underage girl, and with displaying indecent images. The allusion to the martyred saint is flagrant and unblushing: “look upon me, Egon Schiele, suffering for my art even unto death”. As Cumming says, if the drawing were not so skilled, one would need a heart of stone not to laugh. Oddly enough the reverse applies to our reaction to Frida Kahlo’s portrait of herself as a deer wounded by arrows. Here the stiff, faux-naïf style goes a long way towards providing the necessary distance between viewer and picture – “Kahlo’s very failings as an artist are possibly what protect her from being seen as self-sorry”.
And what about Tracey Emin? Cumming pinpoints the affinities between Emin’s “rachitic little drawings of herself” – drunk, bleeding, post-coital – and Schiele’s, just as she spots the prototype for Emin’s photographic self-portrait “The Last Thing I Said to You Was Don’t Leave Me Here”, “where she huddles with her back to us in a corner of the room, naked, thin, forlorn”, the spitting image of a Schiele nude. But time and repetition have taken the edge off Emin’s revelations. Even self-pity has a shelf life. Emin, as the artist herself knows, “has acquired a public persona in Britain by now about as cherished as John Betjeman’s”.
Someone else who doesn’t make it into the chapter on “Victims” is Van Gogh – he goes into “Pioneers”. Cumming is at her most authoritative when she debunks the image of Van Gogh as the holy man of art, and of his “Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear” as an anguished display of stigmata. We like to see Van Gogh as a harrowed martyr to his vocation; he never saw himself in that way. Even the title of this painting isn’t his (he did not give his self-portraits titles). His letters to his brother Theo reveal that he considered the colour effects of this picture with his usual professional detachment. If you look closely at the brushmarks you will see that they are carefully placed: this is a study in control, not in disinhibition. The bandage, too, is just part of the scene, an everyday object like a coat or a hat. It is “not sacramental”, scolds Cumming, “no matter how we might cherish the legend of the Holy Ear” – just one of many incontrovertible assertions that make this the most informative and entertaining art book you are likely to read this year.

Laura Cumming A FACE TO THE WORLD On self-portraits 280pp. Harper Press. £30. 978

Elizabeth Lowry’s novel The Bellini Madonna was published in 2009.