Following on from the sculptured heads by Franz Messerschmidt, for which he used his own face as a template, I thought I'd run a little series on self-portraits.
Having been to see the big Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern last month (which incidentally convinced me that Van Gogh was the superior painter) I'll begin with Gauguin's. I'm sure that we're all familiar with his more famous Polynesian works so I think a look at his self-portraits would be a good place to start.
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris 7 June 1848 and is considered one of the leading painters of the Post-Impressionist period. He died of syphilis at the age of 54 on 8 May 1903 at Atuona, Hiva ‘Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia. The last portrait shown here was the last one he painted, in 1903.
In 1908, Edvard Munch had an anxiety attack and was hospitalized. He had a nervous breakdown. That was said to have been brought on by heavy drinking and depression. He did recover after he had an electroshock treatment. That is when his art went under and extreme change.
To the end of his life, Munch continued to paint unsparing self-portraits, adding to his self-searching cycle of his life and his unflinching series of snapshots of his emotional and physical states.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labelled Munch's work "degenerate art” (along with Picasso, Paul Klee, Matisse, Gauguin, and many other modern artists) and removed his 82 works from German museums.
Before Munch died in January 1944, he had willed his large collection of pictures and un-catalogued biographical and literary notes to the City of Oslo. Consequently, the Munch Museum, dedicated in 1963, has a unique collection of Munch’s art and other material which illuminates all phases of his artistic process.
Picasso's father, Jose Ruíz, was also an artist from whom the young Picasso received his first art training. Pablo attended the carpenter schools at which his father taught and as an early teen passed the entrance exam to the School of Fine Arts with ease. Though he studied at Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, he did not finish – leaving before completing even one year. He was a rebellious youth and moved back and forth between Barcelona and Paris several times between the years 1899 and 1904.
These years also represent his first “period”, the Blue Period, and a time when the young Picasso ceased to sign his full name choosing instead to sign his work only “Picasso”. The Blue Period (1901 – 1904) is characterized by images containing shades of blue and a feeling of melancholy and despair presumably caused by the recent death of a friend.
The Blue Period gave way to the Rose Period with its more cheerful subject matter and soon Picasso was experimenting with what would become cubism along with fellow artist and creator Georges Braque, a French painter and sculptor. Cubism, an important abstract art movement in the early 1900s, attempts to show the subject matter from many viewpoints using an abstracted form and random angles. His works “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”, one of his earliest cubist pieces and arguably one of the best, is a fantastic example of the artistic genre.
Throughout his long career, Picasso often used self-portraits to depict himself in the many different guises, disguises and incarnations of his autobiographical artistic persona.
The range of styles of these self-portraits over a lifetime is astonishing, and his influence and impact on contemporary art can never be underestimated.
And here’s something maybe you didn’t know – Pablo Picasso was actually christened Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso!
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1972 "Facing Death"
Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire 9 July 1937. He went to Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London.
While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, alongside Peter Blake, that announced the arrival of British Pop Art. He became associated with the movement, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon.
From 1963 Hockney was represented by the influential art dealer John Kasmin. In the same year he visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. A later visit to California, where he lived for many years, inspired him to make a series of paintings of swimming pools using the comparatively new Acrylic medium and rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours.
In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. He also made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Hockney is currently based in London and Bridlington, Yorkshire, where he has been painting the Yorkshire landscapes for the past few years.
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2009 (iPhone)
