Picasso self-portraits

An artist that grew up in the classical tradition and went on to be perhaps the most innovative painter of the C20th was Pablo Picasso, 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973. He was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor who lived most of his adult life in France. Picasso’s work spans over seven decades and thousands of pieces.
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!

1896

1896

1901

1901

1901 (blue period)

1906

1907

1917

1938

1972

1972

1972 "Facing Death"

 

David Hockney self-portraits

Having quite comprehensively bridged the C19th & C20th with the self-portraits of Picasso, it seems appropriate to feature the self-portraits of David Hockney - an important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960’s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. Picasso’s influence on Hockney’s mid-career work is self evident (see 1986 painting), and in one of the works here (the 1973 etching), he pays direct homage to Picasso.
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.

 1954

 1954

 1954

 1955

 1973

 1977

 1977

 1980

 1983

 1986

 1999

 2005

 2009 (iPhone)

Chuck Close self-portraits

 Close suffered a devastating spinal infection in 1988 that left him a quadriplegic. Since then he has developed an extraordinary technique using a complex grid-based reconstruction of the photographs that he works from - typically portraits of himself, his family and friends - to create really large-scale works. He has also been creating photographic montages on enormous sheets of Polaroid paper amongst many other techniques.
Charles Thomas (Chuck) Close was born in Monroe, Washington in 1940. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1962 and from Yale in 1964. He was the 1997 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus - the highest university honor for one of its graduates. Close's work is included in the collections of numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Tate Gallery (London). The New York Museum of Modern Art held a special exhibit of Close's paintings and prints in 1998; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held an exhibit on Close's prints in 2004.
This first self-portrait dates from 1967-8 and the second image shows the impressive scale of it.

1967-8

1983

 1987 Polaroid - look at the scale below

 1995

 1997

Detail of the above - if you squint you'll recognise the eye

 2004-5

 (Date unknown)

 2005 Polaroid

 2006 Tapestry

 2007 Screenprint

2008 Collage

Pressed pulp (date unknown)