Famous Self Portraits

1. Famous Self-Portraits

2. Gustave Courbet - Le Desespere, 1845
● Self Portrait of artist Gustave Courbet as a young
man in despair.
● The artist’s close-up shows the eyes wide open
that plunge into the viewer. Painted with lots of
contrasts, the character seems to leap of the
canvas.
● It remains unclear whether the despair depicted
in the painting was the artist’s current emotion or a
mere theoretical exercise.
● Portraits of the time were traditionally vertical,
but Courbet has chosen to use a landscape
orientation for his painting.
● It is believed that he was particularly keen on this
piece, since he took it with him to exile in
Switzerland.

3. Egon Schiele - Self-Portrait With Physalis, 1912
● Depicts the 22-year-old artist that is at the same
time self-confident and fragile.
● The composition is balanced and every line finds
its continuation or a counterpart to which it
corresponds.
● The hair and the body of the artist are cropped
by the edges of the painting and the slander
branches with the colored red lampoon fruit is
depicted in the background.
● During this period, Schiele was extremely
productive and his expressionistic style of painting
became somewhat calmer and more realistic.

4. M. C. Escher - Hand With Reflecting Sphere, 1935
● Dutch artist M. C. Escher was fascinated by unusual vantage
points and something he has described as “mental imagery” often
based on theoretical premises.
● The lithograph Hand with Reflecting Sphere, also known as Self-
Portrait in Spherical Mirror, depicts a hand holding a reflective
sphere where we can see the artist and his surroundings.
● Escher does the unusual and shows the means by which all self-
portraits must be created. He makes the mirror the subject of his
piece.
● He is less interested in his own image, but the way the space is
distorted by a convex reflective surface.

5. Frida Kahlo - The Two Fridas, 1939
● Depicting two versions of Frida Kahlo seated together, the
painting symbolizes her pain during her divorce from Diego
Rivera and the subsequent transitioning of her
novel identity.
● Frida on the right is wearing a white European-style dress,
a costume she donned before her marriage to Rivera.
● During their marriage, she started to
explore the traditional Mexican heritage. Thus, the other
Frida is depicted in the traditional Mexican costume.
● This painting also symbolizes her dual cultural heritage.
● The bleeding heart emphasizes her emotional and physical
pain.
● The blood is a recurring symbol in her work, and it often
gestures her ambivalent attitude towards accepted notions
of womanhood and fertility.

6. David Hockney - Self-Portrait, 1954
● The self-portraits of David Hockney often record the act of
self-portraiture, such as the fact of a painter looking in a
mirror and trying to record what he sees. His portraits present
the ideal of honest observation.
● This piece from the 1954, is one of his early self-portraits
created at the age of 17.
● The backdrop for this piece is a page from The Times, as he
wanted to make a joke with one of the headlines. He was
inspired by the headline on page 14 about the fortunes of the
wool industry.
●This piece depicts an artist as a teenager painted against the
headline “Textile Trade Improves”. As an intentional reference,
it is a playful element of the portrait.
● The piece was discovered a few years ago, and the artist
himself was amazed that it has survived.

7. Lucian Freud - Reflection With Two Children, 1965
● This piece is Lucian Freud‘s self-portrait with his two
children Rose and Ali Boyt.
● It is painted by looking down at his reflection in a
mirror placed by his feet. Thus, there is and extreme
foreshortening and the halo-like ceiling light just above
his left shoulder.
● This uneasy painting shows the artist as a colossal
father figure, while his children are depicted as very
tiny.
● It symbolizes alienation and anxious self-
consciousness.
● The artist made the use of the mirror explicit and he
stares at it coldly.
● He stated he used a palette knife to describe the
space around him and smear it to create a strange, gray,
voluminous void.

8. Pablo Picasso - Self-Portrait Facing Death, 1972
● The painting Self-Portrait Facing Death is Pablo Picasso‘s last
well-known self-portrait and it was done a little less than a
year before his death.
● Typically for his self-portraits, he is depicted with big eyes
that seem to swallow up the viewer, but he insisted he is not
the one who is doing the looking.
● The artist is here battered by time and is facing his mortality,
and his gaze seems terrified, but brave.
● His friend Pierre Daix recalled that Picasso “held the drawing
beside his face to show that the expression of fear was a
contrivance”.