Tuesday, November 20, 2018 | A13
ART REVIEWHowArtists SeeThemselves_________________
From unsparing representations of oldage to gigantic effigies of ego______________________________________

BY WILLIAM MEYERSWashington
YOU PASS THROUGH “Presidents” at the
National Portrait Gallery to get to “Eye to I: SelfPortraits From 1900 to Today.” The presidents arepainted in styles typical of their periods, but all areportrayed with the deference due to their office. The
75 artists whose portraits of themselves are in “Eyeto I” are, in many instances, less respectful of theirpersons. They work in a wide variety of styles andmedia with differing agendas and with differing
capacities for self-revelation.
Rather than save the best for last, let me say rightoff that my favorite is “Alice Neel Self-Portrait”

Patricia Cronin’s ‘Memorial to a Marriage’ (2002)(1980). In a century whose art drifted further andfurther from representation, Neel made her
reputation painting portraits, frequently of artists,
noted for their light touch, affection andpsychological insight. The oil painting was finishedwhen she was 80, an age when many women nolonger want to have themselves depicted, nevermind shown naked. She spent five years on it and,according to the wall text, “I almost killed myself
painting it.”
Neel sits in a chair, her floppy breasts extending to
the rolls of her belly. The chair looks comfortableenough, but is upholstered in material with verticalwhite and blue stripes that might be the bars of acage. Or is it her body that is the cage? I like thispicture because she looks at us with the same
expression as that of my all-time favorite selfportrait, the Frick Collection’s 1658 Rembrandt.
Like his, her brutal, revelatory self-assessment
testifies to both talent and character before defiantly
submitting itself to our judgment.

created MoMA’s department of photography, andlater consolidated the George Eastman Museum’scollection. In his picture he is seen reflected in
MoMA’s plate-glass window, his face obscured byhis camera, and inside the museum we see hanging
on the wall photographs in an exhibition he curated.
To what extent are his position on the sidewalk
outside the museum and his blocked face anindication of residual bitterness at the shabby
treatment by MoMA that occasioned his resignationin 1947?

Alice Neel’s ‘Alice Neel Self-Portrait’ (1980)

Seventeen of the artists are photographers, theearliest being Jessie Tarbox Beals. She presents
herself in a businesslike way standing beside her 8by-10-inch view camera and her assistant at theLouisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (1904).
Gertrude Käsebier’s picture taken the next year
is echt Pictorialism; she sits like Whistler’s mother,formal and dark. Richard Avedon is much too kindto himself; the 1978 dye transfer print smacks ofadvertisement. And Chuck Close—wow!—needed
16 dye diffusion transfer prints in four rows of fourto create one huge (107 9/16-by-86 1/4-inch) notvery interesting picture of his now well-known face(1989). Ego, I guess.
Curator Brandon Fortune’s witty hanging of Man
Ray (1924) and Berenice Abbott (c. 1932) acrossthe hall from each other reasserts the relationshipbetween the mentor and his mentee; both wereaccomplished portrait photographers and producedcredible pictures of themselves. The most visuallycomplex photographic self-portrait is Beaumont
Newhall’s 1970 black-and-white picture taken
outside the Museum of Modern Art. Newhall wrote
the first comprehensive history of photography,

There are 500 self-portraits among the NationalPortrait Gallery’s 23,000 items, and the ones Ms.
Fortune selected for this exhibition include Hans
Hofmann’s cartoonish pen-and-ink image (1942),
so unlike his abstract paintings; Louise Nevelson’s
dramatic ink-and-watercolor drawing (1938), thebold black lines highlighted with red; the novelistRalph Ellison’s tentative graphite picture (1941);“The Silver Goblet,” Lucy May Stanton’s showy
watercolor on ivory (1912); and Thomas Hart
Benton’s “Self-Portrait With Rita” (c. 1924), an oil
painting of Benton and his wife on the beach at
Martha’s Vineyard with his naked torso looking a
lot like that of Douglas Fairbanks in hisswashbuckling adventure movie posters.
The two most unusual media are “Seven Passages
to a Flight,” Faith Ringgold’s 1998 quilt including
nine images from her life and work, hand-paintedetchings with pochoir borders on linen, and Patricia
Cronin’s life-size funerary-like double portrait
sculpture “Memorial to a Marriage” (2002),
showing herself and her then partner, now wife,
Deborah Kass, lying together in an embrace.
The self-portrait provides a cost-free model for
professional artists to demonstrate their skill, and achallenge to their self-understanding. Pele de Lappe
stares at us with an inquiring expression as she musthave stared at herself in the mirror while drawing
her graphite image (1938). Diego Rivera is moreknowing and seems to challenge us in thelithograph he produced to support himself (1930).
In an era of ubiquitous smartphone selfies such as
Molly Soda’s “Who’s Sorry Now” (2017), theNational Portrait Gallery exhibition shows how
professional artists see themselves or, maybe moreaccurately, want themselves to be seen.

Enrique Chagoya’s ‘Aliens Sans Frontières’ (2016)_____________________________________
Eye to I: Self- Portraits From 1900 to Today
National Portrait Gallery,Through Aug. 18, 2019_____________________________________________Mr Meyers writes on [photography for the journal.
See his photographs at
www.williammeyersphotography.com.