Museums

How has the selfie evolved? This new Portrait Gallery
exhibition charts its rise, from 1900.

Patricia Cronin’s bronze sculpture of herself and her spouse, Deborah Kass, is both traditional and contemporary.
(Digitized by Mark Gulezian/Patricia Cronin/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Gift of Chuck Close)

By Mark Jenkins
November 15In 1839, Philadelphia photographer Robert Cornelius was probably the first to do somethingthat has become a national pastime: take a selfie. The technology has changed a lot since then,as illustrated by “Eye to I: Self-Portraits From 1900 to Today.” The attitudes have changed evenmore.

“Eye to I” is the final exhibition of the ones mounted to mark the National Portrait Gallery’s
50th anniversary. Most of the previous exhibitions have featured people who aren’t usually
noticed by official portrait galleries: slaves, workers, lynching victims and even those literally
invisible to history — represented by the images in another 50th-anniversary show, “UnSeen:
Our Past in a New Light.”
This show is more traditional, in the sense that many of its subjects are well known and, in somecases, expected. (How could there not be, for example, an Andy Warhol?) Yet some of the 77
artworks, nearly all of them from the museum’s collection, are of less-celebrated figures. Theselections are noteworthy for their artfulness, but also for how they illustrate our shifting ideasof self-image.
The exhibition is arranged in a rough chronology, so the first half is all paintings, drawings,prints and photographs. These include self-renderings of American realist Edward Hopper andMexican muralist Diego Rivera and a partial view — austerely formalist, of course — ofgeometric abstractionist Josef Albers. There are also pre-digital selfies of such documentary
photographers as Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott and Edward Steichen, as well as artier ones
such as Man Ray.
A few earlier pieces illustrate themes more common in the later works. The country’s firstfemale photojournalist, Jessie Tarbox Beals, stands with her gear in 1904. Her woman-at-workpose presages the emergence of women in fields that, back then, were mostly off-limits. In a
heroic portrait, Thomas Hart Benton strikes a pose that may have been inspired by actorDouglas Fairbanks. The picture was made around 1924, well before most artists — and everyone
else — started thinking of themselves as the stars of their own biopics.

Thomas Hart Benton’s “Self-Portrait WithRita,” c. 1924. (Mark Gulezian/Thomas Hart
Benton/National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Jack H. Mooney)

The recent works include videos and other pieces impossible without contemporary technology.
Evan Roth’s “Internet Cache Portrait” reveals the artist himself not as a physical being but ascollection of interests, gathered from his computer and printed on a long roll of thin vinyl. It’s
another way of depicting presence in absence, and more cutting-edge than Jim Dine’s“Bathrobe,” which implies the existence of the artist’s omitted body.
Enrique Chagoya’s “Aliens Sans Frontiers” is a lithograph, which is not a new process, but it
relies on a recently devised procedure: DNA testing. Inspired by a reading of his genome, theartist depicts six versions of himself, each in a stereotypical setting associated with one of hisancestors’s homelands.
The closest thing to a smartphone selfie is Molly Soda’s video of herself as she interacts with herphone. She’s not quite her current self, though. Molly Soda is a semi-fictionalized version of 29year-old artist Amalia Soto as a teenager, buffeted by the emotional and technological stimuli
delivered by texts and apps. If Benton imagined himself as a Hollywood swashbuckler, Soto isliving a different sort of movie — one she describes as “kind of sad or dark.”
The darkness is palpable in the last gallery. As much as it chronicles changing technology andideas of self-image, “Eye to I” illustrates candor about decline and death.
That’s implicit in Chuck Close’s large 1989 portrait, composed of 16 close-up photos and madethe year after a serious injury left him a quadriplegic. Bodily imperfection is depicted morebluntly in Alice Neel’s nude of herself, painted between the ages of 75 and 80. It announces her
acceptance of aging while critiquing the female form as male artists’s domain.
Patricia Cronin’s bronze sculpture of herself and her spouse, Deborah Kass, is both traditionaland contemporary. The original is meant for the couple’s gravesite and is modeled after
Victorian-era funerary art. But it depicts the women in nude embrace, sensuous and seemingly
very much alive.
Bronze outlasts flesh, but the goal of any portrait is to preserve. The body withers while theimage endures — if properly backed up on a flash drive, of course.
IF YOU GO
Eye to I:
Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today
National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW. npg.si.edu.
Dates: Through Aug. 18.
Admission: Free.
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