Visions of the Self Rembrandt and Now
Grosvenor Hill, London, April 12–May 18, 2019
Gagosian in partnership with English Heritage
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Visions of the Self
Rembrandt and Now
Gagosian in partnership with English Heritage
The vocabulary of painting is all in this picture. And for
me, it’s the most exciting moment of being at Gagosian,
because I never in my life thought I would share a space
with this picture.
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Jenny Saville
Contents
Installation views 2
Experimentation and Reinvigoration byWendy Monkhouse 27
Rembrandt’s O’s and Rembrandt’s I’s: Rembrandt and
Contemporary Self-Portraiture by David Freedberg 29
Plates 61
List of Works 165
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Experimentation and Reinvigoration
Wendy Monkhouse
Creating a show looking at Rembrandt’s impact on self-portraiture in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries allowed English Heritage and Gagosian to interrogate—and cast
in a new light—a well-known, lauded, and familiar work.
We wanted to take Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles out of its customary
habitat, a historic house museum curated by English Heritage, and place it in a completely
different environment—at Gagosian in Mayfair. Context changes any reading of a work
of art; at Kenwood House, where the painting typically resides, it is viewed as the star
of Lord Iveagh’s spectacular 1928 bequest to the nation. It hangs in a room with crimson
damask walls and oak-grained woodwork, rubbing shoulders with works by Frans Hals,
Joshua Reynolds, and Vermeer. At Gagosian it was to be freed from these surroundings
and presented within cool, high-ceilinged rooms in the company of very different works.
And that process allowed it to speak in a different way.
The rest of the exhibition pulled together extraordinary loans in a very short space
of time, showing artists’ peripheral or central awareness of Rembrandt’s contribution to—
and this particular work’s impact on—self-portraiture. No other show in the 350th
anniversary year of Rembrandt’s death addressed his legacy in the modern period and
answered the question “Is his work still relevant to artists?” with an emphatic yes. This
joint curatorial view was expressed implicitly through the way we hung the show, and
explicitly by the living artists who spoke eloquently during its run and whose perspectives
are captured in this volume.
The curatorial partnership was successful and stimulating. For us at English Heritage,
working at a fast pace creatively and experimentally was a great pleasure. It was liberating
to exhibit works without interpretation, and to give visibility to the fundamental
tropes of the show—depth and superficiality, reflection and obscurantism, viscerality
and abstraction—through the hang. Viewers were not asked to measure modern masters
against Rembrandt, but to consider how these artists had reacted to his technique,
his humanity, and his honesty. For us this felt like experimentation and gave us the
opportunity to reinvigorate the work.
We spent much time in the gallery, meeting lenders, collectors, and curators who were
mixing with students, English Heritage members, and international visitors. The
atmosphere was one of excitement and critical appreciation, and then, at the culmination
of the show in front of the Rembrandt, of genuine awe and emotion. We are deeply
grateful to Gagosian for making the show happen, for their intellectual and practical
contribution, and for breaking new ground with us.
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Rembrandt’s O’s and Rembrandt’s I’s:
Rembrandt and Contemporary Self-Portraiture
David Freedberg
I
In this essay I want to describe the ways in which Rembrandt may be regarded as a
precursor—perhaps even the founder—of all modern painting. Others might dispute these
designations and offer alternative candidates—Dürer, say. But the scale and radical nature
of Rembrandt’s innovations in painting are without precedent.
It would probably be too bold to claim that every one of the artists in Visions of the Self:
Rembrandt and Now was influenced by him, whether consciously or unconsciously, but I will
argue that in his approach to painting, Rembrandt anticipated the very core of modernism.
II
Standing before Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball (Rembrandt Self-Portrait Wearing a Hat) (2015;
p. 111), you see the world around you mirrored in the shining blue orb in front of the
painting. You see yourself there too, even if dimly and slightly distorted. The painting is a
self-portrait made by Rembrandt in 1642–43, when he was at the very height of his powers,
just after the completion and successful installation of the work that secured his already
strong reputation for all time, The Night Watch (1642), now the most famous of his many
works in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is as if Koons were saying, “In this work you
can see everything—and you are in it too.”
III
Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now was a rich show, carefully and wisely hung. The
cross-connections were abundant. In one way or another, every work could be referred back
to Rembrandt in one way or another. But does this mean that all of the artists in this show
were influenced by Rembrandt, or derived their approach to painting from him? This would
be too banal, too general, or just too unlikely. We may think that we have had enough
of the anxiety of influence and of the art historian’s search for traces of one artist in another.
But could it be that in his work Rembrandt touched the very core of what it means to
make a self-portrait, so that everyone else’s inevitably reveals something of what is already
present in Rembrandt?
This would be a large claim, both empirically and philosophically; but the show offered
plenty of evidence with which to test it. This evidence teaches us how to read other
portraits through Rembrandt, and how to read them better. It demonstrates how a selection
constrained by chance and availability, if well put together, can be deeply instructive and
enhance our understanding not just of art, but of the history of art. Every work in the show
cast light on the many meanings of portraying the self, perhaps even its essential meaning.
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IV
At the heart of Visions of the Self stood Rembrandt’s great Self-Portrait with Two Circles
from Kenwood House in London, the refined Robert Adam house at the top of Hampstead
Heath, in which the Rembrandt seems an uncompromising intruder (c. 1665; p. 161). In its
contained grandeur it is matched only by the Self-Portrait in the Frick Collection in New
York (1658; fig. 1). These are perhaps the greatest of all Rembrandt’s forty or so painted selfportraits (to say nothing of the many etchings, large and small, that he made of himself).
Both represent him as a mature artist at the very height of his powers. Of course, there are
many other self-portraits by Rembrandt that could also be described as great and moving
works, most notably those that show him marked by the visible signs of his old age: sagging
flesh, furrowed brow, face riven with melancholy and sadness, with the experiences of
life, of financial setbacks and personal loss. In almost all of them paint becomes flesh, first
pasty and soft, then crisscrossed and furrowed with the corrugations of experience, and
long-borne emotion and trial. Many pages have been written—and more undoubtedly will—
about how Rembrandt depicts the flesh and feelings of old age. He is the consummate
master of showing in paint the qualities of proud senescence, as his shaking hand becomes
sure in its unpitying representation of the aging self. We see him thus, over and over
again, and realize that no one until then had made a living out of portraying an old man’s
self with features that if described in words alone would add up to a mere fraction of
the nobility they reveal in paint—however bulbous the nose, however reddened, wrinkled,
and baggy the eyelids.
First Rembrandt lays down the features of the face and the aging body; then, swiftly,
he adapts them to the truth of what he sees. The Italian word for making such changes
to the surface of a painting, for altering a brushstroke or contour, is the same as the word
for “repentance”—pentimento. But when Rembrandt makes changes of this kind, he does
so unrepentantly and with no hesitation. He glories in the epiphanies they bring forth,
making them all too apparent, and directing the viewer’s attention to the visible traces
of his genius. He does this with ever thicker layers of impasto that in some places directly
show the effect of the bristles of the brush, in others reveal the granularity of pigment
and paint, in yet others—particularly in the whites, as in the cap of the Kenwood picture
where the thick paint is as smooth as can be—“lashings of thick white lead,” as Simon
Schama put it in his eloquent description of this painting. In all these late self-portraits
you see the strokes as if they were made before you; they are not subject, for the most part,
to smoothing out and elimination of the traces of brushwork, as in so much other Dutch
painting of the time. Rembrandt shies away from no pentimento and has no qualms
about showing both what constitutes and what lies beneath the effects of his painting.
He is as little afraid of changing his mind or heart as he is of changing his paint surface.
He is not ashamed of showing the roughness either of his declining flesh or of his paint.
Fig. 1
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait, 1658
Oil on canvas
52 ⅝ × 40 ⅞ inches
(133.7 × 103.8 cm)
Frick Collection, New York
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Fig. 2
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640
Oil on canvas
40 1/8 × 31 1/2 inches
(102 × 80 cm)
National Gallery, London
When he was young—twenty-three, to be exact—Rembrandt painted a small
self-portrait of himself in his studio. Now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, it shows
the young painter as a comparatively small and unpretentious figure with the deeply
shadowed eyes typical of many of the portraits he made of himself in his twenties. In the
plainest of rooms, gathered up in layers of clothing—presumably to keep him warm in
his cold studio—he stands at a distance from his easel, here seen from behind. We don’t
know what will go on the panel it supports. His hand could hardly be farther from it.
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A palette hangs on the wall beside him, a kind of badge of his calling, not much more.
The floorboards are worn and bare, the plaster peels from the walls. It is a work that could
scarcely be more different from the late self-portraits, with or without an easel. But he’s
clearly ready to go.
At the age of thirty-six, Rembrandt produced the self-portrait that is perhaps his
most coolly self-confident of all (1640; fig. 2; London National Gallery). While it does not
explicitly show him as a painter (the tools of his trade are absent, and he is certainly not
in the parsimoniously equipped studio of the Boston picture), no one with any knowledge
of painting at the time—and by then the Dutch were more enamored of easel painting
than any other nation in Europe, perhaps even more, indeed, than Italy—would have failed
to recognize what he was trying to demonstrate. He was showing himself as equal to the
two greatest masters of Italian painting, Raphael and Titian—the first the acknowledged
Roman master of drawing and of line, the second the great Venetian exponent of color.
Painting at the time was divided into two camps: those who excelled at disegno, drawing
and line, and those who excelled in colore, color. Disegno stood for the work of the mind,
the supreme basis of art, while colore stood for the material work of the hand and produced
texture and light, shade and even darkness (of which Rembrandt, following Caravaggio
too, became a master as well). Disegno was more conceptual and imaginative, color obviously
more sensual. These two qualities, usually thought of as polarities, as distinctive areas
and the prerogatives or distinctive excellences of one school over another, came together
in Rembrandt—and he knew it, and wanted to show it.
A month or two before Rembrandt began painting the National Gallery portrait,
Raphael’s masterpiece, the 1514–15 portrait of Baldassare Castiglione now in the Louvre,
was sold at auction in Amsterdam in April 1639 (fig. 3). It went for the princely sum of thirtyfive hundred guilders to Alfonso Lopez, a Portuguese-Jewish diamond merchant and
arms dealer. Rembrandt was there and drew it in a swift pen-and-ink drawing that happily
survives (fig. 4), shifting Castiglione’s pretty squarely placed hat to one side, so that it
sits at a more rakish diagonal, and turning his body slightly toward the left. All this was
much more in keeping with his own style—one might call it his own more baroque style—
at the time. Then, seeing one of Titian’s greatest portraits that was also in the Lopez
collection—the one that was said to be a portrait of the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto
(c. 1510; fig. 5), where the sitter’s body is turned entirely away from the face that looks out
at one in the manner of the Italian contrapposto, he combined these two great images.
He preserved the basic pose of Castiglione, but turned his own body away from the viewer,
as in the Titian, while at the same time making turning his neck in the opposite direction,
so as to look still more directly at the viewer. In so doing, Rembrandt ensured that his
elbow projected directly into the viewer’s space, engaging him or her even more directly,
just as in the Titian.
As if to exemplify his command of drawing, he first did an etching of this spectacular
and meaningful combination. And then, one year later, in 1640, he demonstrated his
mastery, both of Raphael’s unusual gray-brown palette and of Titian’s more painterly
handling. Raphael’s sitter, Castiglione, as Rembrandt certainly knew, was the renowned
author of the famous guide to courtly behavior known as The Book of the Courtier, Il Cortigiano.
The picture is the very epitome of courtly cool, of elegant nonchalance, and what Castiglione
himself called sprezzatura. Yet this ultimately self-confident work—painted just before
he received his greatest public commission, The Night Watch—places himself squarely
in the great tradition of the masters of Renaissance Italy (which, unlike many of his peers,
he never visited). Though it has little of the sheer tactility of his later works, it conveys
(as Simon Schama also noted) a palpable sense of fleshy presence—as much through
the strong gaze as anything else. Still, no one could have predicted what was yet to come.
Fig. 3
Raphael
Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione,
1514–15
Oil on canvas
32 1/4 × 26 3/8 inches
(82 × 67 cm)
Collection de Louis XIV,
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Fig. 4
Rembrandt van Rijn
Drawing of Raphael’s Baldassare
Castiglione, 1639
Pen on paper
6 3/8 × 8 1/8 inches
(16.3 × 20.7 cm)
Graphische Sammlung
Albertina, Vienna
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The period of calm confidence that followed produced the uncomplicatedly proud
self-portrait—fur collar, rich tabard, double gold necklace, the usual plain and
unremarkable face with the keenest and most profound eyes gazing directly out at one—
before which Koons placed his gazing ball (p. 111). This period begins, I think, with
the succession of quietly penetrating portraits that came after the London self-portrait
of 1640 and the wonderfully benign and assured portrait, executed in the same year,
of his frame maker Herman Doomer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
it weathers the death of his wife, Saskia, in 1641 and the tempestuous relationship with
his maidservant Geertje Dircx, and it sees his turn to inwardness in the landscapes of
this period and in the ever more reflective mode of the portraits of himself and of others.
Experimentation with his etched and engraved surfaces and in the tactility and boldness
of his brushwork continues with ever-greater intensity, culminating in the blazing
golds and reds of the 1654 portrait of his friend and creditor Jan Six (fig. 6). It is the boldest
of all his portraits in terms of painterly swagger. Six’s red and gold cloak—and in particular
the upper collar, the buttons and the braid—are painted with a bravura and swiftness
unparalleled in his own work. There could be little more confident than the loaded strokes
of the brush here, the smoothness of the rich gray tunic below it, or the creamy impasted
treatment of the cuffs and gloves. But already the skin of the sitter’s face exhibits the
slightly sagging puffiness of incipient age—those marks of decline that will soon will turn
into sites of the most minute pictorial analyses of the unstoppable effects of time
on physiognomy.
Fig. 5
Titian
Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo,
c. 1510
Oil on canvas
32 × 26 1/8 inches
(81.2 × 66.3 cm)
National Gallery, London
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We have seen Rembrandt as a brash young man, establishing from very early on his
independence when it came to the handling of his tools and the application of paint.
Once he’d gotten over his need to show smooth and glistening textures, gleaming metal
and striking light effects (all of which he succeeded in continuing when necessary), his
willingness to take chances with paint only increased. More and more he seemed to relish
leaving the physical traces both of his workmanship and of chance effects on the canvas.
Almost from the beginning he made use of tough and unidealizing models, from old and
stooping men to women squatting to piss, from wrinkled and furrowed sages to women
whose beauty does not reflect the canonical models of ancient art and sculpture, but
whose plump fleshiness showed the very garter marks which Rembrandt was incessantly
condemned for painting even during his lifetime (by the critics; the market seemed to
appreciate him more). Right from the beginning he seems to have been intent on ensuring
that people never forgot that he was not only as great as Raphael and Titian but equal
to the legendary painter of antiquity, the very greatest of all, Apelles—who could divide
the finest line longitudinally in two with one perfectly placed stroke, like the one that runs
along the edge of the picture on the easel in the small early self-portrait in Boston (or
failing him, Zeuxis, his constant rival, who painted the most beautiful picture of a woman
ever by combining the features of the five loveliest young women in the town of Crotone).
But this, of course, is not what Rembrandt sought to emulate, nor, indeed, did he model
his work on the even better known stories about the rivalry between Apelles and Zeuxis
for the palm of the most capably mimetic, the prize for being the most realistic and the
best imitator of nature. The parallels he chose were more pointed than that.
Fig. 6
Rembrandt van Rijn
Portrait of Jan Six, c. 1654
Oil on canvas
44 1/8 × 40 1/8 inches
(112 × 102 cm)
Six Collection, Amsterdam
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VII
In the 1650s Rembrandt applied paint to his canvases to show both the softness and
tautness of flesh, sagging here and there or stretched tight across tendons and bones
(as in Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer [1653; fig. 7] in the Metropolitan Museum of Art;
increasingly into the 1660s he left traces of coarseness, granularity, and texture in the
paint itself, no rendering it longer shiny and perfect as in his portraits of the ’30s, nor
luminous, confident, and ruddy as in the ’40s; instead, he was uncompromisingly honest
not only in painting the rough, aging, and patinated surfaces of things, but in conveying
the very feel of morbid flesh itself. It would not be incorrect, nor any blasphemy, to say that
in his old age as a creator, Rembrandt showed the physical decline of the flesh with
marks on the canvas that are as unsparing as those left by the Creator himself on the face
of the artist.
But in the self-portraits in the Frick of 1658 and Kenwood of perhaps a decade later,
there is still more. They reveal more of the essence of the artist than any of the others.
Of course the others also show him as Rembrandt the artist, especially in the many ways
in which paint becomes the literal sign of life, of vitality, and the particular vitality of
old age. In these two works, however, he shows himself, confronts himself, as in no other—
except one outrider, to which we will come shortly.
In both these paintings, Rembrandt is clearly a painter of a certain age. And in both of
them he shows himself with a maulstick, that instrument that is almost as essential to
the easel painter as the brush itself, particularly as age begins to assail the hand. It is this
instrument on which he now rests his hand as he paints, the old wizard applying his magic
to the surface of the canvas (for these works are always on canvas, as was de rigueur in
the Netherlands at this time). Canvas enhances the texture of a surface, much more so than
panel, which is more suitable for the smooth surfaces that Rembrandt disdained for most
of his life (though not always). By now he was indeed the old wizard—or rather, as he was
called during his lifetime, the old heretic, the old heretic of painting, the painter who
seemed to turn his back on the rules of his art, the old heretic whose one grand commission
for the city of Amsterdam, the painting of the blind Claudius Civilis (1661–62; fig. 8)
taking an oath to defend his fatherland against the colonizing Romans, was rejected by
the city authorities, despite its marvelous luminosity. It was rejected as too rough and
ready, too modern, too avant-garde (there is no need to shy away from these descriptions
as anachronistic, for they, indeed, best convey what works such as all these paintings of
his last decades were).
The Frick picture, painted less than two years after the ignominy of Rembrandt’s
bankruptcy and the sale of his house and his most precious possessions—from his artworks
to the very costumes in which he loved to dress himself up—is the grandest of all his
self-portraits, so grand it can rightly be called imperial. It scorns defeat. The painter as
potentate, one wants to say, calm in the face of turbulence and adversity. As the maulstick
that looks like an imperial scepter suggests, he is now the emperor of painting, and is
dressed accordingly, in golden robe, ermine cloak, and red sash. The picture is a reassertion
in paint of what his real self consists of. His eyes are deeply shadowed, but the gaze is
confident—even though, in worldly terms, the work could not have been painted at a more
disastrous time. His possessions were still being sold off, and his estate and future profits
made over to his ailing son. He was more bereft than ever before. But in this picture he
reveals no doubt about who he is. Nothing could be more magnificent than this painting,
nothing more poignant. And what it shows above all are those grand hands, painted with
the boldest of rich and impasted strokes (not dissimilar to those of Aristotle as he assays
the mind of Homer), in which the materiality of his work becomes still more apparent.
Fig. 7
Rembrandt van Rijn
Aristotle Contemplating
a Bust of Homer, 1653
Oil on canvas
56 1/2 × 53 3/4 inches
(143.5 × 136.5 cm)
Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York
Fig. 8
Rembrandt van Rijn
The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, 1661–62 (detail)
Oil on canvas
77 1/8 × 121 5/8 inches
(196 × 309 cm)
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
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It is in these that his mastery lies—and he knows it, and announces it. His eyes are tired
but the hands strong. Nothing will defeat them, this picture seems to say, nothing, at least,
in the realm of pictorial creativity.
Two years later, in his 1660 self-portrait now in the Louvre (fig. 9), it is almost as if he has
regained his self-confidence. The gaze is open and steady, and he is back in his workshop,
wearing a smock (though he is a little too gussied up to be wearing one, it is true); he holds
his brushes and palette in hand, ready to paint on the easel right before him. Rembrandt the
painter is back, with the hands as large and as broadly painted as ever; face patchy, striated,
and ridged; the garments more cursory yet pictorially full of aesthetic interest; and the
same white cap he would later wear in the Kenwood picture keeping his hair, fluffier than
ever, more or less in place (or just hiding its unkemptness).
Just a year later, however, Rembrandt painted a picture of himself looking much more
tried and under stress. It shows him as the Apostle Paul, with book in hand, one of his
favorite motifs (1661; fig. 10). The lines over his eyes and on his forehead are deeper than
ever. It is not difficult to understand Rembrandt’s lifelong attachment to this most human
and most humble of the Apostles (as Perry Chapman has put it in her excellent lines
on this painting). Tried by his conflicting emotions, and by the tensions between flesh and
spirit, intensely aware of his responsibility to convey Christ’s mission across the world,
and yet bold in the promulgation of His teachings, St. Paul embodied much of the agony
and triumph of Rembrandt’s own life: the one indomitable in his commitment to his
beliefs, the other undefeated in the face of rejection. It may be that Rembrandt saw himself
as an artist who, like St. Paul, transcended individuality to become all things to all men,
as Gary Schwartz has long suggested. But both surely knew, on the basis of their life
experiences, that one could not be that and still remain true to oneself.
It was probably in the same year that Rembrandt received his commission for The
Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis for the brand-new and sumptuous town hall
of Amsterdam (fig. 8). It is a masterpiece of apparently spontaneous uncontained brushwork
and brilliant nocturnal illumination—and yet it was swiftly rejected, almost certainly
for the audacity of its brushwork. There would be one more undoubted public triumph,
that of the 1662 group portrait of the cloth assayers of the Amsterdam guild of drapers,
known as The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, one of the most profound and complex of all Dutch
group portraits, that genre which set the gold standard for group portraits ever since. But
by the next year—the year in which the beloved partner of his old age, Hendrickje Stoffels,
died—it was almost over in terms of public recognition. But in terms of Rembrandt’s
conception of the relationship between medium and message and the revelation of
character and emotion through paint, it most certainly was not.
He may well have barely finished his portrait of himself as St. Paul when he switched
emotional gears once more; and this time he did so by making an unexpected turn.
There is a self-portrait (fig. 11) in Cologne painted on gold ground, showing him as
he looks out at the spectator, laughing. A great gold shawl, sumptuous and tactile, is
draped over his shoulder; his eyebrows are arched, his head cocked at an angle as he turns
away from the business of painting the profile of an old woman to look at us and share
his mood. Whether this is laughter or mockery or some combination of both is unclear.
His maulstick rests on the canvas in front of him.
For many years the painting was a bit of a puzzle, and resisted interpretation. Some
were even a little disturbed by the slightly manic gaze in Rembrandt’s eyes, as if he were
indeed about to collapse from laughter. Of course, it was more complicated than that.
The puzzle was resolved when Albert Blankert noted that the painting was but a
fragment of a larger work that was in turn copied twenty years later by one of Rembrandt’s
students, Aert de Gelder. This work survives, and it shows the artist painting what was
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in fact an old woman (of whom only the profile remains on Rembrandt’s now cut-down
canvas in Cologne). Blankert pointed out that that painting, like Rembrandt’s, referred
to the myth of the ancient painter Zeuxis, who was said to have died while laughing
at the ugliness of the woman he was painting. Not an edifying tale, it is true, but it is as if
Rembrandt were triumphantly saying here, through his smile and raised eyebrows and
amidst the sadness of old age, defeat, and rejection, “See, out of ugliness, out of the ugliness
of old age, I can still make art. And that ugliness is here in the picture of my subject, of me—
my true subject, after all—in all the roughness of my visage and the impasted, granular,
smudgy coarseness of my paint. That is where my art lies, that is where I paint myself, not
in the lines and weakness of old age, but in what my hand can still achieve, even in those
patches and dabs and drips of paint—for those are the very signs of my life in my work.”
It is as if he were saying, “Take it or leave it”—but saying that in the full knowledge that that,
the work of the hands, in all its glorious and honest traces of experience and experiment,
is precisely where his art lay.
VIII
In his final years, some of this fire is gone. Resignation eventually replaces focus—
but not entirely. To judge from the three last portraits, in Florence, London (fig. 12), and
The Hague (fig. 13), probably all painted around 1669, Rembrandt seems to have regained
his confidence after the losses of the preceding years. His gaze is at once secure and
penetrating, tender and content (especially in the very last picture of all, the self-portrait
in The Hague). As always, his skin is pouchy and painted with the crumbly texture that
seems so particularly fitting for these years at the threshold of death. The sadness is gone
and his eyes seem to register calm acknowledgment of his fate.
No one ever painted eyes like Rembrandt, from beginning to end. Though always
luminous and clear, they betray depths without melodrama. They are either shrouded
in shadow or shine out with unmatched clarity and luminosity as they gaze out at one.
Kind, troubled, determined, proud, or tender, they allow one to gather the feeling they
contain, and the history of what they have witnessed. Eyelids and the skin surrounding
them are painted with such finesse and with such minute attention to every accident
and bump of flesh that they exhaust description. It is impossible to understand how such
seeming realism could also contain such feeling, or convey so strong a sense of the
limitlessness of such tenderness, emotion, and penetration.
IX
Much of what I have said about Rembrandt’s approach to painting could be applied
of the works by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Georg Baselitz, and Jenny Saville in Visions
of the Self. Like Rembrandt, none of them reveals any hesitation in showing either the
vagaries of the self or those of the paint that embodies it. Paint, like flesh, is as labile as
the self. The actual movements involved in the application of paint become an essential,
unabashed part of the meaning of the work itself. The art of these works consists of the
material ways in which their makers reveal both their bodies and the actions that produce
their representations of themselves. In the illuminated parts of the face in the Kenwood
picture, as the foremost scholar of Rembrandt’s technique, Ernst van de Wetering,
has noted, there are countless fine indentations and scratches along with the fine traces
of the stiff hairs of a brush, all suggesting the irregular wrinkles and pores of aging skin.
39
Baselitz retains not only the impasted variations of flesh in his picture from the Grosse
Nacht series of 1962–63 (p. 89) but also does not hesitate to leave the globules and scratches
that the brush can make on the surface of a work. He knows that these give a vivid sense
of the ways in which the revelation of the very grit of the materiality of paint itself can
add still further to the visceral effects and artistic interest of a work (to say nothing of the
grossness of the penises that sprout from his body). Both he and Jenny Saville know
how to use juxtaposed patches and strokes of reds and pinks and light touches of yellow
to convey a sense of the vulnerable fleshiness of their bodies, in ways that make their
indebtedness to Rembrandt all too clear.
Like Rembrandt, none of these artists has any shame in showing ugliness of feature
(though few paid as much as he for the accusations of ugliness, or for not conforming to
current standards of beauty, which Rembrandt’s own contemporaries increasingly accused
him of). The traces left by Bacon, Freud, Baselitz, and Saville of brushstroke, of actual
application of paint, of the reluctance to smooth out their surfaces, of the decision to leave
in all the visible effects of bristle, of soft and hard brush, of uneven patches of paint, and
of the many bits and pieces of undissolved pigment or scraps of alien materials that find
their way into the surface of things—let alone the initial elements of their design that they
leave on the canvas for the viewer to figure out: all this may be found in Rembrandt too.
These are works that convey the impression of unabashed spontaneity and candor, as if
to say, “These imperfections before you, these visible brushstrokes, these distortions, these
blots, these spots, and patches—all these are what make this work, and all these are me.”
In the works by many of the younger painters the surface may at first sight seem less
grainy, less rough, but even so, in works such as Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s Self-Portrait after
Rembrandt (2019; p. 67; commissioned, like Saville’s, especially for the show), Rembrandt’s
hold not only on their pictorial imagination but on their very handling of paint remains
clear. Take Quinn’s modulations—and the more delicate impastos—of his mouth, and of
his slightly sad eyes, the features that are always the most significant attractors in a portrait.
They are significant because they reveal so much and provide so much opportunity
for the painter’s and colorist’s arts of nuance and for the potential subtleties of brushwork.
More obviously, Quinn has noticed how rare, especially in the mature Rembrandt, is
the self-portrait that does not show some kind of hat or cap that adds flair, finality, and selfconfidence to a picture of the self. Like Bacon, Quinn distorts all these features in such
a way as to draw still more attention to them.
At first sight Howard Hodgkin’s Portrait of the Artist of 1984–87 (pp. 63) seems not to be
a portrait at all. It seems too abstract, a deeply nonfigurative work in which geometric
form predominates. Upon closer inspection, however, one suddenly notices a pair (or maybe
a trio) of lively eyes deep within the work, right at the epicenter of the central box. They
call to mind one of the floating eyes that Rembrandt painted at the back of works like The
Night Watch or put into some of his earliest etchings, where there is a similar abandonment
of the eye to the vagaries of surface. All of these works by Rembrandt may seem, in their
fundamentally mimetic quality and in the complex emotional qualities the eyes within
them entail, to be the direct opposite of the Hodgkin. But although on the surface it appears
to be a smooth performance, a moment spent with it reveals the opposite. In it we find
exactly the same traces of crumbliness, smudged areas, impasted patches, dribbles, and the
scratching of the bristles of a brush as in the more figurative works in this show as well.
They make us realize that in this surface, too, paint becomes as critical for the spectator as
form itself. It is a self-portrait not because it looks like Hodgkin, but because it reveals the
very self Hodgkin wishes to display. One might well miss this in looking at a reproduction
of the work, but if ever there were an installation where one could plainly tell the necessity
of seeing the painting firsthand, of seeing its physical materiality, it was here.
40
Fig. 9
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait, 1660
Oil on canvas
43 3/4 × 33 1/2
(111 × 85 cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Fig. 10
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul, 1661
Oil on canvas
35 7/8 × 30 3/8 inches
(91 × 77 cm)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
41
The same is true of Basquiat’s Thinker of 1986 (p. 100), where the contrasts between
a brush at work with paints that in parts are dry, in others much oilier and wetter, only
emerge upon closer inspection. This profound awareness of the importance of including
the facture of work extends from the abstraction of Hodgkin to the strongly depictive
quality, both in feel and feeling, of a work such as Rudolf Stingel’s darkly shadowed,
melancholic, and deeply Rembrandtian Untitled of 2012 (pp. 111–12). It is Rembrandtian not
only in the emotional drama of the head but in the leavings of paint and brush on its
surface, and perhaps above all in its embedment in a space that goes from vaguely lit gloom
to almost impenetrable darkness. All this combines to give great emotional power to the
work. And in the superimposition of what seem like somehow residual circles—but
residues of what?—the painting draws us back to the geometric accompaniments of that
classic expression of intellectual emotion, Dürer’s famous 1514 engraving Melencolia II.
X
Fig. 11
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait, 1668
Oil on canvas
32 1/2 × 25 5/8 inches
(82.5 × 65 cm)
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation
Corboud, Cologne
If ever there were an artist famous for showing emotion in a face and for suggesting
the hidden-most depths of feeling in a work, it was Rembrandt. They are depths that we
perceive but fail to plumb, and our struggle to get to their core is part of the hold of his
pictures, and of his portraits in particular. But the profundity of their emotional content
did not come automatically. In his youth Rembrandt studied incessantly how best to
convey emotion in a head, whether using his own or one of his assistants’. It became one
of his major projects, both inside and outside the studio. He painted what at the time
he and others called tronies, small studies of heads, mostly of men; these were vehicles
by which—on which—he could explore how most effectively to convey emotion on a
face. Most are small and intense works, often more like sketches than finished paintings.
Jenny Saville’s much larger self-portrait (p. 134) has the same qualities of Rembrandt’s
experimentation with the relationship between paint and expression of emotion as
his tronies. Several other works in the show, like the Schiele and the late Picasso drawing,
could clearly be classified in the same category. Indeed, it may well be that Bacon’s
spellbinding three studies for a self-portrait (pp. 144–45)—which are based on a strip of
three photo booth pictures of himself—come closest to Rembrandt’s intense exercises
in conveying emotion in a head through the medium of paint, for all their clear
reference to African masks as well.
XI
The largest and most striking picture in the show was Warhol’s Self-Portrait of 1986
(p. 127). It was certainly the most alarming. Warhol’s red face and electric hair strike terror
into one’s heart. There is little nuance of color and no coloristic magic as in Rembrandt
or, for that matter, in the self-portraits by Saville and many of the other contemporary
artists in the show. If ever there were a purely red and black picture, it was this. Since it’s
a silk screen with acrylic, there’s no impasto in it. It’s certainly not a tronie, since it’s too
large for that, and it lacks the kind of experimentation with paint that we find in almost all
of Rembrandt’s pictures. But it’s a work full of stark emotion, especially an emotion that
was perhaps too obvious and thus largely avoided by Rembrandt: fear: blatant, chilling,
fear. It elicits terror in the beholder and reveals the terror of the sitter, the self. You see this
in the eyes, the mouth, and, most bluntly of all, the hair.
Fig. 12
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, 1669
Oil on canvas
33 7/8 × 27 3/4 inches
(86 × 70.5 cm)
National Gallery, London
42
43
XII
From beginning to end, it is not only Rembrandt’s eyes, mouth, and nose that convey
emotion in his portraits. From the earliest works right until the very end, his hair (and often
that of others) stands as an emblem of infinite freedom as well as of the pictorial energy
that never abated, from the wonderful painting of himself aged about twenty-two, now
in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 14), to the very last portraits in London and The Hague that
he made at the age of sixty-three (figs. 12 and 13). Already in the painting of around 1628,
he uses not only the tip of the brush but also its pointed wooden end, incising and
scratching into the paint itself, through to the ground, to show the rich abundance of his
fine mass of reddish-brown hair (fig. 14). One can scrutinize the painting and never see
the end of the manifold strokes that make up his hair, of every little scratch, every curlicue,
every dry stroke and every smooth one, each full of expressive content and aesthetic
interest. Almost every strand seems to charge the work with both energy and softness,
until inevitably the softness becomes more wiry with age. All this Rembrandt manages
to convey like no other.
But soon he contains the waywardness of his hair with his caps and hats. He always
loved painting these, and they are almost always present in his self-portraits, especially
in the later ones. In all the self-portraits his hair becomes an accessory to emotion, unlike
the hair in the Warhol, the Schiele, and the Basquiat, where it is clearly a protagonist;
but in the great Blinding of Samson (1636; fig. 15) in Frankfurt—perhaps the most obviously
dramatic of all his pictures—it carries a powerful emotional charge as well. In Delilah’s
treacherous hands, the hair that was the marker of Samson’s strength is like the hair of
the maenads, those drunken followers of Bacchus, amongst whom she might seem rightly
to belong.
For the great art historian Aby Warburg, following ancient poets like Ovid, the
movement of wild hair, as exemplified by that of the maenads, was always an index of
emotional agitation. We may say the same not only for Basquiat, where the combination
of bared teeth and hair standing on end occurs in many of his most forceful works, but
for Warhol’s Self-Portrait here and above all Schiele’s self-portrait of 1910 (p. 65). His fiery
eyes look distressed, his brow deeply furrowed. Is his expression one of pity, anger, or
thwarted desire? His spiky shock of hair seems to emit flames and smoke, or so the thick
reds and whites are painted to suggest. Together they make clear the extraordinary
emotional tension within.
It is worth recalling at this point how much importance Rembrandt himself attached
not only to the overlap between movement and emotion but also to the kinds of complex
emotions that a head like Schiele’s suggests in its powerful implication of the combination
of both sorrow and anger. One rarely sees a single basic emotion in Rembrandt (and he
generally avoids unidimensional depictions of anger and fear, for example, or if he tries
these, he fails); more he aims for dense and complex combinations of divergent feelings
that emerge not only on the face, but in the whole body and in the very movements it
seems capable of either unleashing or restraining.
Fig. 13
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait, 1669
Oil on canvas
25 3/4 × 23 3/4 inches
(65.4 × 60.2 cm)
Mauritshuis, The Hague
XIII
If Warhol’s silk screen dispenses with the kinds of textures and surface irregularities
that are so critical to Rembrandt’s expressions of feeling in a picture—and indeed to the
revelation of his self—what, then, are we to make of the work of Glenn Brown? His copy—
or better, his version—of El Greco’s portrait of an elderly gentleman from the Prado,
44
45
which Brown turns into a kind of ironic portrait of himself with a red nose, offers a perfect
example of his approach (p. 81). At first his paintings look as deeply impasted as those of
any old master, and almost as richly so as those of Rembrandt; their surfaces seem furrowed,
patchy, and scumbled. But upon closer inspection we see that they are all perfectly flat,
with no ridge or wrinkle whatsoever. Each stroke turns out to be done with great finesse,
and as smoothly painted as it could possibly be. It is as if Brown is enquiring into the
very nature of painting as both an optical and a tactile art.
He does so in both the El Greco portrait titled Sex (2003; p. 81) and in the work painted
especially for the show, The Hurdy Gurdy (2019; p. 140). While relatively frequent in sixteenthand seventeenth-century painting, the subject of the latter work is never to be found
in Rembrandt. And Brown’s approach to pentimento, to a change in direction as he paints,
is also quite different from his. Whereas Rembrandt and most of the painters in the show
charge their changes with tactility, Brown emphasizes their optical dimension. In this
work, he begins by painting a copy of a drawing by Andrea del Sarto and then decides
to copy one from the school of Van Dyck. Neither is obscured (as Rembrandt’s initial ideas
often are) by a superimposed layer of paint. Both are visible. Your eyes switch compulsively
from one head to the other, finding each equally intact. Brown seems to be saying that
painting is fundamentally an optical art—even if it can, by optical means alone, convey
a sense of tactility and texture—as in Sex (and in most of Brown’s work), but not in the
The Hurdy Gurdy.
We should be careful, therefore, not to think of Brown’s work as a rejection of the effect
that Rembrandt—or any who paint in his manner—sought to achieve. On the contrary.
Brown realizes the importance of conveying a sense of the tactility of a painted surface,
but he shows, appropriately for someone so involved in the optical effects of making
a picture, that the sense of an encrusted, scraped, and impasted surface can be conveyed
by the eyes alone. He knows perfectly well that the eyes themselves are capable of evoking
and stimulating the sense of touch. In this lies one of the fundamental creative paradoxes
of vision. It is also where one of the most basic elements of Christian theology meets
with art, in its claim that even though Christ was made incarnate, belief did not rest on
embodiment alone, but on imagination. For why else would Christ have reminded
St. Thomas that he did not have to feel—or even see—the wound in his side in order to
believe in his reincarnation after death.
But in his painting after El Greco, Brown is not yet done with the paradoxes afforded
by the multimodality of sensory perception, such as a sense of tactility achieved through
vision alone. After all, this is as much a fact of life as it is a matter of faith. We live by
it and are thwarted by it. So he does something still more critical. He must have noticed
that as Rembrandt grew older he gave ever more prominence to his bulbous nose (for
Rembrandt had never shirked from showing ugliness, as his critics were swift enough to
notice); perhaps he realized that for Rembrandt it offered almost unlimited opportunities
to represent the multifold forms of the incarnation of the flesh. He must have puzzled,
as we all do, over the ways in which Rembrandt manages to convey the feel of flesh through
the eyes alone. So Brown takes the infinitely more refined and much less salient nose in
the El Greco portrait that was his model in the portrait here, and applies the coloristic
lessons he learned from Rembrandt to it. For a start, of course, it’s a red nose, but one that
is as coloristically nuanced as it might have been in a Rembrandt. In this way he complicates
the central paradox of vision, the tension between vision and tactility, and reminds us
of the multifold possibilities that underlie the relationship between the senses and the
hopes of art. Then he takes the clear eyes in the El Greco and covers them with a milky film
or cataract, as if this were the impediment not just to seeing the colors he does paint,
but to seeing the details of texture and roughness he does not, as if to argue out—but not
Fig. 14
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait, c. 1628
Oil on panel
8 7/8 × 7 3/8 inches
(22.6 × 18.7 cm)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
46
47
argue away—the notion that sight could ever equal tactility. But he also knows that touch
is not taken away from the blind. After all, have we not long known that our sense of touch
does not require sight at all but is, in fact, enhanced by its absence?
XIV
No wonder that one of Rembrandt’s great themes was that of blindness. He frequently
illustrated it with subjects from the Bible and from ancient history. In the stunning
and yet terrifying painting of the blinding of Samson at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt
(fig. 15), he shows how the Philistines chain Samson and punch out his remaining eye with
a sword, as blood spurts from it and Delilah rushes off into the light with his hair in her
hands, thus depriving him of all his strength and leaving him in tragic darkness. In his
many drawings and etchings of the story of the blindness of Tobit—which is presumably
due to a cataract—Rembrandt emphasizes both the helplessness of Tobit and the joy of his
family once his sight was restored to him by his son Tobias (helped, of course, by an angel).
For Rembrandt, sight was always associated with touch, and when you see the most striking
of his impastos, as, for example, in the hands, sleeves, and gold tunic of the Self-Portrait
in the Frick Collection, it is hard to resist reaching out to touch the picture yourself; indeed,
in the stories like that of Tobit, it is tempting to associate relief from blindness with the
satisfaction of the gifts of both sight and touch in personal relationships, as Rembrandt’s
drawings and paintings recall to us over and over again. In the 1653 Aristotle Contemplating
a Bust of Homer in the Metropolitan Museum, Aristotle seems to access the wisdom of the
blind Homer by lightly placing his right hand on the head of the poet’s bust, while his
left hand fingers the great gold chain, as thickly painted as any in the history of art, draped
from his neck to his waist.
The association between all-too-tactile brilliance and sight reaches its apogee in the
last of his public works, the painting commissioned for the Amsterdam town hall and
rejected as being too radical (and presumably not smooth enough!) by the town government,
the The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis (fig. 8). The deeply moving irony
of this picture is that such utter visual splendor should occur in a work about a national
leader who is old and one-eyed—and all the more heroic for that. One sees the glinting
swords, the shimmering embossed fabrics and the costume jewelry, and one wants to
touch them all, as if to join the conspirators in their oath. Nothing could have been more
important to Rembrandt, nothing more visionary than these exemplifications of the
fundamental relationship between sight and touch. It is of course in this that much of his
legacy lies, as Visions of the Self demonstrated over and over again, in picture after picture.
XV
Is it just by coincidence that the other work in the show that was painted with
extraordinary smoothness, all impasto omitted, was the wonderful double portrait of
Gerhard Richter and Benjamin Buchloh, the art historian who was Richter’s Boswell (p. 78)?
In its composition the work is related to the many double portraits of Titian and his school
in which brushstroke was prized and the texture of the surface was generally rather
pronounced. But that is about as far as that relationship goes, for there the surface is almost
tactile; here we seem to want to feel our way in. For here the surface is as smooth as anything
in Glenn Brown, and is entirely covered by a milky layer as if seen through a cataract once
more. It was a wise and pointed choice to include in the show Richter’s later work (2008;
48
p. 131) depicting a mirror with a similarly milky surface, obliging the viewer engage in
an elusive visual search for the definition of whatever figure it might reflect—including,
of course, the self.
How different, then, though equally compelling, are Giuseppe Penone’s rebarbative
eyes in the photograph of himself titled Rovesciare i propri occhi (Reversing One’s Eyes, 1970;
p. 75). They are as chilling as the eyes of Medusa, threatening to freeze one to stone. They
turn one away, just as do the startling glass or crystal eyes of some ancient statue, or the
sockets or dead pupils of a blind man. . . . But then we see that we, his viewers, are reflected
in them, and Penone’s inscriptions tell us that no, they are not mirrors, but contact lenses
acting as mirrors, as a kind of parallel for the photographic lens. They are not transparent
and do not reveal the soul of the artist; instead, they reflect the viewer and make her aware
of her own role in constituting the subject. “The contact lenses,” he writes on one side
of the photograph, “mirror and reflect the images which are put together by the movements
of the observer.” On the other side of the photo, Penone notes that “they entrust to the
uncertain outcome of a photographic recording the possibility of seeing in the future the
images assembled by the eyes of the past.”
Photographs may mirror what is before them, but despite the appearance of faithfulness
they are not reliable. What they show, like the contact lens, depends on your position—
both literal and psychological. We know that from experience. What they record depends
as much on what you, the beholder, bring to them as on the maker’s role in creating the
image. What you see in Penone’s eyes—or rather his contact lenses—are mirrors reflecting
what you want to see; they offer no accurate sense of what is beyond them.
We may thus take this work as a statement about a central problem of art: the maker’s
ability to evoke a response that is both adequate to the mystery of the represented self and
goes beyond it. Its evocativeness depends almost entirely on the extent to which it allows
us to sustain the search for innermost depth, and then, when that search is thwarted, to know
that we will never fail to return to it because each next gaze will reveal something further.
All this may help us understand why it is only rarely that we can say with certainty that
this or that in a modern or contemporary portrait derives from Rembrandt; to do so
would be to scant the processes that go into making a work. What we could say, however,
is that this or that is an aspect of self-portraiture that is similar to Rembrandt because
it worked for him just as it works for X, Y, and Z. An exhibition like Visions of the Self invites
viewers to measure, by way of comparison, the effectiveness of precisely such processes,
techniques, and devices.
XVI
Take Damien Hirst’s portrait of himself at age twenty-three while working in a mortuary
with the head of a dead man (1991; p. 84). It’s altogether too vivid, too realistic, with those
screwed-up eyes, the fleshy grimace, the entrails emerging from the severed head. And then
Hirst’s cheeky and immature grin, his head topped by spikily cropped hair, just as in
some of Rembrandt’s youthful self-portraits, hair not yet constrained by cap or hat. But in
only one or two of Rembrandt’s unsparingly frank drawings does the artist portray himself
as insolently or cheekily as Hirst. For the most part, as we have seen, he uses these early
drawings and paintings of himself as tronies with which to study every kind of emotion.
Indeed, in the greatest of these, such as his own self-portrait at the age of twenty-three, most
of his face is deeply shadowed, and the eyes most of all. They suggest gravity and maturity,
not cheekiness or immaturity, and in them the areas that are lit are precisely those in
which he can show off his technique as a painter to best effect (though the drawings, at least
49
at this point, testify to the brilliant spontaneity of his line and his skill in the use of wash,
that halfway point between drawing and painting, as a means of showing the subtlety
with which he is capable of rendering contrasts between light and shade.
Rembrandt himself was extraordinarily interested in the representation of old men,
especially in his youth. Typically he shows them as dignified, despite all the signs of
senescence that he loved to depict. Insolence and cheekiness were not part of his playbook,
whatever opportunities they may have offered for virtuoso physiognomic representation.
And in the end, of course, there were few other painters in the history of art who were
able to express the decline even of unpromising features and flesh, in all their sagging and
wilting patchiness, with such tenderness and nobility.
XVII
I do not wish to suggest that every work in the show relates to or could be related to
Rembrandt in one way or another. But his legacy was present in almost every picture,
even when the evidence is less clear or less direct than I may seem to have been claiming.
There are many lessons to be learned from the similarities in style and approach between
his work and those of the modernists and our contemporaries, however accidental or
coincidental those similarities may seem to be. Often it seems as if Rembrandt’s handling
of paint and his masterful use of light and shade has filtered across time to our era. His
work offers an almost unparalleled prism through which to view not only all the artists
in the show but also the entire history of painting and printmaking. The multigenerational
comparisons Visions of the Self afforded give one much pause for thought about the
participating artists’ relationship not only with Rembrandt, but with each other. Whether
in his case or in theirs, the fundamental question is about the meaning of style, and
its relationship with the message the artist wishes to convey. It turns out that even in the
works that appear to have no direct or purposeful relationship with Rembrandt, the
similarities and comparisons that emerge provide hooks for connecting the modern and
contemporary paintings and drawings amongst themselves too.
XVIII
Picasso’s drawing of himself aged ninety-one, done the summer before his death in
1973, was one of the most compelling works in the show (p. 137). The line that runs straight
down on the left side of his forehead could hardly be more decisive in its finality. In its use
of chalk it comes close to Rembrandt’s own chalk drawings. The spontaneity of handling,
the granularity of each line, the brisk and often emphatic use of hatching, the highlighting
with white, all this appears in Rembrandt too, not only in his late drawings, but from
the very start. Like all Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Picasso’s late drawing also makes clear
the essential role of eyes, mouth, and nose—as bulbous as anything in Rembrandt!—
in establishing the emotional tenor of the portrait. The jagged and unruly eyebrows play
a similar role in this respect as do the furrowed brow lines in Rembrandt’s paintings of
himself. The sense of movement not only within these features but also in the contour that
defines Picasso’s face (and shoulders) reminds one of the inseparability of movement and
emotion, an inseparability that Rembrandt himself acknowledged when he spoke of the
need to invest his Entombment and Resurrection of 1639 with “ the greatest and most natural
movement”—by which he meant the way in which the movement of the body expressed
the movements of the soul.
50
Fig. 15
Rembrandt van Rijn
The Blinding of Samson, 1636
Oil on canvas
81 1/8 × 108 5/8 inches
(206 × 276 cm)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
51
But then we look more closely, and we see it: no—this is less a living face than a skull.
The nose may suggest fleshy bulbousness, the eyebrows hair, but for the rest—the eye
sockets, the hollows of the face, and the mouth that seems all teeth—these are the chilling
features of the head of death.
The circuit closes. To portray the self is to seek to defy mortality. And yet, in the end,
to do so is nothing less than to testify to one’s awareness of the inescapability of death.
Is that why, as Robert Mapplethorpe so firmly clutches his walking stick topped by a
death’s-head in his last self-portrait, he seems to affirm the parallel between his own visage—
staring eyes, perfectly frontal gaze, the rest all black—and that of death itself? In the
seventeenth century and for long after, one could always find a death’s-head in what were
called vanitas paintings, paintings that testified to the sheer vanity of the things of this
world. Beautiful objects, fine clothes, paintings—all must die, including the subjects
of self-portraits. A skull was often included as a simple memento mori: remember you must die.
But Rembrandt was no emblematist; he did not need such obvious devices or symbols.
Who, in seeing the only other enfleshed part of this work, Mapplethorpe’s beautifully
photographed hand, more clearly in focus than the slightly blurred head, would not
wonder whether Mapplethorpe was here not recalling the way in which Rembrandt’s own
hand, the very vehicle of his immortality, clutches his maulstick in the painting in the
Frick Collection?
XIX
And so the parallels continue. They remain instructive, however coincidental, however
aleatory they may be. But like the roll of the dice, they are fateful, too. The eyes in Man
Ray’s 1924 portrait of himself aged thirty-four (p. 97) have the same hooded watchfulness
as Rembrandt’s in some of his earlier self-portraits, but for the rest it seems much more
conventional than any of Rembrandt’s (and, indeed, than much else in the show). The
slicked-back hair and bourgeois outfit make him appear almost like an alert if skeptical
banker, or an assessor or examiner of some kind or another: spy, judge, interrogator—
who knows? But like Rembrandt—and Dürer too—he places his own stylized signature
prominently in the foreground of the work, thus proclaiming its status as a work of art.
And then we notice the artful blur of light and shade in the background that contrasts
so strikingly with the much more clearly focused marks of damage to the plate that Man
Ray deliberately chose to leave on the print. There it is again, the commitment to the
aesthetic dimension of the error, the technical happenstance of production, the confusion
between the deliberate and the accidental, the enigma left to the spectator, the essential
tension in the work of art between control and the roll of the dice—the tension, in other
words that both enables and underlies the creative results that emerge. The artist is master
of that play, to a greater or lesser degree; we who are not are indeed mere spectators.
If Man Ray’s self-portrait shows a self closed within itself, despite the intensity of
the gaze, Diane Arbus’s of 1942 has a frank, almost invitational openness about it, despite
the fact that she shows herself almost nude (p. 92). Indeed, she is quite naked, save for
the briefs she wears. In its tender representation of young female carnality and the modest
benignity of the expression on her mouth, it calls to mind Rembrandt’s painting of
Hendrickje Stoffels now in the National Gallery in London. It must have been painted
when she was just a few years older than Arbus when she made the portrait of herself
in early pregnancy. The briefs she wears for modesty cover what Hendrickje almost reveals
as she lifts her shift, just as Hendrickje’s shift hides what Arbus so plainly shows. But
in the tenderness and sensuality of the treatment of flesh and in the way both artists so
Fig. 16
Rembrandt van Rijn
The Artist Drawing from the Model, c. 1639
Etching and drypoint on paper
9 1/8 × 7 1/4 inches (23.2 × 18.4 cm)
Morgan Library & Museum, New York
52
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lovingly attend to the other elements within the work, one cannot but help wonder whether
in her imagination as she composed this picture of herself Arbus also recalled Rembrandt’s
painting of Hendrickje.
All these are works that not only imply their beholders but also implicate them. Ellen
Gallagher is knowing about this, and in her appropriation of a famous Man Ray photograph
of Matisse drawing an odalisque model in the luxurious setting of a harem, she substitutes
her head for the model’s, and that of Sigmund Freud, here apparently taking notes, for
the artist’s. Indeed! In both Gallagher’s work and Matisse’s, the model seems to interrogate
the man—whether painter with brush in hand, or psychoanalyst with pen in hand—with
her gaze; she challenges their presence and their roles. Then Gallagher takes charge, adding
gold leaf to the background and seeing to it that lighting effects slowly change as one
looks at the work, so that the background shimmers and scintillates almost like the gold
on the tips of Rembrandt’s brushes in the Kenwood picture and the great tabard he wears
in the Frick self-portrait.
But there is more to all this yet. This is a Pygmalion scene, a scene about the way in which
the artist desires his creation so much that he eventually believes her to be alive, indeed
makes her alive. Of course it is always a male artist and a female model at stake, the sexuality
of the latter never far from the surface. Here the model—the Gallagher-odalisque—looks
out at the painter-psychoanalyst almost too aware of the use to which she can put the
Pygmalion effect. In becoming alive, in fact, as a living person, she knows what the man is
up to, or what his thoughts are up to. It is not as if Rembrandt himself was unaware of this—
perhaps not overtly so in pictures like that of his beloved Hendrickje, but he certainly is,
for example, in the great etching he made in the late 1630s of the artist sketching his model
but left unfinished (fig. 16). In it he shows himself looking up all too eagerly at her but still
incapable of bringing his creation to the life and sensuality he desires. The only things
Rembrandt completes in this most abundantly textured of all his etchings (insofar as a print
can have texture) are the easel and the studio accoutrement of the half-length sculpted
bust of a woman, over which he has cockily placed one of his hats. But the easel is right
in the center and arguably the most finished element of all. The truth will lie in the making,
not in the similitude.
Gallagher has learned all too well that the meaning of a work lies less in its relationship
with the traditional subject to which it may allude than in the way it is painted—though
here there is no question of its political relevance, in the placing of Freud as the voyeuristic
painter with the significant pen-needle-brush. And when we consider Rembrandt in this
light, we realize that he transcends his subject matter as often as Shakespeare: in their work,
their universality transcends their specific sources. And both retain their acute political
relevance, just as Gallagher does in her work here.
it is not individualizing. We don’t normally identify and judge an individual from her
or his genitalia. But in taking a generic male mannequin as his model, in other words,
as perfect and boring a specimen as Pygmalion’s Galatea, Ray ironizes mimesis (as do
many other contemporary artists—perhaps more in the past than we realize). He makes
clear that perfect imitation can neither be a criterion of excellence in a work nor give it
any of the substance or resonance that all portraits surely require. The work is the perfect
example of how even the most perfect mimesis fails to convey the true self. Even the
closest resemblance, as Nelson Goodman so clearly set out in Languages of Art, remains
purely denotative; for the rich connotations of character, we need more.
XXI
A good demonstration comes from Dora Maar’s Portrait de femme (autoportrait) of 1929
(p. 143). It’s by any reckoning an abstract and unpretentious work. Yet it succeeds in
conveying an impression of warmth and character, even with the comparatively limited
means at Maar’s disposal. It’s a good-humored work; there’s sensuality in the mouth,
irony in the eyes, and jauntiness in the hat. It seems to lack a nose, unless we read one into
the upper part of the wedge containing the mouth. Thus Maar completes her depiction
of the chief attractors of the face, those features that primarily claim attention in any
possible physiognomy. As rudimentary and as relatively nonmimetic as they may be, they
contain just enough to allow a viewer to project character into them. And by setting this
face against a background that seems, like so many of Rembrandt’s, to be lit from the left,
she mitigates its darkness and endows it with aesthetic interest by making the viewer
attend, as does he, to the traces of facture—of manufacture, of making by hand. This is a work
that offers a significant clue to the importance of moving away from pure mimesis in the
direction of conveying the texture of personality and the feel of flesh. For this we need both
direction and the possibility of projection. The salvation of art lies in the ways it manages
the renunciation of pure resemblance, and in its unambitious plainness, Maar’s self-portrait
exemplifies this as well as anything else in the show, with charmingly little ado.
This is not how one would describe Roy Lichtenstein’s self-portrait of 1979 at all (p. 146).
Here there’s much ado. It’s an intricate, self-conscious cubist endeavor, but in its
bewildering complexity of linear, flattened, and abstract form, the usual indicators appear:
hair and jutting brow, nose, mouth, bow tie, collar, and pocket handkerchief. These are
just the features and elements of clothing that might draw our attention in a Rembrandt.
But here they are barely mimetic—and yet the suggestion of features of face, body, and
clothing, however geometricized and abstract, is sufficient to unleash the imagination
and to allow us to project the signs of richly living form onto an image with which we may
begin to imagine we could interact.
XX
Charles Ray’s portrait is of another order altogether (1990; p. 123). Like Gallagher’s,
it is decidedly appropriative. It takes as its model not the artist himself, but rather the very
essence of a model: a mannequin—the ultimate stand-in for anonymity, with no clothes
even to individualize it. Who would make a portrait of a mannequin? And why? Normally
and principally we rely on the features of the face to assign individuality. There is none
of that in this bland portrayal. In fact, there is only one clue to individuality here—and
even that would be elusive were it not for the notes to the exhibition. Ray provides
his shop mannequin with a hyperrealistic fiberglass cast of his own genitals (it forms part
of a series of such works with genitalia made in the same way). It is ostentatious but
XXII
Cindy Sherman’s portraits and self-portraits stand at the very opposite pole to
Lichtenstein’s. In addition to reducing the mimetic element in this work, Lichtenstein also
moves away, as in all his art, from the kinds of surface texture that we see so profusely
in Rembrandt, especially late Rembrandt. So too does Sherman. But the photograph of
the artist posed and dressed up to look pretty much like the Amsterdam merchant Nicolaes
Ruts in the wonderful 1631 portrait of him by Rembrandt in the Frick Collection is in
every other respect the opposite of Lichtenstein. While the surfaces in the Rembrandt
54
55
are much smoother than later on, and texture is as much suggested as actually present,
Sherman nevertheless emphasizes the works printed photographic status by smoothing out
the collar, for example, to eliminate even the suspicion of roughness or graininess of surface.
But for Sherman mimetic precision is central, to such a degree that in her adaptation of
the portrait of Ruts, she engages in her habitual play with dressing up, as if to say, “Look at
me! I am present in all my referentiality.” The indebtedness here is more straightforward
than elsewhere, at least on the surface of things. Hers is an art that consists almost entirely
of asserting, “I am me, however much I dress up, however much I impersonate others.”
Perhaps one could say this about Rembrandt too. One recalls Gary Schwartz’s suggestion
that Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul (fig. 10) was a veiled reference to himself
as being “all things to all men,” just as St. Paul declared himself to be. Maybe. But is it not
one of the most moving of the ironies that I have identified in this essay that in hardly
ever painting himself as someone else—and certainly not as a member of the bourgeoisie—
Rembrandt became as accessible as any great artist has ever been?
XXIII
If any social medium of our time shouts, “Look at me,” it is the selfie. Richard Prince’s
Instagram work, such as that of 2019 commissioned for this show, exemplifies this perfectly
(p. 105). Wearing slightly tattered paint-stained clothes, the young Prince stands next to
Alison Mosshart, the lead singer of the rock bands the Kills and the Dead Weather. Beneath
the photo comes the usual string of Instagram responses, in this case by some of the
big names in American popular culture. “You handsome devil,” writes Sante D’Orazio, the
maker of the photo itself. “Very cool,” says Marc Jacobs. Just as Prince places himself
within a milieu that shows off his social status, so too did Rembrandt insert himself into
The Night Watch (though significantly not in front; those were different times). The photo
of Prince and Mosshart is indeed a cool twenty-first century equivalent of Rembrandt’s
great double portrait showing himself carousing with his first wife, Saskia, in 1636, both
dressed to the nines. “New outfit, Dad,” “very cool.” How Rembrandt would have delighted
in such responses to his own outfits!
But let us not delude ourselves. There is little that is embodied and enfleshed here.
For Rembrandt the question of embodiment transcended all questions of labeling. There
are, of course, philosophers—above all Nelson Goodman—who claim that even the
most mimetic works are just labels for what can never be conveyed through resemblance
alone. But let us not delude ourselves with this either.
Take Christopher Wool’s untitled silk screen of 2016 (p. 117), the latest of his many
series derived from Rorschach blots or made to look like them. His fixation on this theme
is an expression of his commitment to the notion that in the end we only project—
that is, that what we see in an image is nothing more than what we project onto it. This
notion is clearly critical for the way we look at all self-portraits (indeed at all works of
art), allowing us to take something away from the artist and give something to the viewer.
Even here, even in this apparently abstract image, which seems diagrammatic or like
some kind of scan with lines crossing it vertically and horizontally, we see a kind of head,
or search within the field for something that approximates to an organic form, a pattern
that resembles something that is alive. We cannot help our biological selves. And so
we return, irrevocably, to the flesh, and to the simulated flesh, and—finally—to the flesh
we project into the image.
56
XXIV
One of the most striking aspects of both the Frick and the Kenwood self-portraits is
their presence, the sheer sense of physical presence they are able to convey, difficult as
this may be to define. They dominate the rooms they are in; they draw you unequivocally
to them. Almost all the works in this show, some more so than others, strive to convey
a sense that they command both the room they’re in and your attention. Perhaps the most
obvious of these works is Urs Fischer’s remarkably realistic wax sculpture of a man seated
at a table. It’s provided with wicks, as if to acknowledge the fact that this kind of mimesis
is for burning, for melting the work to a formless residue, to nothing.
You walk into the room with the Basquiat, the Prince, the Stingel, the Wool, and the
Koons—and there he is, Fischer’s man in an anorak and scruffy pants sitting, leaning
forward, hands clasped, with a couple of bottles in front of him (p. 106). A slightly smug
man, one might think, a nice still life on the table. He hampers your passage from the
paintings to the window where you want to go reflect, in the light, upon what you have
seen. “What’s he doing there?” you ask yourself. He’s in the way, and you feel compelled
to walk around him, as if by doing so you can somehow try to ignore him, try to come
to terms with his presence. But then when you return, there he is again, irritatingly still
there, disturbing the peace, just by sitting there stolidly but somehow powerfully.
All this, of course, may have to do with the sheer three-dimensionality of the work.
It has these effects on you, you realize, precisely because it is so tactile and so sculptural.
While much of today’s two-dimensional art (whether painting, photograph, drawing,
print, or other media) plays consciously with its distinctive and distinguishing inability
to achieve these qualities, let us not forget that it is the tactility (both real and suggested)
of Rembrandt’s work that gives it so much of its presence. But the fact of the presence
of works such as Richter’s gives one pause. Is it then the idea of the work, or of the still
subtle physical presence conjured up by the image behind the cataract that gives it is
presence? Is this the final hope of painting? We must wait for the answer to this puzzle.
XXV
And so we return again to the painting from Kenwood, probably completed a few
years before the final portraits of 1669. Some scholars have supposed the Kenwood picture
to be unfinished. We cannot be sure. But could it be that this is exactly how Rembrandt
intended to finish it and that it is precisely this that makes it so prophetic a work? The issue
has been overshadowed in almost all discussions of the painting by the obvious questions
about its iconography and the meaning of the symbols within it.
What are the circles on the wall at the back of the painting, what do they stand for?
Everyone who sees the picture asks this question, and scholars have not shied away from
discussing them. Rembrandt stands proudly before them, confident despite the heavy
signs of tiredness in his eyes, with brushes, maulstick, and palette (some scholars, slightly
improbably, have called it a mirror) in hand. At the very right edge of the picture one
can just discern the side of an easel. It’s easy to miss as one scans the remarkable surface
of the painting and gazes into its depths, gripped by the variety of brushstrokes and
textures of paint, from creamy cap to the lightest of touches to his golden-gray hair, from
the scarlet of his smock to his fur shawl, draped over a dryly painted collar and the darks
of his overgarment, and the touches of gold at the end of his brushes. In his earliest portrait
of himself in his studio he showed the entire easel and its support (fig. 4); but it is not for
Rembrandt now to show what supports his work, however mysteriously. What he wants
57
to make clear is the work of the hands and the brushes and, if anything, the support for
those hands against the canvas itself.
Above all, though, he must show the perfection of his art. And he does so both by
embodiment and by emblem, the first by means of paint, the second by means of a simple
sign—the perfect circles behind him. Some scholars have argued that they are less
than perfectly round, but that would be a quibble in the face of what it is hard not to believe
Rembrandt intended: an allusion to the skill of his craft and the universality of his art.
From the very beginnings of painting on, and certainly in the art literature of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ability of the artist to draw a perfect circle,
unaided by compasses, was an emblem of artistic excellence. It was epitomized by Giorgio
Vasari’s story of how the Pope recognized the superior talent, indeed the ultimate greatness
of Giotto through nothing more—or less—than the perfectly drawn circle the painter
presented him with. It has also been noted that these circles could allude to Rembrandt’s
skills as a draftsman, and not just as a painter. This seems fitting enough, since Rembrandt
does not fall as readily as one might think on one or the other side of the Renaissance
divide between painting and drawing; he is champion and exemplar of both. Gary Schwartz
has proposed that in fact the placement of Rembrandt’s head between these circles may
allude to the lesser-known story about the greatest painter of antiquity, Apelles, who
demonstrated his skill not only by bisecting a single fine line with a yet finer one, but also
by making a third circle between two others, thus bisecting each one perfectly.
Other scholars have also suggested that these circles may be abstract representations
of the maps of the globe that often feature in the background of other Dutch paintings
of the time (and, of course, in atlases). However abstract they may be, and however lacking
they may be in both the cartographic and pictorial detail that characterize such maps,
Rembrandt’s circles are surely an expression of his claim for the universality both of his art
and his understanding of art. It makes sense, I think, to take these twin orbs as signifying
both technical excellence and the idea that his art goes beyond the Netherlands to
include and embrace the entire world. And in the very way he stands before these grand
circles—whose abstract presence adds immensely to the formal satisfactions of the picture
(here we might recall Cezanne’s famous recommendation to deal with nature by means
of the cylinder, square, and cone)—Rembrandt shows himself as the calm master of his
transcendent art, at once perfect in his skills and universal in his reach.
But to reduce a portrait by Rembrandt to its symbolic iconography, to the meaning
of its symbols alone, would be a mistake. In a way, the claim for universality is also the
message of Jeff Koons’s work in Visions of the Self—but it is also profoundly different.
Rembrandt’s paintings go beyond the symbolic and the purely referential; their meaning
lies in the way they embody, not just symbolize, their meaning. It is not just a matter of
bodily embodiment, but aesthetic embodiment. They carry within their representations
of the physical body their entire meaning. In the Koons and to a lesser extent the
Mapplethorpe, the meaning of the work lies entirely or largely in its referentiality. They
function almost exactly as seventeenth-century emblems or emblematic illustrations do.
Emblems at the time, usually to be found in printed books but often also in pictures, were
key visual symbols that might at first seem puzzling, but turn out to mean something
quite specific and to reveal the meaning of the representation. Thus an orb or circle could
symbolize perfection, a skull mortality, a bubble vanity (or the vanity of earthly things,
of which Rembrandt must surely have been as conscious as anyone), a dry tree infertility, a
caged bird virginity, a bird flown from the cage lost virginity, a couple seated near a burning
fireplace the dangers of passion, and so on. These emblems very often provided the crucial
clues to the meaning of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. But not for Rembrandt.
This would have been too literal for him. He was always engaged in something larger.
58
It may be tempting to think of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in the way suggested by
Koons’s work: namely, that you see yourself and the entire world in them, just as in the shiny
blue ball within the Koons. But Rembrandt turned his back on such emblems, on the very
idea that a cryptic sign could stand for something so much larger. For him the key to his
pictures lay not in a single symbol, such as a circle or an allusion to one of the great painters
of antiquity. Their meaning lay in their substance—indeed, in their very subsistence.
It lay in paint itself and in how the painter was able to convey feelings both of portrayer
and portrayed.
“Every painter paints himself,” ran the Renaissance dictum (Ogni pittore dipinge se).
Rembrandt’s self-portrait perfectly exemplifies it all over again. It is not, of course that every
painter paints a portrait of himself or herself, nor even a matter of what many have called
automimesis, the notion that the painter represents himself in his pictures in any kind
of literal way; rather, it is that the true self-portrait lies precisely and completely in the way
in which the artist paints, whether in actual self-portraits or in any other painting he makes.
The subject matter of the work is irrelevant. It is the paint and the paint alone that counts.
The Kenwood picture perfectly exemplifies this. In the end, Rembrandt is not merely Apelles
or Zeuxis and his greatness is not to be signified by some emblem like a pair of circles
or an orb. Iconography, the hunt for subject matter, must fall by the wayside, for what his
self-portraits really mean is conveyed solely by the work of his hands. This, Rembrandt,
is the true signifier of the self.
The art is in the paint, and in that very materiality, that scorning of smoothly depictive
and mimetic representation, lies the idea of art itself. Design and drawing meet concept,
and here become painting not as an art, but as art itself. In showing us how concept
can reside in pure materiality, the work of Rembrandt resolves one of the key puzzles both
of modernity and contemporaneity.
59
Plates
60
Howard Hodgkin
Portrait of the Artist, 1984–87
Oil on wood
30 3/4 × 35 3/4 inches
(78.1 × 90.8 cm)
62
Egon Schiele
Self-Portrait, 1910
Gouache, watercolor,
and charcoal on paper
16 3/4 × 11 5/8 inches
(42.6 × 29.6 cm)
64
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Self-Portrait after Rembrandt, 2019
Oil paint, paint stick, gouache,
soft pastel, and oil pastel on linen
20 × 20 inches
(50.8 × 50.8 cm)
66
Many years ago, when I was a teacher, I feasted
my eyes on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch at the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Monumental it was,
viewing and studying the work of a great master.
I never fathomed the day when I would make
a painting specifically related to a Rembrandt—
and that such a painting as mine would hang
in the same space as his: my feet, covered in dirt,
were allowed to walk along streets of gold.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
68
69
John Currin
Self-Portrait, 2002
Graphite on paper
10 × 6 1/2 inches
(25.2 × 16.5 cm)
70
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #220, 1990
Chromogenic color print
70 × 46 inches
(177.8 × 116.8 cm)
72
Giuseppe Penone
Rovesciare i propri occhi
(Reversing One’s Eyes), 1970
Gelatin silver print
15 5/8 × 11 5/8 inches
(39.6 × 29.6 cm)
74
Giuseppe Penone
Rovesciare i propri occhi
(Reversing One’s Eyes), 1970
Gelatin silver prints, in 16 parts
Each: 10 3/4 × 8 inches
(27.1 × 20.1 cm)
76
77
Gerhard Richter
Hofkirche Dresden
79
(Court Chapel Dresden), 2000
Oil on canvas
31 1/2 × 36 5/8 inches
(80 × 93 cm)
Glenn Brown
Sex, 2003
Oil on panel
49 5/8 × 33 1/2 inches
(126 × 85.1 cm)
80
82
85
Damien Hirst
With Dead Head, 1991
Photographic print on aluminum
22 1/2 × 30 inches
(57.2 × 76.2 cm)
Edition 15/15
I began the self-portraits the same way I
began the other portraits, with just the head.
I used the hand mirror because it was easy
to work with, but also because I wanted to
make it clear that I was looking in a mirror.
It put me in the distance, as it were, almost
in the background.
Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Hand Mirror in a Chair, 1966
Oil on canvas
8 1/8 × 7 1/8 inches
(20.6 × 18 cm)
86
Georg Baselitz
Grosse Nacht ( Big Night), 1962–63
Oil on canvas
57 7/8 × 41 inches
(147 × 104.1 cm)
88
90
91
Diane Arbus
Self-portrait, pregnant, N.Y.C., 1945, 1945
Gelatin silver contact print
10 × 8 inches
(25.4 × 20.3 cm)
Edition 46/75
92
Sally Mann
Self-Portrait, Untitled (Star), 2005
Gelatin silver print
16 3/8 × 15 inches
(41.6 × 38.1 cm)
Edition 1/6
Sally Mann
(
Self-Portrait, Untitled Profile), 2005
Gelatin silver print
16 3/8 × 15 inches
(41.6 × 38.1 cm)
Edition 1/6
Man Ray
Self-Portrait, 1924
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 7 inches
(24.1 × 17.8 cm)
96
98
If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve
got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s
simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
101
Jean-Michel Basquiat
The Thinker, 1986
Acrylic on canvas
84 × 52 1/4 inches
(213.4 × 132.7 cm)
Richard Prince
Untitled (Portrait), 2019
Ink-jet on canvas
22 1/4 × 17 1/4 inches
(56.4 × 43.8 cm)
102
Richard Prince
Untitled (Portrait), 2019
Ink-jet on canvas
177 1/4 × 49 1/4 inches
(450.1 × 125.1 cm)
104
Urs Fischer
Untitled, 2011
107
Paraffin wax mixture, pigment,
steel, and wicks
53 7/8 × 46 3/8 × 75 1/4 inches
(136.8 × 117.8 × 191.1 cm)
AP + edition of 3
108
Jeff Koons
Gazing Ball (Rembrandt Self-Portrait
Wearing a Hat), 2015
Oil on canvas, glass, and aluminum
64 1/2 × 52 1/4 × 14 3/4 inches
(163.8 × 132.7 × 37.5 cm)
110
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled, 2012
Oil on canvas
132 × 180 inches
(335.3 × 457.2 cm)
112
114
115
Christopher Wool
Untitled, 2016
Silkscreened ink on linen
108 × 96 inches
(274.3 × 243.8 cm)
Overleaf:
Ellen Gallagher
Odalisque, 2013
Slide projection, penmanship
paper, and gold leaf
Dimensions variable
116
118
119
120
121
Charles Ray
Male Mannequin, 1990
Mannequin and fiberglass
74 × 21 5/8 × 27 1/4 inches
(188 × 55 × 69 cm)
122
124
125
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just
look at the surface: of my paintings and films and
me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Self-Portrait, 1986
Acrylic and silkscreened ink on canvas
80 × 76 inches
(203.2 × 193 cm)
126
128
Gerhard Richter
Spiegel, 2008
Mirror
59 1/8 × 59 1/8 × 1/4 inches
(150 × 150 × 0.6 cm)
Edition 5/8
130
131
Jenny Saville
Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), 2019
Oil on paper
54 1/8 × 40 inches
(137.5 × 101.5 cm)
132
Just look at Self-Portrait with Two Circles and you can see so
much modern painting. If you think about [Francis] Bacon,
who uses a limited ground with impasto paint . . . that
comes directly out of Velázquez and Rembrandt. And this
picture in particular, it’s one of the best pictures we’ve
got in Britain. Other than the Velázquez pope, it’s the best
portrait ever painted. I’ve learned how to paint a nose
from this picture, how to do reflected light, the use of
impasto, the difference between having sagging daylight
skin and the virtuoso of the way he’s painted the hat—
the use of contradiction within pictures, how that creates
poetry in paint.
Jenny Saville
134
135
Every painter takes himself for Rembrandt.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Self-Portrait ( July 2, 1972), 1972
Crayon on paper
10 1/4 × 7 3/4 inches
(26 × 19.6 cm)
136
138
139
Although portraits have been my main subject for
the past twenty-five years, I had not made a selfportrait since I was eighteen. To create The HurdyGurdy (2019), I used four source images: drawings
by Andrea del Sarto and Anthony Van Dyck and
two posed photographs of me. I hope the painting
describes my psychology—an amalgamation of
cultural history, a curious puzzle.
Glenn Brown
Glenn Brown
The Hurdy-Gurdy, 2019
141
Acrylic on panel, in antique
(c. late 16th/early 17th century) Tuscan
frame painted with black lacquer
and decorated with gilded floral and
geometric elements
Panel: 70 1/2 × 38 5/8 inches
(179.2 × 98.2 cm)
Overall: 78 × 59 1/8 × 2 1/8 inches
(198 × 150 × 5.5 cm)
Dora Maar
Portrait de femme (autoportrait), 1939
Oil on wood panel
28 3/8 × 19 3/4 inches
(72.1 × 50.2 cm)
142
Francis Bacon
Three Studies for a Portrait
Including a Self-Portrait, 1967
Oil on canvas, in 3 parts
Each: 14 × 12 inches
(35.6 × 30.5 cm)
Roy Lichtenstein
Self-Portrait II, 1976
147
Oil and Magna on canvas
70 × 54 inches
(177.8 × 137.2 cm)
148
Lucian Freud
Man’s Head, 1963
Oil on canvas
21 × 20 inches
(53.3 × 50.8 cm)
150
Francis Bacon
Self-Portrait, 1972
153
Oil on canvas
14 1/4 × 12 1/4 inches
(36 × 31 cm)
154
155
Robert Mapplethorpe
Self-Portrait, 1988
Gelatin silver print
24 × 20 inches
(61 × 50.8 cm)
156
Andy Warhol
Self-Portrait, 1966–67
Acrylic and silkscreened ink on canvas
22 × 22 inches
(55.9 × 55.9 cm)
158
Rembrandt van Rijn
Self-Portrait with Two Circles, c. 1665
Oil on canvas
45 × 37 inches
(114.3 × 94 cm
160
Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older,
showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses.
Rembrandt van Rijn
162
163
List of Works
164
p. 63
p. 65
Howard Hodgkin
Egon Schiele
Portrait of the Artist, 1984–87
Self-Portrait, 1910
Oil on wood
30 3/4 × 35 3/4 inches
(78.1 × 90.8 cm)
Private Collection
Gouache, watercolor,
and charcoal on paper
16 3/4 × 11 5/8 inches
(42.6 × 29.6 cm)
Private Collection
pp. 67 and 68 (detail)
p. 71
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
John Currin
Self-Portrait after Rembrandt, 2019
Self-Portrait, 2002*
Oil paint, paint stick, gouache,
soft pastel, and oil pastel on linen
20 × 20 inches
(50.8 × 50.8 cm)
Private Collection
Graphite on paper
10 × 6 1/2 inches
(25.2 × 16.5 cm)
p. 73
p. 75
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #220, 1990
Chromogenic color print
70 × 46 inches
(177.8 × 116.8 cm)
Private Collection
Giuseppe Penone
Rovesciare i propri occhi
(Reversing One’s Eyes), 1970
Gelatin silver print
15 5/8 × 11 5/8 inches
(39.6 × 29.6 cm)
pp. 76–77
pp. 89 and 90 (detail)
p. 92
Giuseppe Penone
Georg Baselitz
Grosse Nacht (Big Night), 1962–63
Oil on canvas
57 7/8 × 41 inches
(147 × 104.1 cm)
Private Collection
Diane Arbus
Rovesciare i propri occhi
(Reversing One’s Eyes), 1970*
Gelatin silver prints, in 16 parts
Each: 10 3/4 × 8 inches
(27.1 × 20.1 cm)
p. 78
pp. 81 and 82–83 (detail)
Gerhard Richter
Glenn Brown
Sex, 2003
Oil on panel
49 5/8 × 33 1/2 inches
(126 × 85.1 cm)
Teiger Foundation
Hofkirche Dresden (Court Chapel Dresden), 2000
Oil on canvas
31 1/2 × 36 5/8 inches
(80 × 93 cm)
Promised and fractional gift of Donald L.
Bryant, Jr. to the Museum of Modern Art
p. 93
Self-portrait, pregnant, N.Y.C., 1945, 1945
Gelatin silver contact print
10 × 8 inches
(25.4 × 20.3 cm)
Edition 46/75
Fraenkel Gallery and David Zwirner
p. 94
Sally Mann
Sally Mann
Self-Portrait, Untitled (Star), 2005*
Self-Portrait, Untitled (Profile), 2005*
Gelatin silver print
16 3/8 × 15 inches
(41.6 × 38.1 cm)
Edition 1/6
Gelatin silver print
16 3/8 × 15 inches
(41.6 × 38.1 cm)
Edition 1/6
p. 84
p. 87
p. 97
pp. 98–99 (detail) and 100
Damien Hirst
Lucian Freud
Man Ray
With Dead Head, 1991
Hand Mirror in a Chair, 1966
Self-Portrait, 1924
Photographic print on aluminum
22 1/2 × 30 inches
(57.2 × 76.2 cm)
Edition 15/15
Private Collection
Oil on canvas
8 1/8 × 7 1/8 inches
(20.6 × 18 cm)
Private Collection
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 7 inches
(24.1 × 17.8 cm)
Private Collection
Jean-Michel Basquiat
The Thinker, 1986
Acrylic on canvas
84 × 52 1/4 inches
(213.4 × 132.7 cm)
Private Collection
pp. 118–19 and 120–21 (detail)
pp. 123 and 124 (detail)
p. 103
p. 105
Richard Prince
Untitled (Portrait), 2019*
Ink-jet on canvas
22 1/4 × 17 1/4 inches
(56.4 × 43.8 cm)
Collection of the artist
Richard Prince
Untitled (Portrait), 2019
Ink-jet on canvas
177 1/4 × 49 1/4 inches
(450.1 × 125.1 cm)
Collection of the artist
Ellen Gallagher
Charles Ray
Odalisque, 2013
Male Mannequin, 1990
Slide projection, penmanship
paper, and gold leaf
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Mannequin and fiberglass
74 × 21 5/8 × 27 1/4 inches
(188 × 55 × 69 cm)
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
pp. 106 and 109 (detail)
p. 111
pp. 127 and 128–29 (detail)
p. 131
Urs Fischer
Untitled, 2011
Paraffin wax mixture, pigment,
steel, and wicks
53 7/8 × 46 3/8 × 75 1/4 inches
(136.8 × 117.8 × 191.1 cm)
AP + edition of 3
Private Collection
Jeff Koons
Andy Warhol
Gazing Ball (Rembrandt Self-Portrait
Wearing a Hat), 2015
Self-Portrait, 1986
Oil on canvas, glass, and aluminum
64 1/2 × 52 1/4 × 14 3/4 inches
(163.8 × 132.7 × 37.5 cm)
Acrylic and silkscreened ink on
canvas
80 × 76 inches
(203.2 × 193 cm)
Private Collection
Gerhard Richter
Spiegel, 2008
Mirror
59 1/8 × 59 1/8 × 1/4 inches
(150 × 150 × 0.6 cm)
Edition 5/8
Private Collection
pp. 111–12 and 113–14 (detail)
p. 117
pp. 133 and 134 (detail)
p. 137
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled, 2012
Oil on canvas
132 × 180 inches
(335.3 × 457.2 cm)
Private Collection
Christopher Wool
Untitled, 2016
Silkscreened ink on linen
108 × 96 inches
(274.3 × 243.8 cm)
Private Collection
Jenny Saville
Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), 2019
Oil on paper
54 1/8 × 40 inches
(137.5 × 101 .5 cm)
Private Collection
Pablo Picasso
Self-Portrait ( July 2, 1972 ), 1972
Crayon on paper
10 1/4 × 7 3/4 inches
(26 × 19.6 cm)
Private Collection
pp. 138–39 (detail) and 140
p. 143
p. 156
p. 159
Robert Mapplethorpe
Self-Portrait, 1988
Gelatin silver print
24 × 20 inches
(61 × 50.8 cm)
Andy Warhol
Self-Portrait, 1966–67
Acrylic and silkscreened
ink on canvas
22 × 22 inches
(55.9 × 55.9 cm)
Private Collection
*Not exhibited
Glenn Brown
Dora Maar
The Hurdy-Gurdy, 2019
Portrait de femme (autoportrait), 1939
Acrylic on panel, in antique (c. late 16th/
early 17th century) Tuscan frame painted
with black lacquer and decorated with
gilded floral and geometric elements
Panel: 70 1/2 × 38 5/8 inches
(179.2 × 98.2 cm)
Overall: 78 × 59 1/8 × 2 1/8 inches
(198 × 150 × 5.5 cm)
Private Collection
Oil on wood panel
28 3/8 × 19 3/4 inches
(72.1 × 50.2 cm)
Private Collection
pp. 144–45
pp. 146 and 148 (detail)
pp. 161 and 162 (detail)
Francis Bacon
Roy Lichtenstein
Self-Portrait II, 1976
Oil and Magna on canvas
70 × 54 inches
(177.8 × 137.2 cm)
Private Collection
Rembrandt van Rijn
Three Studies for a Portrait Including
a Self-Portrait, 1967
Oil on canvas, in 3 parts
Each: 14 × 12 inches
(35.6 × 30.5 cm)
[CR 67-01]
Private Collection
p. 151
pp. 152 and 155 (detail)
Lucian Freud
Man’s Head, 1963
Oil on canvas
21 × 20 inches
(53.3 × 50.8 cm)
The Whitworth, The University
of Manchester
Francis Bacon
Self-Portrait, 1972
Oil on canvas
14 1/4 × 12 1/4 inches
(36 × 31 cm)
[CR 72-11]
Private Collection
Self-Portrait with Two Circles, c. 1665
Oil on canvas
45 × 37 inches
(114.3 × 94 cm)
English Heritage, The Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood, London
Artwork:
p. 62: © Howard Hodgkin Estate; pp. 67 and 68: © Nathaniel Mary Quinn; p. 71: © John Currin;
p. 73: courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; pp. 75, 76, and 77: © 2019 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; pp. 78 and 131: © Gerhard Richter 2019 (29102019); pp. 81,
82–83, 138–39, and 140: © Glenn Brown; p. 84: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
DACS, London / ARS, NY 2019; pp. 87 and 151: Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images; pp. 89
and 90: © Georg Baselitz 2019; p. 93: © The Estate of Diane Arbus; pp. 94–95: © Sally Mann; p. 97:
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2019; pp. 98–99 and 100:
© Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. The Estate of Jean-Michel
Basquiat does not warrant or represent that all of the works depicted in this catalogue were created
by Jean-Michel Basquiat; pp. 103 and 105: © Richard Prince; pp. 106 and 109: © Urs Fischer; p. 111:
© Jeff Koons; pp. 112–13 and 114–15: © Rudolf Stingel; p. 117: © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the
artist and Luhring Augustine, New York; pp. 118–19 and 120–21: © Ellen Gallagher; pp. 123 and 124:
© Charles Ray; pp. 127, 128–29, and 159: © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; pp. 133–34: © 2019 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / DACS, London; p. 137: © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York; p. 143: © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; pp. 144–45, 152,
155: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS, London / ARS, NY 2019; pp. 146 and 149:
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein; p. 157: © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.
Photography:
All photography by Lucy Dawkins except: pp. 31 (top), 35 (bottom), and 51: HIP / Art Resource, NY;
pp. 31 (bottom), 35 (top), and 42 (bottom): © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY; pp. 32 and
36 (bottom): Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY; p. 36 (top): © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art
Resource, NY; pp. 41 (top) and 45: Scala / Art Resource, NY; pp. 41 (bottom) and 46: Art Resource,
NY; p. 42 (top): bpk Bildagentur / Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Foundation Corbourd / Rheinisches
Bildarchiv Cologne / Britta Schlier / Art Resource, NY; p. 52: The Morgan Library & Museum / Art
Resource, NY; p. 73: courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; pp. 76–77: © Archivio Penone;
p. 84: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2019; pp. 103 and 112–13: Rob
McKeever; p. 105: courtesy the artist; p. 117: © Christopher Wool; and p. 161 © Historic England
Texts on p. 23: Jenny Saville, speaking with Gagosian on the occasion of the exhibition’s opening,
April 12, 2019; p. 69: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, speaking with Gagosian on the occasion of the
exhibition’s opening, April 12, 2019; p. 86: Lucian Freud, interviewed by Michael Auping, in Lucian
Freud Portraits, ed. Sarah Howgate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012 ), p. 215; p. 101:
Jean-Michel Basquiat, in Basquiat-isms, ed. Larry Warsh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2019), p. 28; p. 126: Andy Warhol, “Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol” (1967), by
Gretchen Berg, in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: BFI Publishing, 1989),
p. 56; p. 135: Saville, speaking with Gagosian; p. 141: Glenn Brown, speaking with Gagosian on the
occasion of the exhibition’s opening, April 12, 2019; p. 136: Pablo Picasso, quoted in Life with Picasso,
by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake (London: Virago Press: 1990 ), p. 43; and p. 163: Rembrandt
van Rijn, quoted in “Rembrandt: Self-Portrait with Two Circles,” by Louise Cooling, English
Heritage, accessed October 21, 2019, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/kenwood/
history-stories-kenwood/rembrandt-self-portrait/
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Visions of the Self:
Rembrandt and Now
In partnership with English Heritage
April 12–May 18, 2019
Gagosian
20 Grosvenor Hill
London W1K 3QD
T. +44 20 7495 1500
www.gagosian.com
Publication © 2020 Gagosian
“Experimentation and Reinvigoration” © Wendy Monkhouse
“Rembrandt’s O ’s and Rembrandt’s I ’s: Rembrandt and Contemporary Self-Portraiture”
© David Freedberg
Curators: Richard Calvocoressi, Wendy Monkhouse, and Ottilie Windsor
Director of publications: Alison McDonald
Managing editor: Brett Garde
Gagosian coordinators: Serena Cattaneo Adorno, Cristina Colomar, Tom Cox-Bisham,
Isabelle Edwards, Maddie Estey, Andrew Fabricant, Anita Foden, Hannah Freedberg,
Olga Henkin, Donald Christopher Hyde, Melissa Lazarov, Pepi Marchetti Franchi,
Kenneth Maxwell, Miriam Perez, Stefan Ratibor, Rebecca Sternthal, Ashley Stewart,
Simon Stock, Putri Tan, Robin Vousden, Gary Waterston, and Millicent Wilner
Design by Graphic Thought Facility, London
Color separations by DL Imaging, London
Printed by Verona Libri, Italy
Copy editor: Polly Watson
The curators would like to thank the artists who contributed to this exhibition as well
as the public and private collections who so generously lent works: Doon Arbus and
The Estate of Diane Arbus; Astrup Fearnley Museet; Glenn Brown; Donald L. Bryant Jr.;
John Currin; Urs Fischer; Ellen Gallagher; Damien Hirst; Alison Jacques Gallery;
Sally Mann, Giuseppe Penone; Richard Prince; Nathaniel Mary Quinn; Jenny Saville;
Rudolf Stingel, Teiger Foundation; The Whitworth, University of Manchester;
and all those who prefer to remain anonymous. Particular thanks are due Anna Eavis,
Luke Purser, and all the staff at English Heritage who worked on the exhibition.
Thanks are also extended to Paul Coulon for his assistance with this exhibition.
Dust jacket: installation view of Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now at Gagosian
London, Grosvenor Hill, including Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Two Circles
(c. 1665, front); Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait (1970, front inside flap); and Jenny Saville,
Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt) (2019, back)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the copyright holders. Every attempt
has been made to locate the copyright holders for the materials included in this book.
We sincerely regret any omissions.
Distributed by Rizzoli International Publications
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New York, NY 10010
www.rizzoliusa.com
ISBN 978-0-8478-6907-7