A Face to the World by Laura Cumming

Author:Laura Cumming [Laura Cumming]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007391943
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

Where do you stand? What is your position? Life’s questions apply to art. To be seen in a self-portrait is to make an appearance; to make an appearance involves striking an attitude, arranging a face, holding the two together (or showing them wilfully opposed). The body takes on the language of thought and belief as much as the face, even when the pose is only half-conscious.

People in portraits may hope to hold their own, to choose their own stance, but they are far less free than artists in self-portraits. Ingres, for instance, was a despot with his sitters, agonizing for months over the pose for each portrait (years in the case of Madame Moitessier, finger to temple, impassive as marble). But when it came to painting himself, he simply sat in a chair, slightly angled to avoid head-on confrontation, a choice evidently made in moments.

The narrowness of that choice – standing versus sitting, angled versus frontal, painting or at ease – is implicit in the limitation of the pose. Ingres is not trying to draw more attention to himself than his own reputation deserves (though he has taken the precaution of wearing his Croix de Légion d’honneur). He would not dream of putting on a performance. But there are self-portraits in which the position, the disposition, of the body is as carefully considered as the framing of a film star or the blocking of an actor on stage. It is surely no coincidence that the makers of such images, thinking so much about the relationship between figure and ground, are often the most theatrically inventive of all self-portraitists. Seventeenth-century painters in particular tend to have a very strong sense of self-portraiture precisely as a form of theatre and few more so than the Dutch artist Gerard ter Borch in a tantalizing painting made around 1670, in which the rectangle of the picture is a proscenium frame for the actor who presents himself right at the front of the stage.

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