Prospero | What lies beneath

Self-portraits in the modern age

The subject of identity is one that animates contemporary artists

Man Spirit Mask, 1999Willie Cole (American, born in 1955)Triptych, photo etching printed in brown, with embossing and hand coloring (left); screenprint with lemon juice and scorching (center); photo etching and color woodcut (right)FULL CREDIT LINE:Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lee M. Friedman Fund© Willie ColeCourtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

By J.T-J. | BOSTON

VINCENT VAN GOGH made 30; Frida Kahlo, 55. Rembrandt van Rijn’s are thought to number in the dozens (since his apprentices often copied them, it is hard to be certain). Self-portraits have always been an appealing mode for artists—the sitter is always available, for a start—often created for the benefit of posterity. They have long been of interest to art historians for that reason, as the choices artists make when depicting their outer appearance tells the viewer something about how they regard their inner selves, too.

“Personal Space”, a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, gathers self-portraits made on paper over the course of the last century. It includes figurative drawings as well as more conceptual or abstract representations of personal identity. A theme that emerges from many of the exhibits, eclectic though they are, is how personhood is not entirely self-determined but shaped by historical or social forces.

For “Runaways” (1993), Glenn Ligon, an African-American artist, adapted an old format to comment on perceptions of black masculinity today. In the 19th century slave-owners placed “ran away” adverts in newspapers to locate slaves who had escaped, often describing them in crude and racist terms. Mr Ligon asked his friends to write descriptions of him as if they were reporting him missing to the police, and he was struck by the similarities in terminology used (“stocky build”, “seemingly well educated”, “distinguished-looking”). He then paired the new texts with illustrations of slaves from the time. Some have considered “Runaways” a critique of modern racial profiling by the American police, as well as a comment on the freighted nature of language.

In Willie Cole’s triptych, “Man Spirit Mask” (1999, pictured), the artist contemplates his family background as well as the history of racial oppression. The left-hand panel is a photograph of Mr Cole’s face, but branded with markings; in the centre is a scorch pattern from a steam iron; on the right is a colour woodcut of an iron, shown from above to look like a shield, and superimposed onto Mr Cole’s face as a mask. The motif of the iron, which unites the three images, refers to the domestic labour that his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother undertook; but Mr Cole also uses it to evoke the scarification techniques used by tribes in some parts of Africa as well as the branding of slaves. The scorch-mark panel recalls diagrams of the slave ships that sailed from West Africa, and the traditions which were left behind there.

Allan Rohan Crite reflects on the relationship of selfhood to place in a different way. In the sketch he did for “Self Portrait” (1975), the streets of his local neighbourhood of Roxbury, Boston, stretch back behind him. Its lack of colour and fine detail is intentional: a hand-written text underneath is a moving ode to the place he knew as home, as it changed with gentrification. “Forty-six years of my life here has vanished in the dust of bulldozers and...cranes,” he writes. “Such big chunks of this city has become a memory, so big chunks of my life is memory.”

Cobi Moules produced pencil drawings for “Untitled (Balding)” (2017) with the aim of showing not a lost past, but an imagined future. In each of the 21 sketches, Mr Moules sports a different hairstyle and type of beard, with different facial expressions and body language accompanying each new look. Mr Moules, who is a trans man, uses hair—whether lightly stubbled or long and luscious—to imagine many different selves. The images provide an interesting complement to Kiki Smith’s “Untitled (Impressions taken from artist’s face and hair)” (1990), where the artist uses strands of her hair as a material. The lithograph print is dark, messy and abstract, but it reiterates that external features can help create an entire persona.

Still, some artists consider representing the self in art to be a futile enterprise, and these works provide a playful counterpoint. In “Booster” (1967) Robert Rauschenberg combined six X-rays of his body in a large lithograph (a literal “self-portrait of inner man”, as he called it). Alongside the bones are images of furniture and astrological charts, hinting at some personal memory or cosmic significance, but the viewer gleans nothing about Rauschenberg himself. It is a reminder of the difficulty of looking beneath the surface.

The exhibition is limited to portraits on paper, many of them made before the existence of the internet, so these artworks do not engage directly with subjects such as social media or facial-recognition technology. But a page of illustrated faces by Claude Cahun, a French surrealist, is suggestive of the way in which people today assume different identities online. An inscription reads: “Under this mask is yet another mask. I won’t cease unveiling all these faces.”

“Personal Space: Self-Portraits on Paper” continues at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, until June 21st. Picture credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lee M. Friedman Fund. © Willie Cole. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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