BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (NPG) -- Exhibit: Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today

DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (NPG) -- Exhibit: Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today:

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Description of Pictures: Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today
November 4, 2018 – August 18, 2019
Drawing from the National Portrait Gallery’s vast collection of self-portraits, this exhibition explores and thinks critically about how American artists have chosen to portray themselves over the past two centuries. Individuals featured in Eye to I have approached self-portraiture at various points in history, under unique circumstances, and using different tools, but their representations—especially when seen together—all raise important questions about self-perception and self-reflection. Some artists reveal intimate details of their inner lives through self-portraiture, while others use the genre to obfuscate their true selves or invent alter egos. Are we seeing mirror images? Or, are these portrayals refractions of modern identity that reveal artistry rather than personality?
As we are confronted each day with “selfies” via social media, and as we continue to explore the fluidity of contemporary identity, this is an opportune time to reassess the significance of self-portraiture in relation to our country’s history. The exhibition features more than 75 works, including self-portraits by Chuck Close, Imogen Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Lucas Samaras, Fritz Scholder, Roger Shimomura, Shahzia Sikander, Edward Steichen, and June Wayne. This exhibition is curated by Portrait Gallery Chief Curator, Brandon Fortune.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. EYE2I_181101_001.JPG: The Silver Goblet Lucy May Stanton, 1875-1931 Born Atlanta, Georgia Lucy May Stanton is best known for her impressionistic portrait miniatures. She lived mostly in Georgia, but she studied art in Paris and was well known in the art centers of New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston. In this portrait, Stanton presents herself in a forthright, no-nonsense pose, displaying her virtuosity in handling watercolor. She followed the traditional technique of roughening the surface of the ivory so that pigment would adhere to it but then tilted her work board to move the flow of the washes. In "puddling," an innova- tive wet-on-wet technique, she allowed broad pools of color to shift over the surface and then dry, leaving a rich texture. Watercolor on ivory, 1912
2. EYE2I_181101_013.JPG: Eye to I Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today Every day, countless selfies are posted on the internet, announcing one's status, connections, and hopes. While some see authenticity in those digital images, the very concept of identity is fluid and open to constant reinvention. Artists think deeply about representation, particularly when they make self-portraits. By depicting themselves, they explore their own identities, linking their eyes to a self, an "I." With developments in technology, twentieth-century artists have steadily begun to shift away from the mirror. Many have abandoned painterly, sculpted, or drawn surfaces to look through the camera, often choosing to generate mechanical reproductions that confirm their existence through prints, photographs, and video. While their created selves may, or may not, reveal their true character, we can, through slow looking, see something of their activism, self-reflection, or engagement with the history of art. Drawn primarily from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, which holds over 500 self-portraits, Eye to I includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, and digital works. The aim of the exhibition is to provide a background for today's fascination with self-portraiture and to inspire more self-representations that encourage empathy and understanding. Unless otherwise stated, all works in this exhibition are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
3. EYE2I_181101_015.JPG: Gertrude Kasebier, 1852-1934 Born Des Moines, Iowa Wearing an antique dress, photographer Gertrude Käsebier pictures herself in this self-portrait as a traditional matron. In the world of fine art photog- raphy, however, Käsebier was hardly a conserva- tive figure. One of the founding members of the Photo-Secession and the first photographer to be profiled in Alfred Stieglitz's magazine Camera Work, she earned a reputation at the turn of the twentieth century for reimagining the creative possibilities of portrait photography. After raising three children, Käsebier began training to be a painter at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute in 1889, but she decided to pursue photography instead. Less than a decade later, she opened her own professional studio in Manhattan, where she soon attracted many of the leading artistic and literary celebrities of the day. Refusing to employ the painted backdrops and contrived poses used by many portrait photographers, Käsebier adapted lessons drawn from her study of modern art to craft portraits that were rich in character and psycho- logical insight. Platinum print, 1905
4. EYE2I_181101_019.JPG: William Auerbach-Levy, 1889-1964 When is a self-portrait not exactly a likeness? William Auerbach-Levy gained fame from the 1920s through the 1940s as a caricaturist of literary and theatrical figures, artists, and movie stars. His drawings could be found for years in the New York World and other major publications. Auerbach- Levy also caricatured himself, showing his thinning hair, round face, and weak chin. In this drawing, he reveals an alter ego -- one who is broad shouldered, with a full head of thick hair -- the artist as he "should" look. This figure recurs in Auerbach-Levy's work, in the same pose and displaying the same features. Here, he is shown creating a modernist interpreta- tion of a house. In other sketches, the same artist character is seen caricaturing a nude model, or making a painfully thin model look like a modernist sculpture by Gaston Lachaise, or transforming a large-boned fleshy model into a svelte ideal. Watercolor and ink on paper, c 1925
5. EYE2I_181101_023.JPG: Marguerite at 10th Street Studio with Dahlov Marguerite Zorach, 1887-1968 Marguerite Zorach is best known for her paintings and textiles, but she also made prints that focus on domestic subjects, such as her family and friends. As one of the artists who brought Cubism and Fauvism to the United States after several years of European study, Zorach reveals her interest in the structure of her environment in this stark black-and-white print. Sternly modernist in its staccato rhythms and dense patterning, the composition foregrounds a strong vertical image of the artist herself, with her daughter Dahlov and the family dog cavorting beneath a small table. Zorach was the president of the New York Society of Women Artists around the time that she made this linocut, and she rebuked the art world for not championing women's work. In 1925, she wrote, "I am certain that had I not had an artist husband, and had I tried to exhibit on my own, I would have had all the difficulties." Linocut, 1927
6. EYE2I_181101_031.JPG: Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849-1921 Completed a year before his death, Abbott Handerson Thayer's darkly dramatic self-portrait is one of several that he created at the end of his life. According to scholar Kevin Murphy, Thayer's need to protect -- from guarding his own children to caring for the environment in his home state of New Hampshire -- was a guiding force for the artist. Thayer is best known for his landscapes and paint- ings of ideal women and winged angels, but he spent many years studying natural science and theo- ries of evolution. He developed ideas about camou- flage and visual protection in the natural world and co-authored a book with his son Gerald entitled Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). These ideas informed his approach to painting as well, for as in this portrait, he often used the paint- erly surface of his work, with its dark coloration and sense of insubstantiality, to hide elements of the figure. Oil on plywood panel, 1920
7. EYE2I_181101_036.JPG: Walker Evans, 1903-1975 Walker Evans recorded the Great Depression's impact on rural America with his camera. As a photog- rapher charged by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document conditions in the country's agricultural regions, he carried only the most basic equipment. But that equipment proved more than ample. The FSA pictures taken by Evans from 1935 to 1937 recorded with often-jolting clarity the toll of the Depression on the rural South. This forthright self-portrait was made around this time and captures Evans's commitment to clarity of vision and his engagement with documentary photography. Having shown his work with Ralph Steiner, Margaret Bourke-White, and George Platt Lynes, and bolstered by friendships with Lincoln Kirsten and Ben Shahn, Evans was at a turning point in his career. Gelatin silver print, c 1934
8. EYE2I_181101_042.JPG: George Grosz, 1893-1959 This 1916 self-portrait by George Grosz was drawn at a moment of intense psychic turmoil that would affect his art for years to come. The Berlin-born artist had enlisted in the German army in 1914, and this anguished portrayal reveals the psychological scars of his wartime experience. Grosz channeled his anger into apocalyptic imagery and trenchant political satire, depicting the venality and brutality he saw around him. The maimed soldiers, grotesque generals, and bloated officials of his paintings and drawings made him famous. A leading figure of the Berlin Dada movement, Grosz moved to the United States in 1933 and became a citizen. Through teaching, winning merit prizes for his art, a Guggenheim fellowship, and securing commissions, he achieved admiration for his unflinching diatribes against war and corruption. The introspective expression and delicacy of this early charcoal, in contrast, reveal a painful vulnera- bility that one friend felt explained his ferocity rather than contradicted it. Charcoal and graphite on paper, 1916
9. EYE2I_181101_046.JPG: Man Ray, 1890-1976 Man Ray, an American artist who embraced modernism, Dada, and Surrealism, created this self- portrait in 1924. Moving between the United States and Paris, he worked in a variety of mediums and generated purposefully shifting identities. This image carries a strange sense of alienation and foreboding. Man Ray directs his intense gaze away from the camera and the viewer, and he appears with his tie askew, in the midst of arrested movement. One could chart a connection between Man Ray's efforts to both conceal and reveal himself and his stated desire to be always a "foreigner" and to have "complete freedom from social conformity." During this period, he was making photographic portraits of expatriates in Paris, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, in whose bookstore they all gathered. As Beach wrote in her memoirs, "To be ‘done' by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott means that you were rated as some- body." Abbott, whose self-portrait is included in this exhibition, served as Man Ray's darkroom assistant when he made this image. Gelatin silver print, 1924
10. EYE2I_181101_051.JPG: Nickolas Muray, 1892-1965 In 1913, Nickolas Muray left his native Hungary to escape anti-Semitism and arrived at Ellis Island, feeling hopeful about his future. By the 1920s, he had mastered English and was sought after as a photographer of celebrities. A charming and hand- some man, he met his greatest subject, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in 1931, and they were lovers for a decade. He was also a champion fencer at this time and competed in the 1932 Olympics. During the lean years of the Great Depression, Muray focused on commercial and advertising work, and developed his skills in color photography. He rapidly mastered the new three-color process, and soon his vibrant images were regular features in popular publications, such as Ladies Home Journal and McCall's. Here, Muray poses with his one-shot color-separation camera. Using this camera, he could simultaneously expose three plates through three separate filters to make the color separations needed for color-carbro prints and color reproductions. Gelatin silver print, c 1935
11. EYE2I_181101_055.JPG: Aaron Douglas, 1899-1979
12. EYE2I_181101_060.JPG: Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994 Ralph Ellison, born in Oklahoma, wrote about the African American struggle, and though he was not a practicing artist, he created this self-portrait in 1941, during a formative stage in his literary career. His appearance as an introspective young man aligns with the themes of marginalized invisibility and alienation, as well as the drive for representation that he explored throughout his life. A decade after Ellison made this portrait, he published his awarding-winning novel, Invisible Man (1952), a semi-autobiographical story about a young black man's frustrating attempts to find his own identity, both in the segregated South and during a volatile era in Harlem. After the release of Invisible Man, Ellison lectured and published essays and short stories, but he never wrote another novel. In 1971, he gave this likeness to Burt Britton, a collector who worked in a bookstore and asked for self-portraits from personalities he encountered there. Graphite on paper, 1941
13. EYE2I_181101_065.JPG: Pele deLappe, 1916-2007 Pele deLappe shared with many women artists of her generation the challenge of maintaining an artistic career while raising children and making a living. This 1938 graphite drawing, conveying both her beauty and her self-assurance, asserts an auspicious beginning. The San Francisco-born deLappe met Diego Rivera and became a sketching companion of his wife, Frida Kahlo. In the early 1930s, deLappe studied at the Art Students League in New York City, but she returned to San Francisco in 1934, planning to concentrate on social-realist themes. Her style, however, reflected the influence of the Mexican muralists, including Rivera and her close friend David Alfaro Siqueiros, more than the quick-sketch approach of her New York compatriots. Her lithographs of the 1930s had a muralist's sensibility, with simplified compositions, broad planes, low viewpoints, and heroic figural forms. This statically posed and sharply outlined self- portrait shares a similar monumentality. Graphite on paper, 1938
14. EYE2I_181101_069.JPG: Aline Fruhauf, 1907-1978 Known for her biting caricatures, Aline Fruhauf was equally incisive when she depicted herself. These two prints were created at the beginning of her career in New York City in the 1930s, when she was drawing celebrities from the worlds of theater, art, music, and other forms of entertainment. The image from 1931 is only slightly exagger- ated and depicts Fruhauf seated in front of her own caricature of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which hangs on the back wall. It presents a sympathetic image of an artist at home. But in the 1933 work, she has unleashed her vision and wit on herself. Fruhauf wrote about the process, noting that her nose was prominent and bulbous at the end, that she made her mouth even smaller than it was, and that she created for herself an impossibly long neck. The result, an artist poised at her drawing board, perusing her own image, is as exaggerated and unruly as her published caricatures of the famous faces of the day.
15. EYE2I_181101_076.JPG: George Platt Lynes, 1907-1955 This intimate and quietly sensuous self-portrait was made in 1933, around the time that George Platt Lynes moved into a new studio in New York City. With printer and book publisher Monroe Wheeler and writer Glenway Wescott, whom he met when he was just twenty, Lynes had traveled back and forth to Europe for several years, experiencing the freedoms of Paris (where homosexuality was more widely accepted) and teaching himself photography. In 1932, a year before Lynes made this portrait, New York's Julien Levy Gallery had shown his photo- graphs alongside the work of Walker Evans. Lynes gained recognition as a photographer of well-known artists, writers, dancers, and Hollywood celebrities. He was employed as a fashion photog- rapher, but he is perhaps best known today for his dramatic and provocative photographs of male nudes, which were not exhibited during his lifetime. Gelatin silver print, 1933
16. EYE2I_181101_083.JPG: Louise Nevelson, 1899-1988 "When I used a line, it was like a violin," sculptor Louise Nevelson claimed about her expressive drawings, which she frequently exhibited along with her three-dimensional work. In this self-portrait, wiry scratches, squiggles, bold black contours, and a red overdrawing compete for attention. The robust features convey her driven personality along with the muscular expression evident in her later sculpture. The double red contours of the face hint at both profile and full-face poses, suggestive of a rotating head, Pablo Picasso's cubism, and multiple-exposure photography. Although Nevelson was described as beautiful, she distorts her features with an emotional intensity that relates to German Expressionism, Surrealism, African sculpture, and the murals of Diego Rivera, with whom she briefly apprenticed. But while Nevelson studied with Hans Hofmann and other renowned artists, she claimed no influence. Recognition for her powerful, often wall-sized, abstract sculpture came late in the career of this fiercely independent woman. Ink and watercolor on paper, c 1938
17. EYE2I_181101_088.JPG: Greets from the Freuhs Alfred J. Frueh, 1880-1968 Al Frueh's Greenwich Village home was a center for artists, writers, and theatrical figures, many of whom he had caricatured through incisive drawings that appeared in the New York World in the 1920s. Each year, Frueh designed a Christmas card for his friends, starring himself and his wife, Giuliette Fanciulli Frueh, as figures of fun. One time, they presented them- selves as the puppets Punch and Judy, and another time they appeared as a pair of chimpanzees. For this card, they are shown carrying an enormous wreath. Frueh captured the essence of their likenesses in a few bold strokes and washes of color. 1923
18. EYE2I_181101_094.JPG: Grant Wood, 1881-1942 The regionalist painter Grant Wood had a wry and sometimes dark sense of humor. This smiling caricature, with its dimples and pince-nez, was probably made around 1925, when the artist was still in the midst of launching his career. Wood's family members have recalled that at Christmas, he gave away between fifty and one hundred of these original tiny sculptures, made in gilded plaster. Through these small gifts, the artist literally presented himself and his compliments to his recipients. This metal version may have been created in the early 1970s. c 1972-73, after c. 1925 original
19. EYE2I_181101_098.JPG: Miguel Covarrubias, 1904-1957 Miguel Covarrubias, who moved to New York City from Mexico when he was nineteen, was best known for his popular caricatures of celebrities that were published in Vanity Fair and other leading magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. His visual wit could be piercing, as in this small sketch with which he greeted his friends during the holidays. The artist, who is shown carrying a portfolio of drawings, chose to exaggerate his features to fearsome effect, with soaring eyebrows, dark circles under his eyes, and sharp teeth. c 1948
20. EYE2I_181101_102.JPG: A. Stirling Calder, 1870-1945 The father of artist Alexander Calder, A. Stirling Calder began his own career working in the Beaux Arts realist tradition, which he absorbed during his student years in Paris. Influenced by the spirit of modernism, however, he moved toward greater simplification and abstraction. This severely spare self-portrait, like much of his later work, reflects this stripped-down aesthetic. A few years later, Calder created a sculpture entitled Introspection, where a figure holds its own severed head as though interrogating it, allowing us to project a similar self-examination in this truncated terracotta. Terracotta, c 1930
21. EYE2I_181101_108.JPG: Self-Portrait #2 Antonio Frasconi, 1919-2013 This work reflects the politically themed woodcuts that Antonio Frasconi made while living in his native Montevideo, Uruguay. After he immigrated to the United States, in 1945, Frasconi remained committed both to the woodcut and to political causes. In 1948 and 1949, for example, he used a freely distorted cubist and expressionistic style in a series of paintings and woodcuts representing, he said, the "people of Spain [suffering under the Franco regime]… through the heroic presence of Don Quixote." In this print's original form, the idealistic knight on his steed appeared at the left, but Frasconi later cut away the section of the block picturing Quixote, thus simplifying a complex and specific image and making it a more flexible representation. Nevertheless, the work continues to evoke the agony of the Spanish struggle through the artist's face -- with its distracted, hooded eyes -- and his constrictive pose. The Ruth Bowman and Harry Kahn Twentieth-Century American Self-Portrait Collection Woodcut, 1949
22. EYE2I_181101_113.JPG: Imogen Cunningham, 1883-1976 Imogen Cunningham made this self-portrait around the time she joined Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and other San Francisco photographers to promote photography as a fine art. Cunningham and her friends called their group "f/64," in reference to the smallest opening of a camera lens, which rendered the greatest range of tone. The name also reveals the group's distinctive aesthetic, for at this setting, cameras produce images that are crisp, bright, and sharply focused. Her self-portrait embodies this vision, as well as her own interest in close studies of nature and its tactile elements, such as the weather-beaten wood surface behind her and the textures of her camera and soft hat. Though short-lived, f/64 became extraordinarily influential as generations of photographers adopted the standards that Cunningham, Weston, and Adams pioneered. 1933
23. EYE2I_181101_117.JPG: Jane, Alice, and Imogen Imogen Cunningham, 1940
24. EYE2I_181101_126.JPG: Don Bachardy, born 1934 Born Los Angeles, California Keeping alive the tradition of figuration, even in the midst of the vogue for abstraction, California artist Don Bachardy mastered a particular form of portrayal few can imitate: the large-scale, closely observed life portrait drawn with graphite lines or light ink and graphite washes. Bachardy relishes the intense, sometimes uncomfortable, collaboration that results from prolonged staring at a subject and considers each sitting a portrait in time, recording the mood of the moment. While he does not have that interaction in his self-portraits, he does applythe same standard of intense observation to his own features. Here, Bachardy combines the softly applied wash of hair and torso with the sharp contour and meticulous shading of the facial profile. Even in his self-portraits, he "seems to leap at his subject," as one critic wrote, and wrings "every nuance of feature and gesture with swift discerning eye." 1976
25. EYE2I_181101_133.JPG: Bathrobe Jim Dine, born 1935 Jim Dine, whose work often depicts objects with which he feels a personal association, adopted the motif of the bathrobe as a self-portrait after spotting one in an advertisement in the New York Times in 1964. For Dine, the image was more than just a found object. As he explained, "There was nobody in the bathrobe, but when I saw it, it looked like me." Shortly thereafter, the robe became the basis for an exhibition of paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery. The robe also served as the motif for the artist's first foray into etching. As though reflecting his pride in his early command of a medium that he would describe as "drawing with acid," the bent elbows of the robe -- conveying the invisible gesture of an artist with his hands on his hips -- seem to signal youthful satisfaction. 1964
26. EYE2I_181101_138.JPG: Danny Lyon, born 1942 In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon left the University of Chicago, where he was studying history, and hitchhiked south to immerse himself in the civil rights movement. Upon arriving in segregated Albany, Georgia, he became the first photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was then led by James Forman. During his time in the South, Lyon documented SNCC protests and the harrowing conditions of African Americans; many of his images were used for posters and other materials meant to increase public awareness. Several of these documentary photographs are presented in a book, Memoirs of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (1990). Lyon notes, "I had the rare privilege to see history firsthand." This casual photograph, taken in Albany the morning after his arrival, shows him in front of the barber- shop that served as the local SNCC office. 1962
27. EYE2I_181101_144.JPG: Beaumont Newhall, 1908-1993 In 1937, Beaumont Newhall, then a young librarian at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), presented Photography: 1839–1937 to commemorate the first century of the medium. This began his long, distinguished career as a pioneering historian and curator. Newhall was close to many great photographers of his time and promoted the 35mm camera for works of art as well as reportage. He also made photographs himself. He made this self-portrait in 1970, the year he organized Photo Eye of the 20s for MoMA and the George Eastman House, where he then served as director. In a show that explored "the camera as a precise image maker" and "photography as a plastic medium," he chose to hang the photographs so that passersby could see them from the streets. As he wrote, "the unexpected, inexplicable counterplay of reflected and direct images within and without is a montage, expressing the spirit of the exhibition." 1970
28. EYE2I_181101_152.JPG: Self-Portrait, Peterborough 57 Xavier Gonzalez, 1898-1993 Xavier Gonzalez was a painter, sculptor, and educator who was active in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts. He was born in Almeria, Spain, but experienced a nomadic childhood in Spain, Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas. While his works draw from reality, he manipulated what he saw to conform to his vision and reflect a modern sensibility. In this self-portrait, which Gonzalez created in the middle of his life, a serious man looks out at the viewer with a determined set to his jaw. His round glasses, accented by prominent eyebrows, magnify his eyes and frame his penetrating gaze. The skillful use of ink with a light wash of paint translates human energy to a sheet of paper, capturing the artist's spirit. Gonzalez stated that he had "to approach painting indirectly, slowly, because a painting like a flower can die from too much handling. The overstatement of a truth kills it." 1957
29. EYE2I_181101_161.JPG: Elaine de Kooning, 1918-1989 Elaine de Kooning was best known for her expressive, gestural portraits and for her ability to capture the individuality of her subject's entire body. For her, "the pose is the person." She often did multiple drawings in graphite or charcoal while creating paintings of the same subject. Here, in a drawing inscribed with the date, March 18, 1968 (just six days after her fiftieth birthday), de Kooning created a severe and introspective portrait of herself in charcoal. Although she delineated the slight effects of age, her features and hair approximate her appearance as captured in painted self-portraits from more than twenty years before. At this time, still separated from her husband, Willem de Kooning, she purchased a small house in Springs, East Hampton, that was close to her friends Ibram and Ernestine Lassaw, and near Willem's home and studio. She may have been taking stock of her life and charting a new course. 1968
30. EYE2I_181101_165.JPG: MW His Self, Nov 30, 1972 Martin Wong, 1946-1999 An influential and openly gay artist during the AIDS era, Martin Wong worked in both San Francisco and New York City. He employed various mediums and styles and was an avid collector of found objects from popular and street culture, which he incorporated into his formal works. Wong frequently collaborated with his partner, Miguel Piñero, a poet and one of the leading voices of the Nuyorican movement, which promoted Puerto Rican culture in New York City. Shortly after finishing college in 1968, Wong made sketches and portraits to earn income, calling himself the "Human Instamatic," a sly reference to the popular, easy-to-use cameras of the day. This drawing from that period is remarkable, not only for its fine draftsmanship but also for its ability to telegraph the bohemian, louche era -- a time when AIDS cut short the lives of so many individuals, including Wong's. 1972
31. EYE2I_181101_168.JPG: Paul Cadmus, 1904-1999 Paul Cadmus met his partner, the young dancer Jon Anderson, shortly before he made this self-portrait in April 1965. Cadmus often used Anderson as a model for his nude drawings, but he also posed for himself. "I've done a great many just plain self-portraits," he noted, "being the most easily available model." Although the angled hand, dark-toned paper, and subtle touches of color recall his meticulous nudes, his unrelenting gaze conveys a less admiring appraisal, as if comparing his aging face to his companion's youth. Critics always admired Cadmus's ability to draw and paint the human form, and he persisted in doing highly finished figurative drawings, even when they became unfashionable at mid-century. For him, a good drawing was "less an act of exploration than a fully resolved work, which, like a poem or musical composition, was worth consideration only in its final, perfected form." Crayon on paper, 1965
32. EYE2I_181101_176.JPG: Seven Passages to a Flight Faith Ringgold, born 1930 1998
33. EYE2I_181101_198.JPG: Lois Dodd, born 1927 1989
34. EYE2I_181101_205.JPG: Chuck Close, born 1940 Chuck Close has focused on large-scale heads for most of his long career as an artist, varying his materials, but not his efforts, to make a person's face into an overwhelming, impersonal presence. He has made portraits of friends, family members, and models for many years, but he has also created a number of self-portraits. Close suffered a collapsed spinal artery in 1988, leaving him a quadriplegic, and in 1989 -- the year this self-portrait was made -- he was finding new ways to make his artworks. For a long time, he only used photographs as reference material for his paintings and drawings, but by the late 1970s, he saw their potential to stand on their own as art. He was particularly drawn to large-format Polaroids and hyper-real images, like this one, where viewers may find themselves overwhelmed by the size and the visual information provided in the composite image. The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges that, in 2017, several women accused Chuck Close of sexual harassment. The museum recognizes the positive and negative impacts that individuals represented in our collections have had on history. Dye diffusion transfer prints, 1989
35. EYE2I_181101_212.JPG: New York, New York Tseng Kwong Chi, 1950-1990 Wearing dark glasses and a Mao Zedong suit, Tseng Kwong Chi traveled worldwide to create his evocative series East Meets West, in part inspired by Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Born in Hong Kong to exiled Chinese Nationalists, he invented the persona of a Chinese "Ambiguous Ambassador" to explore tourist photography and critically assess political tensions of the 1970s and 1980s. While mocking the period's U.S.-China relations, Tseng's images also highlight his ability to move freely across borders, a right that was denied to many Chinese. In this image, he jumps ecstatically before the Brooklyn Bridge, creating a photograph that is both a tongue-in-cheek and thoughtful consideration of the role of a historic site, tourism, and a foreign traveler's body in the landscape. We also catch a glimpse of the shutter release and cord attached to the camera, the technology that made this self-portrait possible. 1979 (printed 2017)
36. EYE2I_181101_216.JPG: Gregory Gillespie, 1936-2000 Self-portraiture played a critical role in Gregory Gillespie's career, enabling him to carry on an internal dialogue about the hopes, fears, and contradictions that shaped his outlook and his art. Gillespie's expression radiates satisfaction, and the light that filters through this image intensifies the sense of his spiritual fulfillment. The challenge of maintaining such harmony is conveyed by the work's very materiality: the heavily worked graphite is inherently fragile, perpetually threatening to disturb the artist's crisp marks. Such tension has metaphorical significance. As the artist explained, "My job is to turn the chaos and pain into art." 1983-84
37. EYE2I_181101_223.JPG: Faith Ringgold, born 1930 Faith Ringgold based her 1998 artist's book, Seven Passages to a Flight on autobiographical memories drawn from her own Harlem childhood. Searching for a way to express the experiences of African American women, she started working in textiles in the 1970s. Her innovative story quilts draw inspiration from Tibetan "tankas," African piece work, and black American quilting traditions. Long an activist for racial and gender equality, Ringgold used flight here as a metaphor for overcoming the challenges that she had encountered. The bridge, which she could see from her tar-covered Harlem rooftop, symbolizes opportunity. "Anyone can fly," she writes in her children's book, Tar Beach. "All you have to do is have somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way." The imagery of flying, Ringgold has explained, "is about achieving a seemingly impossible goal with no more guarantee of success than an avowed commitment to do it." 1998
38. EYE2I_181101_232.JPG: Memorial to a Marriage Patricia Cronin, born 1963 Deborah Kass, born 1952 In 2002, New York-based, cross-disciplinary artist Patricia Cronin created a carved Carrara marble self-portrait with her then partner, now wife, pioneering feminist artist Deborah Kass in the tradition of nineteenth-century funerary sculptures. Memorial to a Marriage presents two influential feminist artists and life partners in an eternal embrace. As a powerful commentary on gender, sexuality, and marriage, it tells both a transcendent story and one that is historically and culturally significant; the work was made a decade before Cronin and Kass were granted the right to marry in their home state of New York. The original carved marble sculpture now resides in New York City's historic Woodlawn Cemetery. Cronin made three bronze versions of the marble, including this one. Recognizing the importance of the work in the history of American art, artist Chuck Close donated this version, which he initially acquired for display in his garden, to the National Portrait Gallery. Bronze cast after marble original, modeled 2002, cast 2013
39. EYE2I_181101_239.JPG: Self-Portrait with Grey Cat Fritz Scholder, 1937-2005 A painter of Native American subject matter in the 1960s and 1970s, Fritz Scholder developed an approach that became known as Indian Pop. This is his last self-portrait, made in 2003 when he was battling complications brought on by diabetes. The dark, moody canvas features the artist boldly facing the viewer as he leans on his cane. His eyes are covered by tinted glasses, and the tubes from his oxygen tank are visibly running from his nose to the ambiguously shadowy floor, which has been described as a reference to the "shadow of death." An avid reader, Scholder chose to include two books in the foreground, and the gray cat likely refers to the Egyptian feline goddess Bastet. Critics, who often cite this painting as a particularly important self-portrait, also point to the influence of Francis Bacon, an artist Scholder deeply admired. 2003
40. EYE2I_181101_245.JPG: Portrait of an Artist Shahzia Sikander, born 1969 2016
41. EYE2I_181101_257.JPG: Super Buddahead Roger Shimomura, born 1939 Now retired, Roger Shimomura spent his career as a professor at the University of Kansas. As a painter, printmaker, and performance artist, he continues to focus his artwork on the experiences of Asian Americans and the obstacles they face. When Shimomura was a small child during World War II, he and his family (all American citizens of Japanese descent) were relocated from their home in Seattle to a Japanese American internment camp in Idaho. His work often addresses that experience, as well as the racist stereotypes used to characterize Asian Americans. Shimomura creates self-portraits as a way to investigate his own identity vis-à-vis popular imagery. Here, he depicts himself as Superman, flying through the air. Noting that his image interrogates "whether Superman must be Caucasian to be complete," he also explains that the "term buddha-head was a World War II term used by the Japanese American soldiers among themselves." 2012
42. EYE2I_181101_263.JPG: Aliens Sans Frontieres Enrique Chagoya, born 1953 2016
43. EYE2I_181101_267.JPG: Copper Self-Portrait with Dog Susan Hauptman, 1947-2015 For Susan Hauptman, the exploration of selfhood was a long-term artistic quest. Like so many of her self-portrayals, Copper Self-Portrait with Dog appears purposefully disjointed. The hyperrealism of the dog and the mid-twentieth-century skirt and hat contrast with the folk-naive rendering of the feet and the mismatched proportions. Juxtaposing the ultra-feminine ruffles and flowers with a masculine, nearly hairless head creates a disturbing disparity. The whimsical costume, with its canine "accessory," appears comical at first glance, but the confronta- tional pose and serious expression deny laughter. Even Hauptman's beautiful, meticulous technique stands in stark contrast to rougher, seemingly unfinished portions of the drawing. While Hauptman questions gender stereotypes and draws upon self-portrait traditions of dressing up and masquerading, she does not do so to impersonate others or to reinvent the self. The constant pairing and contrasting seems instead to be an exploration of dualities within herself that coexist with creative tension. 2001
44. EYE2I_181101_276.JPG: Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1960-1988 c 1981-82
45. EYE2I_181101_283.JPG: Internet Cache Self-Portrait Evan Roth, born 1978 2018
46. EYE2I_181101_285.JPG: Alice Neel, 1900-1984 In making a portrait, one critic observed, Alice Neel "hurls shafts that hit the mark but do not sting," pinpointing the penetrating yet compassionate quality in the figure studies for which she is best known. Neel adhered to portraiture in the midstof the Abstract Expressionist movement and was consequently ignored by the art world until shortly before two retrospective exhibitions held during the early 1970s. "Life begins at seventy!" she said of her career's newfound transformation. In 1975, Neel began this shocking, endearing, and utterly unconventional self-portrait, one of only two she ever made. She took five years to complete the work and later, recalling the process, said, "The reason my cheeks got so pink was that it was so hard for me to paint that I almost killed myself painting it." A striking challenge to the centuries-old convention of idealized femininity, Neel's only painted self-portrait is openly accepting of her aging body. 1980
47. EYE2I_181101_296.JPG: Lucas Samaras, born 1936 Lucas Samaras is a complicated artist who works in a wide variety of mediums, including assemblage, photography, sculpture, and performance. Born in Kastoria, Macedonia, in Greece, he immigrated to the United States as a teenager and attended Rutgers University in New Jersey. While there, he studied with artists George Segal and Allan Kaprow, and participated in Kaprow's Happenings in the 1960s. Samaras uses his own image to explore themes of sexuality, terror, mortality and transformation. In this supersized self-portrait, set in his studio, he portrays himself as a looming figure, dressed in a robe resembling a religious vestment. The dramatic lighting, with tones of red, green, and black, adds to his ominous presence. His gaze is imperious while his pose is aggressive, seemingly poised to react to a challenge from the viewer. Samaras remarked, "You may like my work; you may find, however, that you do not like me." 1983
48. EYE2I_181101_311.JPG: Study for Los Angeles Sushi Ghost Tales / Fish Woman and the Artist Masami Teraoka, born 1936 1980
49. EYE2I_181101_318.JPG: Diego Rivera, 1886-1957 Diego Rivera is remembered for his public art and murals in Mexico and the United States. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, he painted monumental and powerful murals for public buildings, including a twenty-seven-panel fresco called Detroit Industry for the Detroit Institute of Arts. His 1933 mural for Rockefeller Center was canceled when he included among its portraits one of Lenin. Rivera was well known in the United States by the time he created this self-portrait. It is one of numerous lithographs he produced as a means of supporting himself while working on more time- consuming projects. The lively crosshatching strokes used to model the contours of his face relate directly to the technique he employed in his monumental murals. Notably, this image was used by several major newspapers to accompany his obituary, and thus, in significant ways, it is how the American public often pictured him. 1930
50. EYE2I_181101_323.JPG: Tsuguharu Foujita, 1886-1968 Tsuguharu Foujita was perhaps the most famous Japanese artist in Paris during the 1920s. Dramatic and bohemian, and a friend of the artist Amedeo Modigliani, Tsuguharu developed a hybrid painting style that incorporated figures with flat ivory white skin, dark sumi ink outlines, and subdued colors. Tsuguharu made self-portraits during this time as well, often to advertise his artistic reputation rather than to tell us about himself. In the early 1930s, when he had grown restless, he traveled to South America, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Upon returning to Japan in 1934, he created this self-portrait print, which is inscribed to the printmaker Stephen de Hospodar, whom he surely met in California. Caught between Japan and the West, Tsuguharu spent the war years supporting the Japanese cause, but after World War II, he left Japan and lived the rest of his life in France. 1934
51. EYE2I_181101_329.JPG: Self-Portrait with Spanish Cap Federico Castellon, 1914-1921 Federico Castellon here depicts himself against a coastal landscape reminiscent of his native southern Spain, where he had gone for a visit in the early 1930s, after having been away since his childhood. Following that memorable visit, Castellon studied art and exhibited in Spain and France before fleeing Europe in 1936 to avoid conscription in the Spanish Civil War. By portraying himself in a Loyalist soldier's hat, this self-portrayal suggests his anguish over both the war and the United States's refusal to intervene in it. There is a keen sense in the portrait of longing, with its sensuous yet unavailable female figure, fetishistic shoe, and suggestive imagery. All of these elements attest to the influence of the Surrealists, with whom Castellon exhibited in Paris in 1935. Upon returning to America, Castellon had his second solo exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. This print was one of his first lithographs, created when he began to gain critical and financial success. 1937
52. EYE2I_181101_335.JPG: John Wilson, 1922-2015 "This business of looking at people I latched onto when I was very young," John Wilson once noted. Wilson's 1944 self-portrait, drawn in lithographic crayon, reveals the twenty-two-year-old's assured draftsmanship and experience in modeling faces. He was initially taught to draw at the local boys' club, and although the chances of a poor young black artist succeeding seemed slim at the time, he enrolled in the school of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1939. He ultimately graduated with highest honors and received a prestigious travel grant that enabled him to study modernism in Paris with Fernand Léger and learn about non-Western art forms. In his portraiture, Wilson probed beyond momentary expressions and personality quirks to hint at an interior essence. Admiring the Buddhas in the Boston Museum that "are quiet, still, but...have a spiritual force, an inner energy," he sought to express such universal human qualities in his own work. 1944 1944
53. EYE2I_181101_339.JPG: Self-Portrait on Tripod Philippe Halsman, 1906-1979 Philippe Halsman was one of many Europeans who fled the rise of Nazism in Germany; Albert Einstein, a family friend, arranged for his visa in 1940. Soon after arriving in the United States, Halsman found work with American magazines, photographing celebrities and other notables. He continued this work for over thirty years, generating more than one hundred covers for Life. Halsman was also known for his whimsical, fantastic imagination and his interest in Surrealism. In one of his series of portraits, he asked famous subjects to leap into the air, and his complex collaboration with the artist Salvador Dalí led to his famous 1948 photograph of Dalí leaping with three airborne cats alongside a splash of water. This self-portrait shows Halsman becoming his camera. His head rests atop the tripod's fixed plate, and his hand is cranking the worm gear sector that adjusts the angle of the plate for controlling and panning the camera. 1950
54. EYE2I_181101_344.JPG: Hans Hofmann, 1880-1966 While best known for his vibrant, painterly abstractions, portraiture and self-portraiture also played a critical role in Hans Hofmann's intellectual and artistic development. This undated self-portrait drawing appears to be related to a series of paint- ings that Hofmann made of himself in 1942. In those compositions, as here, Hofmann conceives of his physiognomy as a vocabulary of shapes: triangles, squares, circles, and ovals. Yet it was not simply his own form that concerned the artist but also the inte- gration of his body with the space that surrounded it, as indicated by the use of energetic diagonal lines in this area of the composition. Hofmann's decision to tilt his head to the left intensifies this interaction between planes. His drawing thus reveals, in the artist's words, likeness in "a plastic sense, not in a photographic one," obtaining an independent reality. 1942
55. EYE2I_181101_349.JPG: Hayward Oubre, 1916-2006 "I fought racism with my art," Hayward Oubre asserted. Light-skinned, Oubre could have "passed" for white, but he proudly refused to do so. When a student in his printmaking class at the University of Iowa made a racist remark about him, he responded with a print of a black man attacking a snake that was meant to represent the white race. In this self-portrait, made in the same class, Oubre stressed the tan tone of his skin by using buff paper and leaving a thin coating of ink on the plate. He exag- gerated the size of his eyes but avoided the gaze of the viewer, perhaps suggesting his alienation. Lines underneath the eyes evoke premature sags and possibly point to the stress of his having lived in segregated campus housing. After earning an MFA in 1948, Oubre spent his career teaching, and around 1960, he began making wire sculptures that have earned increased recognition in recent years. 1948 (printed 1993)
56. EYE2I_181101_353.JPG: James A. Porter, 1905-1970 Born Baltimore, Maryland An influential artist and art historian, James A. Porter founded the field of African American art history. He chaired Howard University's Art Department and directed the university's art gallery from 1953 until his death in 1970. Porter championed unrecognized African American artists through organized exhibitions and published work. His influential Modern Negro Art (1943) placed African American art in the context of the history of modernism for the first time. Porter studied in France, Cuba, and Haiti and traveled in West Africa, Egypt, and Brazil. These trips abroad influenced his work, which was included during his lifetime in exhibitions at major institutions, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art. 1957
57. EYE2I_181101_358.JPG: Self-Portrait as Fallen Angel John D. Graham, 1886-1961 When asked several decades later if he knew John Graham very well, Calder answered, "Well, I thought I did." After Graham's death in 1961, his friends became disillusioned to learn that much of his life was invented-from his name to his story of his imprisonment with the czar in Russia. In Self-portrait as Fallen Angel, Graham represents himself with horns and flames emanating from his head, thereby expressing his belief in the satanic nature of genius. Allusions to the horns of Moses and the "inner eye" of Buddhism further complicate Graham's delusional conception of himself. John D. Graham 1886–1961 John Graham's self-portrait boldly asserts his self-characterization as a shaman. Using both the front and back of the paper, Graham, with this drawing, invites the viewer to peer through the surface to an "inner eye," a Buddhist symbol for the state of spiritual enlightenment, in the center of his forehead. During the course of his career, Graham fashioned an elaborate and mystical persona for himself. The imagery of Graham's Self-Portrait as Fallen Angel reflects a great deal about the artist's self-construction. In likening himself to a "fallen angel," he referenced the divine origins he claimed, asserting that he was "the son of Jupiter and a mortal woman." Graham's implied role of a prophet helps explain his inclusion of horns, which allude to traditional depictions of Moses. In fact, the visual iconography of Moses came to include horns during the Renaissance because of a faulty translation of Hebrew, demonstrating the role of scholarly study in iconography. c 1955
58. EYE2I_181101_364.JPG: Self-Portrait with Rita Thomas Hart Benton, 1889-1975 At the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Hart Benton was among many young painters who embraced abstraction. He soon rejected that brand of modernism, however, and emerged in the 1920s as a leader of the regionalist school of realism, whose primary concern was the portrayal of local life and history in America. Benton made this portrait of himself and his wife (wearing the latest in bathing-suit fashion) at Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, sometime around 1924. Best known for his panoramic murals, he brought to his works a boldness of composition that led one critic to describe him as "the most . . . vigorous and virile of our painters." Benton was also interested in Hollywood's star culture, and his bare- chested likeness in this work may reference Douglas Fairbanks Sr.'s appearance in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). c 1924
59. EYE2I_181101_370.JPG: Edward Steichen, 1879-1973 Prior to becoming chief photographer for Condé Nast Publications in 1923, Edward Steichen had never worked with anything but natural light. When an electrician armed with floodlights, reflectors, and other exotic equipment joined him for one of his first assignments, Steichen improvised to avoid admitting that he had no experience with artificial lighting. His instincts proved excellent, and the electrician came away from the session convinced that the photogra- pher was truly an innovative professional. Steichen soon grew to regard electric lighting as an essential tool in bringing variety to his compositions. In the later years of his work for Vanity Fair, he recalled that he had "lights going all over the place," as evidenced in this self-portrait. 1929
60. EYE2I_181101_377.JPG: Berenice Abbott, 1898-1991 In 1923, having given up her ambitions of becoming a sculptor, Berenice Abbott was residing in Paris, wondering what to do next. Then, her friend Man Ray hired her as his darkroom assistant, and Abbott helped him develop his portraits of writers, artists, and other cultural figures. Man Ray taught Abbott about photography, but her own instinctive ideas about posing subjects soon emerged. By 1925, Abbott had begun to take photographs of friends and, soon after, began showing her work publicly. Her subjects included such notables as Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, and Coco Chanel, as well as her close friends and lovers. Abbott recalled, "I relied on my intuition about people a great deal... I tried to get them unposed." By the early 1930s, when she made this arresting self-portrait that reveals her "startling glacial turquoise" eyes, her photographic interests were shifting away from portraiture to chronicling the life and architecture of New York City. c 1932
61. EYE2I_181101_388.JPG: Ralph Steiner, 1899-1986 Although the photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner studied pictorialist photography at the Clarence White School, he shifted toward modernism after encountering Paul Strand and his photography around 1927. Strand's work caused Steiner to realize that he "was not yet a photographer." To perfect his technique, Steiner bought an 8 x 10 large-format camera and spent three months working intensively at Yaddo, an artist's retreat near Saratoga Springs, New York. That summer he made many photographs of billboards, and shortly there- after, he created this self-portrait. The composition features an enormous billboard, with one image partially pulled away to reveal another, and Steiner posing at the bottom of the frame, cradling his camera like a heavy infant as he stares out at the viewer. Steiner's acerbic wit, so evident in his writing, and often in his photographs, is clear in the concep- tion of this image, with its visual complexity. 1929
62. EYE2I_181101_400.JPG: Isabel Bishop, 1902-1988 Isabel Bishop generally chose her subject matter from the street life of New York City that flowed beneath her studio window. She recalled enjoying "the incredible richness of this coming and going of these multitudes of people." But as a young woman in the late 1920s, she found herself a convenient subject, noting that self-portraiture may serve just "to provide oneself a model, especially handy for a young artist as a means for studying picture problems." In this etching, Bishop's concerns are formal: structure, form, gesture, and the play of light on a tilted, slightly turned face. The detached unread- able expression and elegant geometry of the head disguise her personality. Even the hand, resting too lightly to support the head, seems merely a pose she wished to explore. Concealing internal emotions, Bishop used her mirrored reflection to solve pictorial challenges. The resulting print reveals what one critic called "her combination of precision and delicacy." 1929
63. EYE2I_181101_405.JPG: Everett Shinn, 1876-1953 By 1901, when he drew this self-portrait, Everett Shinn was an acclaimed illustrator and pastel artist whose bright impressionist palette was very popular. In this drawing, he displays his theatrical personality in muted tones, vivid colors, and a downturned face. Recognizing that a degree of dramatic posturing was expected of an artist, he assumed the role of a brooding romantic and paid tribute to the cele- brated actress Julia Marlowe in an inscription. In 1908, the artist -- who is best remembered as one of the Ashcan painters of urban scenes -- sent a sketch of himself posing for publicity photos to fellow Ashcan artist John Sloan. "Great fun. being an artist. with temperament," Shinn quipped. 1901
64. EYE2I_181101_418.JPG: Jessie Tarbox Beals, 1879-1942 Created early in his career, this bold self-portrait lith- ograph by Josef Albers reflects his interest in the new artistic trends of his day, particularly Expressionism and Cubism. This work not only suggests the young artist's mastery of recent modern art but also highlights his focus on the future and his capacity to innovate. Indeed, for Albers, self-portraiture provided critical terrain for artistic experimenta- tion, and this print serves more as an exercise in the development of form than it does as a psychological study. The intensity of the subject's expression, however, is nonetheless striking, and one can read in this fragmented self-representation something of the strains of World War I. Living in Germany when he made this work, Albers surely observed the bandaged faces and mutilated bodies of returning veterans. 1904
65. EYE2I_181101_422.JPG: Edward Hopper, 1882-1967 Edward Hopper was twenty-one when he sketched this quietly confident self-portrait. A student at the prestigious New York School of Art, Hopper earned awards for drawing and oil painting. One fellow student recalled that he produced "brilliant" draw- ings with impressive speed. This quick sketch reveals the influence of Hopper's teacher, Robert Henri, in its informal pose and strong, loose strokes of char- coal. Hopper is dressed in a jacket and roll-neck sweater. Such sweaters were popular for masculine outdoor athletics, especially football and cycling. In part through his choice of clothing, Hopper depicts himself as youthful, unpretentious, and modern. Although two decades would pass before he gained recognition for his oddly mysterious realist painting, this drawing demonstrates a modern sensitivity to medium and self-representation. In 1935, Hopper remarked, "In every artist's develop- ment the germ of the later work is always found in the earlier. . . . What he was once, he always is, with slight modifications." 1903
66. EYE2I_181101_432.JPG: Josef Albers (Left Profile), 1888-1976 Created early in his career, this bold self-portrait lith- ograph by Josef Albers reflects his interest in the new artistic trends of his day, particularly Expressionism and Cubism. This work not only suggests the young artist's mastery of recent modern art but also highlights his focus on the future and his capacity to innovate. Indeed, for Albers, self-portraiture provided critical terrain for artistic experimenta- tion, and this print serves more as an exercise in the development of form than it does as a psychological study. The intensity of the subject's expression, however, is nonetheless striking, and one can read in this fragmented self-representation something of the strains of World War I. Living in Germany when he made this work, Albers surely observed the bandaged faces and mutilated bodies of returning veterans. 1916
67. EYE2I_181101_442.JPG: Charles Sheeler, 1883-1965 In 1924, Charles Sheeler -- who rarely ventured into self-portraiture -- composed this pastel with a modernist's sensibility and a photographer's eye. That same year, an exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club called attention to his enigmatic realism -- what his friend the poet William Carlos Williams later referred to as the "bewildering directness of his vision, without blur." The portrait initially appears more conventional than the painted still lifes, cityscapes, industrial land- scapes, and domestic interiors that Sheeler preferred. But his works share many characteristics, revealing what he called "the absolute beauty [of] . . . objects suspended in a vacuum." This pastel parallels Sheeler's approach to photog- raphy, particularly in the strong, artificial lighting that throws the head into sharp relief, casting abstract patterns of light and shadow. Sheeler understood, Williams wrote, that through the camera, the subject could "be intensified, carved out, illuminated." A similar heightened reality enhances his self-portrayal with its intensely focused, melancholy gaze. 1924
68. EYE2I_181101_447.JPG: June Wayne, 1918-2011 The name of Richard Avedon is synonymous with fashion photography. His imaginative, original camera work revolutionized the industry of fashion and modeling, and his images quickly gained recog- nition as art. He also created other forms of portraiture, revealing likenesses of celebrated Americans, such as Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, or other people whom he found interesting. Often choosing to create photographs in series, Avedon's well-known feature in Rolling Stone (1976), "The Family," featured unidealized portraits of a group of powerful elites. In 1978, he made this self-portrait for the cover of Newsweek, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Avedon was known for his insightful portrayals, but in this instance, he reveals very little of himself and chooses to look beyond the viewer, as though focusing his camera on another subject entirely. 1957
69. EYE2I_181101_451.JPG: Catherine Murphy, born 1946 For decades, Catherine Murphy has been making paintings, drawings, and prints that engage rigorously with commonplace subjects through intense observation. A realist painter based in New England and New York City, she has tackled landscapes, still lifes, and figures throughout her career. She has also made self-portraiture a recurring subject, presenting her likeness in complex spaces. Unsentimental and honest, Murphy's portraits pull us into a dialogue about art and representation. In this self-portrait, made when the artist was about thirty, we see three visual planes -- the still life on the table, the artist's figure in the middle ground, and the landscape revealed through the open window behind her. The darkness of the interior and the dramatic yet soft light creates a sense of intimacy and calm strength. Murphy likens her work to poetry: "How do you take something ordinary, that people see every day, and frame it so that you change the equation? That same thing happens in a poem." 1976
70. EYE2I_181101_458.JPG: Jack Beal, 1931-2013 When Jack Beal won a commission to paint murals for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1974, he built a new studio whose skylights appear in the background of this lithograph. Beal, one of the few realist artists of his era to paint from life rather than from photographs, thoughtfully reinterpreted what he saw in the mirror. Here, he shaped the fall of the light so that his visor's shadow would cut his face diagonally in half and leave his eyes intriguingly obscured. Beal chose to show himself in a long-sleeved plaid shirt whose grid of lines let him model the fabric's surface while compositionally balancing the diagonals of the skylights. As in all his realist art, he marshaled every element in the image to communicate his own ideas. Beal asks us to imagine that the realm inside the image is, as he once put it, "a world that is as real as this world." 1974
71. EYE2I_181101_465.JPG: Andy Warhol, 1928-1987 Created for Andy Warhol's 1966 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, where he spoke of his (supposed) retirement from painting, this self-portrait -- an offset lithograph based on a photograph by an unknown maker -- pictures the artist with his face deeply in shadow. The print's mechanical appearance and manufacture further disguises evidence of the artist. Warhol has even relegated his signature to the back of the work, rendering it invisible to most viewers. Implicit in the metallic silver background, which recalls Warhol's famous pronouncement, "I want to be a machine," are references to his studio, known as the Factory; the cinema, appropriate given Warhol's experimentation with filmmaking; and religious icons, as Warhol had recently been dubbed "Saint Andrew" in the press. 1966
72. EYE2I_181101_472.JPG: Jacob Lawrence, 1917-2000 In about 1965, when Jacob Lawrence began this self-portrait, he had assumed a visibility beyond anything previously accorded to an African American artist. The 1941 exhibition of his epic series of sixty paintings, originally entitled "The Migration of the Negro," had firmly established his reputation. Composition, color, and abstract pattern became the root of Lawrence's style as he painted the black experience. The human face and figure, normally subject to entrenched artistic conventions, were to him just shapes to be simplified or distorted. With the exception of a small group of self-portraits that he made in the 1960s, Lawrence rarely attempted portraiture. In 1996, he updated this drawing of himself, adding bands of black around the face and changing its contours to a single sweeping curve. Transforming a linear drawing into a muscular interplay of black and white, the likeness reflects both the strength and the anxieties of the artist's advancing age. c 1965
73. EYE2I_181101_479.JPG: Richard Avedon, 1923-2004 The name of Richard Avedon is synonymous with fashion photography. His imaginative, original camera work revolutionized the industry of fashion and modeling, and his images quickly gained recog- nition as art. He also created other forms of portraiture, revealing likenesses of celebrated Americans, such as Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, or other people whom he found interesting. Often choosing to create photographs in series, Avedon's well-known feature in Rolling Stone (1976), "The Family," featured unidealized portraits of a group of powerful elites. In 1978, he made this self-portrait for the cover of Newsweek, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Avedon was known for his insightful portrayals, but in this instance, he reveals very little of himself and chooses to look beyond the viewer, as though focusing his camera on another subject entirely. 1978
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