Art History Today

Studio in Self-Portrait, or Self-Portrait in Studio?

We’ll start with a question. How can a self-portrait be considered a representation of the studio? Well, usually in paintings of the artist in the studio, artistic implements are shown; such tools also appear in self-portraits. From the sixteenth-century onwards, artists tended to show themselves sitting or standing before an easel with the tools of their trade around them. Expect to see brushes- obviously!- palettes, drawings, jars, sculpture, other canvases- what was called last week the paraphernalia of painting. Given the smaller dimensions of self-portraits, not all these instruments can be shown; instead we usually see a reduced ensemble of brushes, palette, maulstick, and of course the support that the painter is working on.

 

When thinking about the problem of self-portraits and the artist’s studio it might help to use a concept used by Giles Waterfield in his essay on the studio- “self-framing.” From the 18th century onwards, artists in Britain began to show themselves looking at themselves through mirrors in their own studios. As Waterfield says , such mirroring apparatuses gave the artist the opportunity to show reflections that reflect the artist’s reflections on himself, (The Artist’s Studio, 13). This sub-genre can be traced back to Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait of 1524, painted just after he arrived in Rome. In this virtuosic and somewhat arrogant demonstration of painting, Parmigianino shows himself reflected in a convex mirror. Richard Brilliant has called this image a “tour-de force of contradictory illusion, self-deception, and abortive alienation”, (Portraiture, 157). And he goes on to say that in this instance the spectator is made to feel that in looking at the mirror image he is intruding into the apparently reciprocal relation between the artist and the mirror; the large hand might act as barrier between the viewer and studio space. As we shall see, the artist’s studio can invite or bar, depending on the whim and temperament of the artist him or herself.

A more famous example of the mirror occurs in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait in which the artist may be shown deep in the mirror witnessing the wedding of the Arnolfini couple in the room. This mirror may have been the inspiration for another self-framing image: Mark Gertler’s Still Life with Self-Portrait of 1918. Here, the Bloomsbury Group artist shows himself painting in a mirror; the still-life he is representing stands below the mirror, and Gertler shows his studio reflected again in the bottle in the inanimate group. A curious feature here is the looming Japanese figure, which may not only betray Gertler’s interest in Oriental art but suggest his impending doom- he threw himself under a train several years later.

In the process of creating a self-portrait, an artist obviously makes use of the mirror; without it they cannot paint a self-image, unless they rely on memory, but that would lead to errors in representation. Of course we seldom see the mirror in the self-portrait because that is what the artist is looking into as they paint themselves. I say “seldom” because there are notable exceptions: we’ve seen the Gertler, but well before that there is  the Triple Portrait by the Flemish artist Johannes Gumpp, executed in 1646. In this extraordinary image, Gumpp shows himself no less than three times: in person, in his studio painting with his back to the spectator; in the mirror, with his gaze averted; and on the canvas, looking directly out at us. Here the distinction between the physical mirror in the studio and the “mirror” of the painting is made; the artist has to continually look into the former in order to realize the latter, on canvas, which might be seen as a moral “mirror” that reflects the virtue and skill of the painter. The difference between the two is also seen in relation to doing and seeing. Gumpp regards himself in the mirror, a purely optical strategy and uses his hands to paint the image he sees, a mechanical activity. The skill needed in perfecting the Self-Portrait is negotiation between hand and eye, which inevitably leaves a gap, a blind spot which is neither the painting on the easel nor the mirror. We could, at a pinch, even imagine ourselves in the place of the artist who seems to be looking out directly at the spectator, unlike the reflection in the mirror which looks to the side, although the artist’s back suggests barring- like Parmigianino’s hand- rather than admission into the studio. We could try another experiment if we don’t feel confident at imagining ourselves in the space of the painter- imagine another artist creating the self-image.

Actually we don’t have to envisage this situation as we have a ready-made example. The 16^th century painter Sofonisba Auguissola did a painting of another artist, her tutor, Bernardino Campi, painting her own image; so this is a self-image created via the mediation of another painter, who being her mentor, immediately raises questions about lineage, influence, and not forgetting gender as well. It is a striking image, and Sophisba may be perpetrating an elaborate joke, which is lost upon us.  As Germaine Greer has observed, the head of Campi is “subtly expressive, in her own best manner”, while Sophonisba’s features are blank and “moon-faced”, (The Obstacle Race, 181). Sofonisba shows herself as vague, un-idealised, sketchily conceived, and her master in fine detail, though it also her hand that has rendered this face. This is very amusing, although we’re not privy to the actual meaning of the joke. Or does Anguissola have a more serious intention? Is the female artist, probably under cultural pressure, playing down her ability as an artist in a self-deprecating way? Compare Sophonisba’s visual scherzo with this less schematic, less humorous self-image.

A second example of the mirror in self-portrait is provided by the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci who played with the vocabulary of the self-portrait by showing himself as a self-portrait in his own studio in a painting of 1604. Perched on an easel, Annibale’s framed self-image regards the spectator with his trade mark melancholia, while his palette hangs forlornly from his easel. A shadowy figure lurks by the window and a little dog stands nearby. The animal quotient was cut down in the final version; the sketch for it has a cat under the easel and a pack of dogs Annibale’s drawing is a highly complex meditation on the relationship between the self-portrait and the studio, underscored by the relationship between reality and illusion. In the top rectangle, a quick sketch for a conventional self-portrait is drawn, and in that an image is an oval mirror; this could be the artist’s own as he would have faced the mirror with his right shoulder towards it resulting in a reversed image as he worked. In the bottom rectangle, the self-portrait is placed within Annibale’s studio. This has a beamed ceiling, three dogs, one of which is barking at his master’s canvas- this is a witty way of suggesting the dog thinks it’s the real person, an update of Zeuxis fooling the animals in classical Greece. A cat cuddled up under the easel lends a note of domesticity and informality- no studio should be without one! The mysterious figure framed at the window may be the artist himself, peering into his studio, and in the process emphasising the dynamic between the real world and the realm of the studio, reality and artifice respectively. Finally, the bearded man to the right might relate to the clothes in the original self-portrait, which have been changed in the final version to convey less grandeur and more humility, not to say sadness, Annibale’s customary expression, according to his biographers. Many more ideas are contained in this fascinating drawing, which beats Gumpp into a cocked hat with its complexity.

Sophonisba’s unusual mediated self-portrait; Gumpp’s tripartite representation of himself; and Annibale’s complex configuration indicates what could be called the expanding repertoire of the self-portrait from the late 16^th century into the 17^th century. Conventions of self-representation were being challenged resulting in singular iconography that we’re seeing in these examples. But perhaps the most radical departure from the conventions of self-portraiture is Poussin’s contemporary, Artemisia Gentileschi, who was in contact with one of his patrons. In her Self-Portrait, aka Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting, Artemisia shows herself painting at her canvas, seen from the side. This in itself is evidence of her science and skill since it would have required two mirrors to capture this oblique figure. More significantly, she shows herself as Pittura, the female personification of painting.  Conforming to Ripa’s prescription for Pittura- with the odd change such as omitting the blindfold symbolising the muteness of painting, though she retains the mask of imitatio, worn on a necklace- Artemisia is clothed in the cangiante gown showing a characteristic of the art. In showing herself as Pittura, Artemisia avoids the masculine tradition in which Pittura is shown as a female muse to the male painter who is inspired by her to paint.

One of the most famous examples of this is the beautiful woman in a canvas in Poussin’s Self-Portrait of 1649-50. She too wears colourful cangiante garments, but Poussin has made some modifications. She is held by an invisible figure- the painter himself, perhaps?- and has an eye in her diadem. This has been interpreted as optical perspective, or what Poussin called “prospect”, a clear way of seeing necessary to the painter’s art. Though Artemisia’s self-portrait lacks such intellectual qualities as Poussin’s, it is a remarkable pictorial essay on the role of the female painter fighting to carve out a career and artistic reputation in a predominantly masculine world. Gentileschi scholars suggest, rightly I think, that it was probably painted in 1638 when Artemisia was working with her father at the court of Charles I in England. As some have speculated, Artemisia may have seen Van Dyck’s renowned Self-Portrait with Sunflower- the latter a symbol for the king- and resolved to have created an equally memorable self-image. There is no doubt that she did that, and revolutionised the genre of the self-portrait in the process.

Inside the Artist’s Studio

As I’m busy for the next few months and don’t really have time to write anything new, I’m going to do what I did last term- do posts adapted from lectures on the term’s theme. This term it’s the topic of the Artist’s Studio, a course I developed after attending an exhibition in 2009. I’ve used Giles Waterfield’s book on the subject to create a framework for the lectures- I’ll be interweaving my own thoughts and ideas within this.

Some key ideas that Waterfield says should be kept in mind are the following. “How have artists’ studios been seen by the artists who occupy them, and by other artists, and by their publics, over the past four hundred years? What are the myths that have developed around this type of space? Do certain ideas, or motifs, characterise depictions of the artist’s studio? And can types of studios be arranged into valid categories? These are some of the issues that this book, and the exhibition that inspired it, attempt to illuminate, using examples primarily taken from the British tradition.” (The Artist’s Studio, 1).

If we start in the renaissance period we can immediately see a variety of contexts for the idea of the studio. Studio comes from studiolo, meaning a room for contemplation, like a study. This differs from the renaissance workshop or bottega. Although these two rooms would have different functions, they could be in the same building. Waterfield gives the example of Tintoretto who would have worked and supervised painting operations in his bottega, but he would have had a studiolo in which he could quietly ponder ideas for his paintings, or even attend to business matters there.  Already we see here a division emerging that might be characterised as a split based on the mind/body dichotomy. The private room could be likened to the mind; by contrast, the busy workshop would be analogous to the outward body, visible and busily functioning. We can also see division occurring between the idea of contemplation and that of acting, although that is to simplify. An artist like Raphael could be working in his own industrious bottega, but that would not stop him from contemplating the art he was working on amidst the din and distractions. His studiolo was in his head.

The image of the artist in their studio constitutes a genre in itself, but where did it originate? There are not many examples of the painter at work in their studio in the renaissance period; artists would not have felt the need to represent themselves at work in their studio, especially as there wouldn’t have been a market for it. The “studio” appears in the very composition itself with its draperies and figures suggesting drawing and modelling respectively. The odd representations of the artist in their studio don’t throw much light on it as an idea in the renaissance. In this engraving of young Raphael in a corner of his studio, we have a portrait of the man, not an image of how he worked, even though he is placed next to artistic tools.  It is only in later periods that Raphael, Michelangelo and other renaissance artists are shown in a studio situation, as in Delacroix’s painting of the latter, made about 1849-50.

After the renaissance, images of the artist in their studio become more common, especially in the Netherlands. Here, where matter-of-fact realism conditioned life, we see the space of the artist’s studio becoming more recognisable as a real space. Rembrandt is, of course, the main exponent. In this early painting (about 1628) in Boston, we see him staring intently at a canvas he has either painted, or is contemplating putting brush to. Behind the young painter are jars containing pigment and oil for binding; on the wall hangs a palette that he may eventually use, assuming that he has not started painting. This painting is also a self-portrait, and it was via this genre that the artist’s studio became more visible, both explicitly and by implication. In a later self-portrait at Kenwood House Rembrandt shows himself before an easel which we assume was in his own studio. This may be true, but the studio is also “present” as an abstraction: the circles on the easel probably refer to the theory behind the practical side of painting.  This theoretical representation of the studio can be contrasted with a magnificent painting (c.1660) by C. N. Gijsbrechts who shows us items in a studio such as a skull, the peeled stretcher of a canvas, a little miniature- possibly the artist’s wife- and other details such as his oozing palette and brushes stacked up against a ledge. These and the back of the painting obviously confirm it as a representation of the artist’s studio, but the skull, which must be a prop too, places it in the tradition of the vanitas- a meditation on the transience of life, and in the case of this image, the mutability of art too.

Sometimes we do not even see the artist at all, or the artist does not make it obvious he is the craftsman making pictures in his studio. An image of the 18th century academic painter Henry Fuseli’s studio is captured by an anonymous artist of the British school. He does not show Fuseli at work, but the watercolour shows the paraphernalia of painting: cheval glass (for self-portraits), palette, pigments and a large figurative painting on an easel. We could consider this image as a snapshot of a studio observed by an almost detached eye; we could equally see it as the artist viewing his own workspace from a distant point. Commenting on this watercolour, Wakefield says that the work plays with themes of presence and absence. We see a similar idea in an etching made in 1825 to illustrate a Guide for Young Artists, by the 19th century watercolourist David Cox. Cox shows us a very large palette with brushes- he is said to have used a large Swan’s Quill brush-sketches in various media, such as graphite, pen and wash, in the manner of Claude Lorrain. This corner of the artist's studio is “populated” by examples of the art that Cox studied and produced: Claude like classical scene, marines and seascapes in the Dutch style, watercolours that the artist executed on his many painting tours in England, Wales and abroad. Cox himself is not present. Instead, we get the impression that he has stepped out to have a quiet smoke, a habit of his while sketching. Notice also how in his instance the studio overlaps with the exhibition space, a theme I’ll return to in a later lecture.

Art in the “Idiot Universe”

I’ve just finished re-reading Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer, a novel from 1939. When I first read this novel I wasn’t an art historian, or particularly interested in visual art at all. On re-encountering it, I’m struck by how many references there are to painters and sculptors in it.

I shouldn’t be surprised at this. Huxley was an English man of letters; he knew many artists and aesthetes including those of the Bloomsbury set who are parodied in some of his earlier novels. Tiring of England, Huxley went out to California in 1937 in search of enlightenment, eventually achieving guru status, not least because of his famous book on L.S.D., The Doors of Perception. Ambivalent about the consumerist situation he found out in California, he has an unforgettable phrase in After Many a Summer to describe the encroachment of materialism in paradise: “Gum, not God”.

The central character in the story, Joe Stoyt, is based loosely on the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst who built a castle on the Californian coast- folie de grandeur in marble and stone. Now “Hearst Castle” belongs to the State of California, and pulls in the tourists despite its remote location. The “idiot universe” is a phrase used by a character to describe the baroque, mock-baronial home of Stoyt, who has raised a similar monument in California tricked out with art from all centuries; not because he is an aesthete or a connoisseur, but because he has to possess things, including the land and people around him.

Through the eyes of another character, Jeremy Pordage, an English agent hired by Stoyt, and a thinly veiled portrait of Huxley himself, we’re allowed to view the massive art collection of Uncle Joe. He owns works by many artists: Giambologna, Fra Angelico, Rubens, Vermeer, El Greco, Rodin, Etty, Brancusi, Watteau, Etruscan sculpture, and so on. It is these art treasures that comprise the furniture in his “idiot universe”; it’s these objects which come to signify the banality at the heart of this decadent empire. Huxley is merciless- and very funny- at exposing how these priceless works of art are debased through the materialistic, acquisitive magnate’s desire to turn them into objects of consumption and vanity. Here’s a flavour of Huxley’s writing as he wittily observes how baroque sculpture on Stoyt’s state is electrified and made a gimmick for visitors to gawp at:

  “Floodlighted , Giambologna’s nymph was still indefatigably spouting away against the velvet background of the darkness. Electricity and sculpture, Jeremy was thinking as he looked at her- predestined partners. The things that old Bernini could have done with a battery of projectors! The startling lights, the rich, fantastic shadows! The female mystics in orgasm, the conglobulated angels, the skeletons whizzing up out of papal tombs like sky-rockets, the saints in their private hurricane of flapping draperies and wind-blown marble curls! What fun! What splendour! What bad taste!”

Here’s the Trevi Fountain in Rome, as a reference point.

 

Money and corruption frequently collide with art in this fool’s paradise. Fra Angelico’s Annunciation adorns the dining room, but it presides over mealtime entreaties for money and funding made by petitioners of the millionaire. The Chapel houses an El Greco Christ on the Cross and Rubens’s Nude with A Fur Coat, an incongruous pairing that emphasises the “no-track”, eccentric mind of Stoyt. Actually, the Chapel was “consecrated” by Stoyt’s mistress, Virginia, who happens to be having an affair with his doctor, Obispo, an unforgettable villain- a latter day Marquis de Sade with a stethoscope. A lucid Vermeer Woman at a Harpsichord, found of all places in an elevator, demonstrates perfect geometry, the antithesis of a universe where everything is morally and aesthetically out of true.  And the aforementioned Giambologna nymph in the garden squirts water through its breasts at guests bathing in the grounds, a perfect symbol of how tawdry art has become in the “idiot universe”. Huxley’s vision of art is fairly grim and uncompromising here. We even get a novelistic flashback to a prostitute’s boudoir in London: a room hung with Victorian painters like Poynter and Alma-Tadema, to illustrate how the fruits of conscientious artistic labour are turned into louche pornography.

  The most interesting discussion of art occurs in the closing stages of the novel. Another character asks Jeremy if a Martian could infer from paintings by Botticelli, Perugino and Raphael the conditions that Machiavelli described in his writings. He then goes on to state that “the real conditions at any given moment are the subjective conditions of the people then alive”- the historian has no way of finding out what those conditions were.  Pordage takes the line that the art historian must take: we must look at the works of art themselves, to divine those “subjective conditions.” Doesn’t the nature of Perugino’s paintings- a contemporary of Machiavelli- suggest that the artist opted for cheerfulness despite living through a violent and unpleasant period? And if Perugino contrived to be optimistic and serene, why not others, like Raphael for instance? This is opposed to the famous view of Nietzsche who couldn’t reconcile the beauty in renaissance art with the horror of the times. So Huxley closes his debate about art and the world on an optimistic note, I think.  

An extraordinary book, replete with many interesting ideas about art in the world; it also proves that good ideas about art can be found outside art history textbooks.