Art imitating life: Artist self-portraits in the SLAM collection

SLAM visitors have likely seen works from artists depicting other people, but what about works from artists depicting themselves? The Museum’s collection features about 120 self-portraits. These pieces span centuries and media but attempt to answer the same question: What does it mean to be an artist?

The answer is far from simple, as visitors can see in selected works. Dating from the 17th century through the late 20th century, these prints and paintings show artists depicting themselves at different points in their careers, exploring personal and societal questions impacting their art.

One early work featured in the Museum collection that shows an artist portraying themselves is an etching by 17th-century Bohemian printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar, who spent most of his career in England. Available for viewing online is Wenceslaus Hollar, from the series Image de divers hommes: The true effigies of the most eminent Painters. Hollar depicts himself in the etching with his engraving tools, modeling himself after his portrayal in a portrait painting by artist Johannes Meyssens. In the etching, Hollar holds one of his own copperplates of a painting by Raphael with an image of St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of students, philosophers, and scholars. The work also shows markers of Hollar’s noble heritage, such as his family coat of arms in the top left corner.

By showing himself surrounded by markers of his noble background and tools of his trade, Hollar presents his identity as both a gentleman of standing and a master craftsman. In doing so, Hollar frames the artist’s role not as a solitary, inspired genius, but as a cultural mediator; a gentleman-craftsman whose technical skill allowed him to preserve, translate, and elevate fine art for the public.

The field of artistic self-portraiture continued to expand, with portrayals changing dramatically over the years. By the 18th and 19th centuries, society began to define artists as emotionally intense outsiders. Many artists responded to this judgment, and as a result, self-portraits carried more psychological weight. Artists grappled with themes including creativity, loneliness, and ambition, all while responding to complex sociocultural dynamics.

A 19th-century work in the SLAM collection exemplifies this trend. Interior with Young Woman Tracing a Flower by French artist Louise Adéone Drölling shows a young woman tracing a drawing of a tulip against a windowpane. The painting, which is on view in Pauline Gehner Mesker Gallery 205, may be a self-portrait of Drölling at work in her studio. The work’s quiet interiority reflects the struggles many women artists faced during this time.

Women in the 19th century were banned from official art academies and couldn’t move through the professional art world like their male peers. As a result, many were forced to pursue their craft in private, domestic settings. However, women like Drölling could assert themselves through their paintings, which reflected artistic skill and subtle resistance to these unfair restrictions. This quiet strength appears in Interior with Young Woman Tracing a Flower, in which Drölling defines herself as an artist in a male-dominated field.

In the early 20th century, some artists began to more closely examine internal states and subjective experiences, including in—perhaps, especially in—self-portraits, where the canvas became a place for artists to interrogate political questions and express their opinions. Viewers can see this shift in Self-Portrait by Irish artist Sir William Orpen, which is on view in Jordan Charitable Foundation Gallery 207. The painting is one of at least 35 to 40 self-portraits Orpen created in his lifetime, including The Man from Aran (Self Portrait) (1916), which exemplified his fondness for personifying himself through role-playing, and Major Orpen (1917), which he created while serving as an official war artist on the Western Front during World War I.

In Self-Portrait, Orpen depicts himself with a furrowed brow, standing with brushes in hand. He poses before a large painting that he produced the same year, Sowing New Seed, which symbolizes his hope for youth to regenerate his home country of Ireland. An Anglo-Irish Protestant who eventually resided in England, Orpen cared deeply about Irish cultural renewal, but he strongly disliked institutional bureaucracy and the violence of political nationalism. By positioning himself over Sowing New Seed, Orpen aligns his personal identity with a critique of institutions and groupthink. In doing so, he prompts the viewer to see the artist and their personal or political statements as inseparable.

As one can see in Self-Portrait, Orpen shows both his inner conflict and people’s collective anxiety about societal changes. Orpen worked as an official World War I artist and as a portrait painter in England and Ireland for wealthy and prestigious sitters, which undoubtedly influenced both his self-perception and his view of the artist’s role. His expression in Self-Portrait suggests concern, or perhaps consternation with current events. The shadowy colors at the top of the canvas create a somber, ominous quality that starkly contrasts with the bold yellow underneath it, seeming to portend ensuing chaos.

Also, the two older figures painted in darker colors at the right of the canvas have a ghostlike quality, invoking doom or decay that opposes the bright, cherubic qualities of the babies underneath them and the young woman at the left of the painting. Notably, most of the figures in the background do not have clear facial features, hinting at themes of erasure and vulnerability following the decline of European aristocracy and before the carnage of both World Wars.

The theme of artists using self-portraits to portray political stances appears in another 20th-century self-portrait from the SLAM collection, 4 Muses. In this painting, German artist Jörg Immendorff portrays himself in a fictitious studio in West Germany shared by three of his artist friends: Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck. Notably, Penck, who lived in East Germany, is shown in the shadows, surrounded by imagery of the Eastern Bloc, a coalition of communist states during the Cold War. All four men look into mirrors while creating self-portraits, surrounded by attributes of their art.

Like Orpen’s Self-Portrait, Immendorff’s 4 Muses has a haunted quality reflecting the state during the Cold War in Europe. The scene is shadowy and dark but also contains pops of fiery color, seemingly invoking the underworld. Most of the figures in the painting have unclear features, appearing as ghosts or apparitions from a different world. Additionally, the tables where Immendorff and his friends work are not held up by regular table legs; they’re bolstered by recognizable societal figures including a policeman, a worker, and what appears to be a man wearing a blindfold of the German flag.

Immendorff created this painting during the Cold War, a time of enormous upheaval in Europe. He portrays himself and other artists as political actors surviving—and directly responding to—conflict in divided Germany. An antinuclear sign on Immendorff’s workbench illustrates his response to current events. He also embeds himself and his friends in the conflict, rather than apart from it. As previously mentioned, actors in this new political world including policemen hold up worktables; a solider lingers at the bottom right of the canvas; and mirrors reflecting the artists contain illusory images the viewer can’t see, such as naked bodies in unusual positions, suggesting the brutality of the Cold War era. Additionally, Immendorff chooses to portray himself and his friends in his self-portrait instead of himself alone, which could point to the need for artists to support one another during a time of immense struggle and creative suppression in Communist Germany.

Another self-portrait in the SLAM collection created around the same time as Immendorff’s also explores the artist’s role in society. In Allegory, American artist Philip Guston depicts himself as an abstract blue head surrounded by the bespectacled eyes of composer Morton Feldman on the left; a brow over the horizon belonging to his wife, poet Musa Guston; and sculptor Raoul Hague on the right beating a jumble of shoes, which could represent frustration with Western capitalism and consumerism. A banner at the top of the work declares “The Artists,” while the words “The Dilemma” appear over artists’ titles shown in all capital letters: “Composer,” “Painter,” “Sculptor,” “Poet.”

Through words and imagery, Guston’s self-portrait asks: What is an artist’s role in modern society, especially one defined by chaos? Traditional symbols of order including a ruler, geometric shapes, and numbers are found on the left of the canvas, while more abstract images including tangled limbs and a pile of shoes are portrayed on the right side, perhaps satirizing rationality by showing its close relationship to chaos. Black, gray, and pink hues strip the painting of traditional polish or elegance, reflecting Guston’s dedication to a pared down palette, as critic Dore Ashton notes in her book, A Critical Study of Philip Guston (1990). Through these motifs, Guston seems to suggest the artist’s role as an unvarnished truth teller.

However, Guston’s painting also contains purposely ambiguous symbols. Clocks, bare light bulbs, soles of shoes, and studio debris crowd in a space, seemingly for no reason. Guston deliberately subverts classical allegorical tropes, such as the kind found in Hollar’s 17th-century etching. By declining to infuse his painting with a simple meaning, Guston turns the question of the artist’s role back to viewers.

Perhaps artists purposefully resist giving definitive answers to the question of their role in society. Art, or more specifically, self-portraiture, becomes a place for them to show their humanity, reflecting deep explorations of identity, purpose, and meaning. Prints and paintings generate questions that are meant to outlast the artist, spurring conversation on what it means to belong in an increasingly complex world.