Here's Looking at Me: How Artists See Themselves (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Here's Looking at Me: How Artists See Themselves
"If you were going to paint a picture of yourself," the text in this slim overview of self-portraits begins, "how would you do it?" After a quick discussion of some of the possibilities of self-portraiture, the book offers fourteen examples of well-known artists' examples of self-portraiture, starting with Albrecht Dürer's early teenage self-portrait and finishing with Cindy Sherman's photograph of herself as Bacchus in an image imitating a Caravaggio self-portrait, featuring on the way a diverse crew that includes Artemisia Gentileschi, Jan Vermeer, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Rockwell. Each spread features a full-page reproduction of the featured portrait and a quick overview of the artist's life and/or career, with a little additional information about this particular image. The tone is tips into the stilted and the textual material is somewhat scanty, sometimes overestimating audience knowledge and perception (it's probably not clear to all that Sofonisba Anguissola's self-portrait is deliberately unfinished, and many kids won't find much use in Wassily Kandinsky as a comparative figure to Henri Rousseau); the book could also [End Page 370] have benefited from a bit more synthesis rather than being essentially a gallery of extensively captioned self-portraits, and from providing further resources or at least information as to where these paintings are actually located. It's still an interesting way to focus on art, though, and Raczka manages to drop some useful and relevant tidbits and pose some piquant questions in a small space. This could therefore be a comradely way to start off an art assignment on self-portraiture or a method of structuring a museum visit.
