Self-portraiture began flowering during the Renaissance and has remained a potent means of expressing human identity ever since. Painters have relied on it to develop their craft, particularly Rembrandt, who is known for his prodigious outpouring of self-portraits.
Artists have used it to commemorate personal milestones — think of Van Gogh picturing his bandaged head after mutilating his ear. Even modernists such as Marcel Duchamp have practiced the art to impersonate others and redefine the self.
“Reflections/Refractions: Self-portraiture in the Twentieth Century” at the National Portrait Gallery examines the recent mutations of this centuries-old genre, from personality-revealing expressions to a metaphorical brick.
This thought-provoking exhibition shows that even abstractionists of the last century liked looking in the mirror, following the Greek myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his reflection.
Drawn entirely from the gallery’s collection, the exhibit is the type of in-house show now common at art museums as they cut costs during the economic downturn. Almost all of the 77 self-portraits come from art educator and curator Ruth Bowman and her late husband Harry Kahn, an economist and stockbroker. The New York couple assembled their collection over 15 years and both donated and sold 187 works to the National Portrait Gallery in 2002.
Prints and drawings curator Wendy Wick Reaves takes advantage of the recent acquisition to refresh and expand the concept of self-portraiture. As she writes in the exhibition catalog, “the notion of a fixed, externally evident identity dissolved in the wake of … advancements in sociology, psychology, genetics, philosophy and other fields” during the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Artists, in turn, increasingly broke down traditional ways of picturing the face and the figure to explore changing ideas about the self. Those who were female and black began using their self portrait to represent larger social issues related to racial and gender equality.
The chronologically organized show gets to all that, but starts with more conventional images of American artists from the early 1900s. Edward Hopper’s profile, drawn while in his 20s, reflects the same play of light as characteristic of his cityscapes and interiors. Charles Sheeler’s 1924 pastel likeness, one of his few human studies, is as precisely rendered as his uninhabited scenes of factories.
Many of the artists represented in the show created their self-portraits when they were just starting out. “[Self-portraiture] is especially handy for a young artist as a means for studying picture problems,” notes artist Isabel Bishop. Her coquettish likeness at age 27 is hung next to a grimacing portrait penciled while in her 80s.
Several of such pairings appear throughout the exhibit to show how self-portraiture is used to record the passage of time and changes in outlook.
In a self-portrait made at 22, California artist Pele de Lappe presents herself as a pretty face open to life. Five decades later, the artist wearily holds a mask to symbolize her need to hide behind the roles expected of women.
Russian-born Raphael Soyer morphs from a raven-haired 21-year-old to a gaunt, balding septuagenarian. The change in appearance is striking but not altogether truthful.
“I never made myself entirely like myself,” Mr. Soyer told an interviewer in 1973. “I always appear older looking or unshaven or all alone. It’s the result of looking a bit more deeply.”
Vanity, of course, plays a role as in any type of portraiture. Boston artist John Wilson, who created the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the U.S. Capitol, pictures himself at 22 like a handsome bronze statue. At 41, his likeness takes on a darker, more intense expression to suggest black pride in the face of racial prejudice during the early 1960s.
A few of the artists featured in the exhibit use the self-portrait to represent their political views directly. Louis Lozowick’s 1936 self-portrait in a noose reacts to lynchings of blacks in the South and warns of what could happen if Nazi fascism came to this country.
In “Copper Self-Portrait With Dog,” the only work in the show from the 2000s, Susan Hauptman pictures herself with a shaved head, ruffled skirt and fluffy pooch to challenge feminine stereotypes.
Such theatricality is expected of the self-portrait. The sitter, who is also the artist, is unrestricted when it comes to gesture, costume and setting. In a 1933 drawing, American Impressionist Childe Hassam depicts his brimmed hat, jacket and knickers in great detail but chooses to blur his facial features.
Other artists present their physiognomy in contradiction to their signature work. Josef Albers, a Bauhaus artist known for his colorful concentric squares, reveals a partial profile of his face through baroquelike curves. Louise Nevelson imagines herself with an unexpected fluidity of line that counters her blocky sculptures.
In representing themselves, artists don’t have to please a patron and the show clearly relates their willingness to experiment. Chuck Close assembles his 1982 likeness from paper pulp so that it appears abstract when viewed close-up and only coalesces into a face from a distance.
Mr. Close, along with Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol, whose self-portraits are also part of the exhibit, helped revive the portrait during a period of abstraction in the 1960s. Influenced by photography and film, these artists achieved a more detached type of realism, devoid of traditional narrative.
David Hockney is the only artist in the show to be represented directly by photography. His collage of snapshots presents a memory of his mother at the abbey where she met the artist’s father. Only Mr. Hockney’s shoes appear at the bottom of the frame.
It is a stretch to label this a self-portrait, but the photocollage is more easily understood as autobiography compared to ceramic artist Robert Arneson’s “Brick.” Imprinted with his last name, Mr. Arneson’s 1975 terra-cotta block reflects his close identification with the clay units of his sculptures.
He literally sees himself as his art, a self-portrait expressive of the workaholic age.
WHAT: “Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century”
WHERE: National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets Northwest
WHEN: 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily through Aug. 16
ADMISSION: Free
PHONE: 202/633-8300
WEB SITE: www.npg.si.edu
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