ARTISTS LOOK IN THE MIRROR
Glenbow Museum displays series of self-portraits
In Gary Olson’s 1977 graphite on paper, I Am Up Against the Picture Plane Again, the Calgary artist and teacher offers an undeniably goofy portrait of himself with his face comically squished against a “picture plane.”
If you don’t know what that is, that’s kind of the point. The portrait was part of a series the artist created, partially in response to a specific concept he was teaching students at the time in Calgary and one that he may have felt was taken a little too seriously in some circles.
“He was teaching his students at (Alberta College of Art and Design) about the picture plane, which is this modernist, academic idea of how two-dimensional space is composed,” says Sarah Todd, curator of The Artist’s Mirror: Self Portraits at the Glenbow Museum. “He was kind of poking fun of this idea, this sort of stodgy concept.”
A few years earlier, Norval Morrisseau painted Self-Portrait: Devoured by His Own Passions. It’s also part of a series, one that had the pioneering Ojibwa artist from northern Ontario depicting battles between a tormented man and snakes that wrap themselves around his body.
“It about a man struggling with demons, I think,” says Todd. “With the snakes and the expression on his face, I think you can identify some real tension going on in this work. This is something that he has painted throughout his career and has kind of spoken to some of the struggles he’s had throughout his life.”
Made up of works on loan from the Library and Archives Canada and from Glenbow’s own collection, the new exhibit opens Saturday and features 25 self portraits by some of Canada’s most beloved artists. As the contrast between Morrisseau and Olson’s works suggest, self-portraiture is a diverse, long-standing practice that covers a wide variety of mediums and tones.
The concept didn’t really gain traction until the Renaissance when artists apparently had ready access to high-quality mirrors for the first time. But being that most of the artists in the exhibit are Canadian, there are no works that date back that far. Still, they range from William G.R. Hind’s stately self portrait on oil and paper, painted sometime between 1865-70, to Inuit artist Floyd Kuptana’s 2007 Brazilian soapstone self portrait sculpture that depicts two faces, which has never been exhibited before.
As with Morrisseau’s work, Kuptana’s sculpture seems to indicate inner turmoil in the artist, whose life has been marred by drug addiction and other struggles. On the other hand, the late Toronto-based artist James Hill has some fun with his image with Self portrait as a Snail, a 1979 oil on Masonite that was apparently meant to show the pioneering illustrator’s penchant for being cheerfully slow to adapt to change.
“He never really kept up with the pace of modern design or modern technology,” Todd says. “This was how he came back at his critics.”
Canadian art scholars will also no doubt be drawn to a rare Emily Carr work that has rarely, if ever, been exhibited and certainly never in Alberta. The 1899 charcoal drawing is notable in that it looks absolutely nothing like the work of Emily Carr, Canada’s pioneering post-Modernist painter.
“What the researchers of the Library and Archives Canada think it was done when she was studying in the U.K.,” says Todd. “So it has a very classical academic European feel from that period. So it could have been a project for school. Emily Carr is such as iconic figure and this doesn’t look anything like you would expect it to look like at that time. But it’s an incredibly beautiful image.”
She isn’t the only famous artist who throws a curveball in the name of self portraiture. Photographer Yousuf Karsh, best known for his portraits of politicians and celebs, took what must be one of the first selfies in 1951, an experimental work shot through a reflective orb from his garden and depicts the artist behind a camera with his face completely obscured.
The face of cowboy artist Charles Russell, the only non-Canadian in the exhibit, is clearly visible in a small bronze medallion from 1930.
There are two self portraits, done more than 30 years apart, from versatile artist Alma Duncan. The first, Self portrait with Braids, is from 1940 and was apparently considered scandalous because it dared to show a female artist wearing pants.
Sensibilities had changed considerably by the time Calgary artist Marcia Perkins painted Untitled in 1989, which features a self portrait of the artist looking in a mirror with the torso of a naked man, reportedly her husband, depicted in full frontal glory behind her.
One of the most poignant works may be Ghitta Caiserman’s self portrait. It was painted sometime between 2001-03, when the artist was in the final throes of dementia. Nevertheless, it features stylistic hallmarks that she was known for throughout her lengthy career. She passed away in 2005.
“It’s an incredible document of the persistence of someone’s artistic vision,” Todd says.
The exhibit is the first of five that the Glenbow will organize over five years using works borrowed from the Library and Archives Canada. It runs until January.
Given society’s ubiquitous selfie culture over the past decade or so, The Artist’s Mirror seems particularly resonant to modern times. It’s also a nice companion piece to Glenbow’s current exhibit, Frida Kahlo: Her Photos, a collection of photos the iconic Mexican painter collected over her lifetime. It includes a number of early pictures of the artist herself, whose later self portraits revealed an obsession with controlling her own image.
“A big part of it has to do with identity,” Todd says. “It’s figuring out different aspects of one’s identity through representation. I think that’s a throughline in all of this work.”