Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits

0:00:04 > 0:00:09If you could leave one image of yourself for the rest of the world to judge you by, what would it be?

0:00:09 > 0:00:12Is there one picture that would sum you up?

0:00:15 > 0:00:19In the 21st century we make images of ourselves all the time.

0:00:19 > 0:00:21We're all self-portraitists now.

0:00:21 > 0:00:26We can snap away, trying out various poses, clothes, and characters,

0:00:26 > 0:00:28different versions of ourselves to show the world.

0:00:30 > 0:00:34It's so common that we don't even think about it.

0:00:34 > 0:00:38But for centuries, the only people able to do this were artists.

0:00:38 > 0:00:42They could make anything they liked of themselves...and they did.

0:00:43 > 0:00:45In their self-portraits,

0:00:45 > 0:00:50artists have shown themselves as many things - wounded,

0:00:50 > 0:00:53decapitated, pierced with arrows,

0:00:53 > 0:00:58as a Turkish prince, even as a flayed skin dangling like a wet overcoat.

0:00:58 > 0:01:04But no matter how outlandish the fiction, a self-portrait will always reveal a deep truth,

0:01:04 > 0:01:11the truth of how the artist wanted to be seen and known to the world.

0:01:13 > 0:01:19Self-portraits show how art and artists have changed over the last 500 years.

0:01:19 > 0:01:23They show their creators as they moved from the outside into the spotlight,

0:01:23 > 0:01:29from the courts of Europe to the garrets of bohemia and the modern avant garde.

0:01:29 > 0:01:37But can they also tell us how we have changed, as we've become more modern, more complex?

0:01:37 > 0:01:40The more you look at self-potraits, the more you realise they're actually

0:01:40 > 0:01:44a unique form of art with an intimate connection to us all.

0:01:44 > 0:01:49They show the artist doing what we all have to do, to some extent, every day,

0:01:49 > 0:01:53which is to present a version of ourselves to the world.

0:02:14 > 0:02:17My name is Laura Cumming. I'm the art critic of The Observer.

0:02:17 > 0:02:21Though I write about all kinds of art, I keep coming back to

0:02:21 > 0:02:25self-portraits, which is, I think, just what they want.

0:02:25 > 0:02:30It's quite deliberate. Self-portraits catch your eye across a crowded room

0:02:30 > 0:02:32as if they wanted to stand out,

0:02:32 > 0:02:34and I'm going to argue that they do...

0:02:36 > 0:02:43..that art history is wrong to treat them as a remote twig on the greater tree of portraiture.

0:02:43 > 0:02:47In fact, I think self-portraits are unlike any other form of art,

0:02:47 > 0:02:50offering the most intimate truths.

0:02:54 > 0:02:58It was self-portraits that first opened my eyes to the power of art.

0:02:58 > 0:03:01I was ill in bed, I think I was about eight,

0:03:01 > 0:03:04and a kind adult gave me this shoebox.

0:03:04 > 0:03:07It was full of postcards of portraits.

0:03:07 > 0:03:10People, faces.

0:03:10 > 0:03:13Who wouldn't be interested?

0:03:13 > 0:03:15But one of them stood right out.

0:03:15 > 0:03:20It had that intensity about the eyes that even a child recognises as the sign of a self-portrait.

0:03:20 > 0:03:25It mesmerised me, even frightened me a little.

0:03:25 > 0:03:28It made me aware for the first time

0:03:28 > 0:03:32that people in paintings could be as exciting as people in real life.

0:03:32 > 0:03:39This is the one, the 1500 self-portrait of Albrecht Durer.

0:03:47 > 0:03:51The 1500 self-portrait is at the end of a long corridor

0:03:51 > 0:03:54in the Alte Pinakothek Museum in Munich.

0:03:56 > 0:03:59Going there, I have this mounting sense, very common among visitors,

0:03:59 > 0:04:02that Durer is just waiting, ready to transfix you.

0:04:11 > 0:04:13Just absolute charisma.

0:04:14 > 0:04:18You feel it drawing you across the gallery.

0:04:20 > 0:04:23With some paintings there's a sense they're winking at you

0:04:23 > 0:04:26or waving at you or they're completely indifferent to you.

0:04:26 > 0:04:29But this one is luring you.

0:04:35 > 0:04:39When I was a child, I was mesmerised by this painting.

0:04:39 > 0:04:45Children are mesmerised by the direct eye to eye look,

0:04:45 > 0:04:49the idea that the eyes are following you around the room.

0:04:49 > 0:04:55But in fact looking at it now, I still feel quite unnerved by it.

0:04:59 > 0:05:03Durer appears in close up, yet he's so remote.

0:05:03 > 0:05:07Look at that coldly glowing stare.

0:05:08 > 0:05:11The hair is like golden twine,

0:05:11 > 0:05:16spreading in a radiant triangle that echoes Durer's famous AD logo.

0:05:16 > 0:05:22Geometry, symmetry, order. Not a hair out of place.

0:05:22 > 0:05:26With all portraits there's this illusion, sometimes only lasts for half a second,

0:05:26 > 0:05:29that what you're looking at is a real person,

0:05:29 > 0:05:32before that person reverts to an image.

0:05:32 > 0:05:35With self-portraits the claim goes further,

0:05:35 > 0:05:38because the two are one and the same. The artist is the picture.

0:05:38 > 0:05:40I think you have that sense,

0:05:40 > 0:05:44more powerfully with this painting than any other.

0:05:46 > 0:05:48Durer IS his picture.

0:05:57 > 0:05:59I believe all self-portraits,

0:05:59 > 0:06:05no matter how closed, give up innermost truths about their maker.

0:06:06 > 0:06:08Evidence of who they were,

0:06:08 > 0:06:12what they hoped to achieve, is right there in the picture.

0:06:12 > 0:06:16The strangeness of this masterpiece is what strikes first and last.

0:06:16 > 0:06:19So what does that reveal about Durer?

0:06:29 > 0:06:31Durer was a compulsive note-taker,

0:06:31 > 0:06:35recording everything he saw in word and image.

0:06:35 > 0:06:37And one of the things he observed,

0:06:37 > 0:06:40was his own self changing over the years.

0:06:42 > 0:06:44Here he is as a boy. He's only just 13 years old.

0:06:44 > 0:06:47Can you imagine any other 13-year-old doing this?

0:06:47 > 0:06:49And even right here at the start of his career,

0:06:49 > 0:06:51he isn't doing anything ordinary at all.

0:06:51 > 0:06:54He's in a three-quarter pose - incredibly difficult to pull off.

0:06:54 > 0:06:57He probably needed two mirrors to do that,

0:06:57 > 0:07:00and he looks so young,

0:07:00 > 0:07:04too young to be doing this, too young to have a sense of his own

0:07:04 > 0:07:07posterity, which is what you feel when you see this image.

0:07:09 > 0:07:11There's an inscription at the top.

0:07:11 > 0:07:13Durer's put this in later, in which he says,

0:07:13 > 0:07:18very powerfully, I think, that "I made this when I was just a child".

0:07:18 > 0:07:20He's dated it, he's signed it.

0:07:20 > 0:07:23He dated and signed absolutely everything he made,

0:07:23 > 0:07:26so that nothing should ever be lost to time.

0:07:26 > 0:07:29I think that this drawing shows him

0:07:29 > 0:07:34even then with a sense of his own self, a strong sense of his own self.

0:07:34 > 0:07:41"Here I am, 13 years old, this is what I look like, I, Albrecht Durer."

0:07:44 > 0:07:48Durer was the first committed self-portraitist

0:07:48 > 0:07:52and even at this early age, he seems to be pointing to the future.

0:07:52 > 0:07:56Incisiveness, detachment, a mania for observation,

0:07:56 > 0:08:00it's all there to be applied to the world and himself.

0:08:04 > 0:08:06In his first painted self-portrait,

0:08:06 > 0:08:11aged 22, he painstakingly captures his own androgynous beauty.

0:08:11 > 0:08:13But the look is glacial.

0:08:13 > 0:08:14He gives nothing away.

0:08:17 > 0:08:21Older, naked, he perhaps gives too much away.

0:08:21 > 0:08:23Leaning towards the mirror,

0:08:23 > 0:08:26he notes the way the scrotum echoes the eyeballs.

0:08:29 > 0:08:33He's a strange creature even to himself.

0:08:40 > 0:08:44Durer's the first great traveller in art.

0:08:44 > 0:08:46He journeyed to Italy, where he was revered,

0:08:46 > 0:08:50bringing Renaissance art and ideas back home to Germany.

0:08:50 > 0:08:54Here he is as a Venetian gentleman, showing just how far he's come.

0:08:54 > 0:08:59In the background you can see the Alps he crossed, back and forth,

0:08:59 > 0:09:01as if through the window of a train.

0:09:07 > 0:09:10Durer seems to have felt as no other artist before him,

0:09:10 > 0:09:12the value of putting a face to one's name.

0:09:12 > 0:09:20His self-portraits were mass produced as prints and medals, making his looks famous across Europe.

0:09:20 > 0:09:23The 1500 self-portrait was displayed in his native Nuremberg

0:09:23 > 0:09:29during his lifetime, and carried through the streets when he died.

0:09:35 > 0:09:39But there is another more tangible piece of evidence,

0:09:39 > 0:09:42that shows just how much Durer was worshipped.

0:09:42 > 0:09:47To see it, I've come to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

0:09:47 > 0:09:51When Durer's grave was opened in the 19th century by disciples

0:09:51 > 0:09:58hoping to measure his skull, for the divine proportions of genius, the body was gone.

0:09:58 > 0:09:59But there is a relic,

0:09:59 > 0:10:03handed down from artist to artist for almost 500 years.

0:10:03 > 0:10:06And it's here in this library.

0:10:10 > 0:10:13Traditionally it was saints whose relics were preserved.

0:10:13 > 0:10:16After Durer, it could be artists.

0:10:45 > 0:10:47Can't believe I'm looking at this.

0:10:47 > 0:10:49I certainly can't believe I'm holding it.

0:10:49 > 0:10:53It's so long and wavy and blonde.

0:10:53 > 0:10:56It was snipped from Durer's head

0:10:56 > 0:10:59a couple of days after he died in 1528

0:10:59 > 0:11:03and given to his assistant Hans Baldung as a memento mori.

0:11:05 > 0:11:07I can see why he was famous for it.

0:11:07 > 0:11:11He had this long, long hair, right down over his shoulders,

0:11:11 > 0:11:14in an age when everybody had collar-length cuts.

0:11:14 > 0:11:17Even he teased himself about it.

0:11:17 > 0:11:21There's a letter in which he refers to himself as the hairy painter.

0:11:23 > 0:11:27He'd touched it, combed it, washed it...

0:11:27 > 0:11:29and painted it, of course.

0:11:29 > 0:11:33He turned it to pure gold in the 1500 self-portrait.

0:11:44 > 0:11:47The hair is crucial to this painting.

0:11:47 > 0:11:53Even fellow artists thought the brilliant strand by strand depiction supernatural.

0:11:53 > 0:11:56And what does it look like, this radiant hair?

0:11:56 > 0:11:58A golden veil?

0:11:58 > 0:12:01Perhaps even a halo?

0:12:02 > 0:12:07People have fallen in love with this picture, but they've also been appalled.

0:12:07 > 0:12:13And there is a shock here, a moment where you think your eyes are deceiving you.

0:12:13 > 0:12:18It looks like Albrecht Durer, but it also looks like someone else too.

0:12:18 > 0:12:21It's a double take.

0:12:21 > 0:12:23It looks like Jesus Christ.

0:12:31 > 0:12:36We'll never know why Durer deliberately portrayed himself as Christ.

0:12:36 > 0:12:39Perhaps he was trying to live up to Christ,

0:12:39 > 0:12:43or taking literally the idea that we're all made in God's image.

0:12:43 > 0:12:46All we know for sure is that he chose

0:12:46 > 0:12:50to show himself as both man and Christian icon.

0:12:50 > 0:12:55German artists then and since couldn't get this image out of their heads.

0:12:57 > 0:13:01A century later, when Georg Vischer came to paint Jesus,

0:13:01 > 0:13:03he gave him Durer's face.

0:13:05 > 0:13:08There he is, the Messiah of German painting.

0:13:11 > 0:13:14The self-portrait's supernatural power endures.

0:13:14 > 0:13:18In 1905 a museum guard noticed that Durer's stare suddenly looked different.

0:13:18 > 0:13:21Close inspection revealed something terrible...

0:13:23 > 0:13:26Deep scratches across the eyes.

0:13:28 > 0:13:33The curators reported that someone had attempted to blind Durer with a hatpin.

0:13:33 > 0:13:37Only the thick varnish saved him.

0:13:37 > 0:13:43And Durer is what we say, not Durer's self-portrait, as if the painting was the man himself.

0:13:43 > 0:13:48This is a public appearance in person.

0:13:48 > 0:13:50Standing in front of the painting,

0:13:51 > 0:13:53I still feel...

0:13:55 > 0:13:58an absolute catch in the throat.

0:13:58 > 0:14:01My heart's actually beating faster to stand in front of it.

0:14:04 > 0:14:07I'm not sure I can stand looking at it anymore!

0:14:07 > 0:14:09It's really drilling into me.

0:14:19 > 0:14:25Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. It's the first great self-portrait of western art,

0:14:25 > 0:14:30and it played its part in a revolution that was occurring in the status of artists.

0:14:30 > 0:14:33In the Middle Ages artists had been mostly anonymous, painters

0:14:33 > 0:14:37and sculptors no more important than the apothecary or scribe.

0:14:37 > 0:14:42Skilled workers, but hardly in the same league as poets or musicians.

0:14:45 > 0:14:51In Florence, fresco artists were even forced to join the same guilds as those who whitewashed the city walls.

0:14:54 > 0:14:57But by the 15th century, artists were making cameo

0:14:57 > 0:15:02appearances in their own works to let the world know of their achievements.

0:15:04 > 0:15:08Their faces look out of some of Florence's greatest paintings and sculptures.

0:15:13 > 0:15:18And you can see this quite literally on the doors of the baptistery, where the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti

0:15:18 > 0:15:22has posted a self-portrait right out on the street.

0:15:24 > 0:15:28Ghiberti spent more than two decades working on the baptistry doors known

0:15:28 > 0:15:35as "the gates of paradise", a miracle of gilded-bronze craftsmanship, as he himself pointed out.

0:15:35 > 0:15:39In his autobiography, one of the first by an artist, Ghiberti boasts

0:15:39 > 0:15:44about HIS doors as if it hadn't taken a huge team to make them.

0:15:44 > 0:15:50The doors may glorify God, but Ghiberti wasn't going to leave himself out of posterity.

0:15:53 > 0:15:57Ghiberti is among the first European artists to promote himself with such flagrant brass neck.

0:15:57 > 0:16:02Here he is, shrewd smile, a certain superiority among the saints

0:16:02 > 0:16:07and looking down forever on the people of Florence.

0:16:20 > 0:16:26Walking around this place, what's striking is the way self-portraits behave like real people.

0:16:26 > 0:16:30You're looking around and suddenly your eyes catches somebody else's.

0:16:30 > 0:16:34Straightaway there's a frisson that connects you.

0:16:34 > 0:16:38This isn't a common look in 15th century Italian art.

0:16:38 > 0:16:45In those days it was usual to show wealthy patrons and sitters in worshipful profile, formal and aloof.

0:16:51 > 0:16:56But in Florence's Santa Trinita Church, hidden within a fresco

0:16:56 > 0:17:02is one of the first examples of an artist shooting one of those glances that hook you.

0:17:11 > 0:17:17The giveaway is that special look of looking that distinguishes the self-portrait.

0:17:17 > 0:17:22Two-eyed portraits were rare enough - most were in profile - so imagine what it

0:17:22 > 0:17:27must have felt like to be in church looking at a fresco

0:17:27 > 0:17:30and find one of the faces staring right back at you.

0:17:40 > 0:17:45That's the painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio, there on the outskirts of the scene.

0:17:45 > 0:17:49Although he's not exactly hiding away. In fact he really stands out

0:17:49 > 0:17:53with that swaggering pose, and the eyes are locking directly with yours.

0:17:53 > 0:17:58The look that Ghirlandaio gives you, with one eye painted slightly out of

0:17:58 > 0:18:03focus using the primitive mirror of those times, will appear in self-portraits down the centuries.

0:18:03 > 0:18:10But back in 1485 it must have seemed quite outstanding. Why is he here?

0:18:10 > 0:18:17Well, the faces in the crowd are real people, members of the banking family who paid for the fresco.

0:18:17 > 0:18:21Ghirlandaio was a successful man too, and churches, as the priests

0:18:21 > 0:18:25complained, were turning into portrait galleries.

0:18:26 > 0:18:30The patrons themselves were getting in on the act, so why not the man

0:18:30 > 0:18:33who created the whole scene, the artist himself?

0:18:39 > 0:18:43As the Renaissance progressed and patrons began to sit for independent

0:18:43 > 0:18:47portraits, artists stepped free of the crowded fresco as well.

0:18:51 > 0:18:55Here's Raphael, painting himself around 1506,

0:18:55 > 0:18:59not as part of a bigger picture but deserving one all of his own.

0:18:59 > 0:19:03He's an individual, ready for his close up,

0:19:03 > 0:19:07eager to be seen and known as something other than a craftsman.

0:19:07 > 0:19:10You notice he has no brush for hire.

0:19:12 > 0:19:16A few decades later a young Venetian looked in a mirror and painted his

0:19:16 > 0:19:21eyes staring back with a look that holds you too in its sights.

0:19:21 > 0:19:24This is the face of Tintoretto.

0:19:28 > 0:19:34Look at those red rims. Tintoretto was an insomniac, painting all night.

0:19:34 > 0:19:37These are eyes that make you stare hard in return.

0:19:37 > 0:19:42It's a startling switch. The picture puts you in the artist's position.

0:19:42 > 0:19:46You are where he once was, contemplating himself.

0:19:46 > 0:19:49You're seeing him through his own eyes.

0:19:51 > 0:19:54Centuries before anyone discovered that the eye is an extruded part of

0:19:54 > 0:19:59the brain, Tintoretto senses a connection between mind and eye.

0:19:59 > 0:20:02To see is to know.

0:20:02 > 0:20:06He makes you feel you've entered into his self-awareness.

0:20:06 > 0:20:08It's a unique gift of self-portraits.

0:20:13 > 0:20:16Self-portraits had become a popular genre,

0:20:16 > 0:20:19explored by artists right up to the present day.

0:20:22 > 0:20:25But how do you turn yourself into a picture?

0:20:25 > 0:20:29What do artists go through when they create a self-portrait?

0:20:29 > 0:20:34I've always been interested in the art of self-portraits and taking them as an inspiration.

0:20:34 > 0:20:37The latest one I'm wanting to do is this one by Tintoretto.

0:20:37 > 0:20:39It's quite an interesting experience

0:20:39 > 0:20:43because I am not only painting myself, I'm trying to paint that.

0:20:43 > 0:20:48You need to get the midnight hour in Venice into this painting.

0:20:48 > 0:20:52It's an absolute gimlet stare, isn't it?

0:20:52 > 0:20:54It is an analysing look.

0:20:54 > 0:21:00It'd be remiss to say it is looking into your soul, but he's looking at you in a different way.

0:21:00 > 0:21:04I'm coming up the nose, I'm going to do the bridge of the nose

0:21:04 > 0:21:06and I'm coming over to the far eye,

0:21:06 > 0:21:07the eyebrow in,

0:21:07 > 0:21:14first the eyebrow, just the shadow, and then the eye approximately.

0:21:15 > 0:21:20This side, I've got a very big shadow in the eye socket,

0:21:20 > 0:21:26my eyebrow coming in, and then the googly eye here, this is there.

0:21:28 > 0:21:32Of course, now I've drawn everything wrong.

0:21:35 > 0:21:37Does he look suitably sinister?

0:21:40 > 0:21:45I often think that painting self-portraits,

0:21:45 > 0:21:50it's not a conscious effort to find out something.

0:21:50 > 0:21:56It's a feeling around in the dark and later on things occur to one when one looks back on it.

0:21:56 > 0:21:58It's like a

0:21:58 > 0:22:02bloody Picasso, not like a Tintoretto. Do excuse me.

0:22:06 > 0:22:11I'm going to pop a highlight in here to liven it up.

0:22:11 > 0:22:14And you've only got one there, haven't you? Look at your face.

0:22:14 > 0:22:16This one has none.

0:22:16 > 0:22:20And this is quite a bright one. You haven't got any.

0:22:20 > 0:22:22Does Tintoretto have any?

0:22:24 > 0:22:29None at all, no, look, he's made the lid do all the work, hasn't he?

0:22:29 > 0:22:33In fact he has just made the pupils much darker, to give that sense...

0:22:33 > 0:22:38The whole iris peering out at you.

0:22:38 > 0:22:39No highlights at all.

0:22:39 > 0:22:44- All the highlights are on the nose and the cheek.- Very mysterious.

0:22:44 > 0:22:46So you could go that way at this point.

0:22:46 > 0:22:48I could, but I'm going to try anyway.

0:22:48 > 0:22:50I want to see what a highlight looks like.

0:22:50 > 0:22:52Because I'm cheesy.

0:22:52 > 0:22:57OK, so I'm going to just put it in here.

0:22:59 > 0:23:01That's good.

0:23:13 > 0:23:16Self-portrait of a man thinking about Tintoretto.

0:23:16 > 0:23:18Yes, exactly.

0:23:23 > 0:23:29We are all trained to subliminally read micro expressions. A lot of

0:23:29 > 0:23:33interaction happens on this kind of instinctive level,

0:23:33 > 0:23:37and I wonder whether those tiny adjustments I'm making,

0:23:37 > 0:23:43while I'm trying to make the eye more real or the nose come out or the mouth work properly,

0:23:43 > 0:23:47they then suggest all these different emotions.

0:23:47 > 0:23:51So for you, where other painters might choose to try to transmit

0:23:51 > 0:23:54something of their character, for you it's coming through the paint?

0:23:54 > 0:23:59Yes, absolutely. It's coming through the paint and it's unconscious.

0:24:00 > 0:24:03In a sense, I suppose this is in between

0:24:03 > 0:24:07the way I feel and the way I see myself. It's somewhere in between.

0:24:09 > 0:24:13Within and without, self-portraits bring the two together.

0:24:13 > 0:24:17Artists may not be able to paint their outer appearance any better

0:24:17 > 0:24:20than a portrait painter, but they have complete access

0:24:20 > 0:24:22to their inner selves, and this shapes the painting.

0:24:22 > 0:24:29Perhaps that's why self-portraits have been so prized by collectors down the centuries.

0:24:33 > 0:24:37The oldest and most monumental collection of all can be found in Florence.

0:24:40 > 0:24:44That's the Uffizi Gallery behind me, and if you can see where tiled roof starts, with all

0:24:44 > 0:24:49the windows underneath, that's the Vasari Corridor of self-portraits.

0:24:49 > 0:24:51It's the largest collection in the world.

0:24:55 > 0:24:58The corridor is over half a mile long.

0:24:58 > 0:25:05It was designed by the Renaissance artist, architect and pioneering art historian Giorgio Vasari.

0:25:05 > 0:25:09It was Vasari, through his Lives Of The Artists, who made the world see

0:25:09 > 0:25:15artists differently - as creative, temperamental, even as geniuses.

0:25:15 > 0:25:17People worthy of biography

0:25:17 > 0:25:20whose self-portraits were wondrous things to collect.

0:25:20 > 0:25:24The corridor is almost never open.

0:25:24 > 0:25:27The self-portraits are usually locked behind this door.

0:25:36 > 0:25:40This is Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, who started this collection.

0:25:40 > 0:25:43He was really obsessed, collecting them like football cards.

0:25:43 > 0:25:47Began with one, soon over 100, and now there are over 1,000.

0:25:47 > 0:25:49And I think you can understand his passion.

0:25:49 > 0:25:53You love the artist's work, you wonder what the artists looked like.

0:25:53 > 0:25:56The self-portrait embodies them both.

0:26:02 > 0:26:07Oh, you really feel you are stepping into the past.

0:26:09 > 0:26:12And all these eyes staring at you.

0:26:12 > 0:26:15There's a real feeling of pressure here,

0:26:15 > 0:26:17a force of personality.

0:26:20 > 0:26:24There's plenty of famous names - Titian, Rembrandt, Carracci -

0:26:24 > 0:26:30but more interesting are some that are now forgotten, like Giovanni da San Giovanni.

0:26:30 > 0:26:37Oh, look at that. He's really casting a cold, clear eye on you, and of course on himself.

0:26:37 > 0:26:41The wart - every single hair has been spelled out.

0:26:41 > 0:26:43He could have painted it from the opposite view,

0:26:43 > 0:26:46but he wasn't going to flatter himself.

0:26:46 > 0:26:51It's all about the truth, that one. And up here is one I really love.

0:26:51 > 0:26:54It's the one comedy self-portrait.

0:26:54 > 0:27:00It's Lorenzo Lippi, from Florence, 17th century, and he's making a real

0:27:00 > 0:27:03parody of the eyeballing business of self-portraits.

0:27:03 > 0:27:05One eye is in shadow,

0:27:05 > 0:27:07the other one peeping out as if

0:27:07 > 0:27:12he was looking around the corner, terrified somebody might jump out.

0:27:12 > 0:27:15He's brave enough to paint himself, but he's too frightened to look.

0:27:26 > 0:27:30Beautiful painting. Self-portrait by candlelight, very delicate.

0:27:30 > 0:27:32Van Dyke, looking very grand.

0:27:32 > 0:27:35Lovely gold chain of office over his shoulder.

0:27:35 > 0:27:38And this is by the Austrian artist, Johannes Gumpp,

0:27:38 > 0:27:41about whom nothing is known except for this picture.

0:27:41 > 0:27:42Here he is, three times over,

0:27:42 > 0:27:48the mirror on that side, the picture he's painting on that side,

0:27:48 > 0:27:51and he's in the middle. Which is the best of the Gumpps?

0:27:51 > 0:27:54Which is the true Gumpp? Is it nature, the mirror? Is is art, the painting?

0:27:54 > 0:27:59It's obviously meant to be art because the painting on the easel's got much more animation.

0:27:59 > 0:28:03But truly Gumpp is this man in the middle with his back to us.

0:28:03 > 0:28:05We'll never really know what he looks like.

0:28:05 > 0:28:08He's never going to turn round.

0:28:12 > 0:28:15By the start of the 18th century, there were nearly 200 self-portraits.

0:28:18 > 0:28:21An engraving shows them lined up like pictures on a boardroom wall.

0:28:21 > 0:28:25Eventually, unsolicited donations had to be banned.

0:28:27 > 0:28:30This was a select club of the great and good,

0:28:30 > 0:28:34hence perhaps a certain pomp and formality.

0:28:34 > 0:28:37There's a lovely sequence here of the self-portrait with wig.

0:28:37 > 0:28:39You couldn't be on the walls by now,

0:28:39 > 0:28:43without being quite grand and receiving an invitation,

0:28:43 > 0:28:49and I think the honour of the invitation is really beginning to stifle creativity.

0:28:51 > 0:28:55As in life, so in art. Having to make an official public appearance

0:28:55 > 0:28:56can suppress one's character.

0:29:00 > 0:29:04In the Vasari Corridor, many artists come over as rigid,

0:29:04 > 0:29:09remote, even reluctant, as a certain uniformity sets in.

0:29:09 > 0:29:13Some of these self-portraits have all the personality of passport photos,

0:29:13 > 0:29:16and others, well, they're so buttoned up,

0:29:16 > 0:29:18they might as well be portraits.

0:29:28 > 0:29:32Such conformity is a disappointment to modern eyes.

0:29:32 > 0:29:35We don't want our artists to look the same. We're not the same.

0:29:35 > 0:29:38In fact we change all the time.

0:29:38 > 0:29:43And it's this sense of inner mutability that defines the work of Rembrandt.

0:29:43 > 0:29:45self-portraiture's leading light.

0:29:47 > 0:29:52About appearances, Rembrandt is notoriously unreliable.

0:29:52 > 0:29:57In over 80 self-portraits his eyes and hair colour change,

0:29:57 > 0:30:00his nose waxes and wanes.

0:30:00 > 0:30:02But as for his inner self -

0:30:02 > 0:30:05never fixed, altered daily by experience -

0:30:05 > 0:30:08these pictures are revelations.

0:30:09 > 0:30:10Or so it seems to me.

0:30:10 > 0:30:13Others insist that this cannot be true,

0:30:13 > 0:30:16centuries before the Romantics and Sigmund Freud.

0:30:18 > 0:30:21It's a debate that hung over a tremendous exhibition

0:30:21 > 0:30:26in 1999, at the National Gallery, when, for the first time in history,

0:30:26 > 0:30:29the self-portraits were all brought together.

0:30:34 > 0:30:36I remember that show so well.

0:30:36 > 0:30:40This powerful presence of Rembrandt all around you

0:30:40 > 0:30:43and this extraordinary sense of not just a life,

0:30:43 > 0:30:47but a man's whole inner being, unfolding before your very eyes.

0:30:51 > 0:30:54It began with the young Rembrandt hiding in the shadows.

0:30:54 > 0:30:58He's not so easily pinned down, this guarded soul,

0:30:58 > 0:31:00though the painting is pure performance -

0:31:00 > 0:31:03a dazzling play of dark against light.

0:31:06 > 0:31:11Moving through that show, you'd have encountered him here, at the age of 34.

0:31:11 > 0:31:15Rich, busy studio, a huge and international reputation,

0:31:15 > 0:31:19and he's wearing the opulent clothes of the previous century.

0:31:19 > 0:31:21And the pose is also from the past.

0:31:21 > 0:31:24He's declaring himself to be one of the old masters.

0:31:27 > 0:31:32A decade later, he is on the verge of bankruptcy.

0:31:32 > 0:31:33His wife has died,

0:31:33 > 0:31:36his kind of painting is beginning to go out of fashion.

0:31:36 > 0:31:40He's full of pain. But look at him.

0:31:40 > 0:31:45"I'm still here in the darkness, I'm still standing."

0:31:48 > 0:31:50This is one of Rembrandt's last paintings.

0:31:50 > 0:31:53He's 63 and in a few months

0:31:53 > 0:31:58he will be dead and buried in an unmarked grave.

0:31:58 > 0:32:01It's the seventh age of man, really.

0:32:01 > 0:32:03He's returned to childhood,

0:32:03 > 0:32:06though not, of course, as an artist.

0:32:06 > 0:32:12But how perfectly he sees and describes what it might be like

0:32:12 > 0:32:14to be at the end of your life.

0:32:18 > 0:32:22Every self-portrait in the show convinced you that this

0:32:22 > 0:32:26was the truth about Rembrandt, the faithful expression of himself,

0:32:26 > 0:32:29but the curators completely disagreed.

0:32:29 > 0:32:33They insisted that a sense of self did not exist in Rembrandt's day,

0:32:33 > 0:32:37that artists didn't explore their inner selves, because they didn't have them.

0:32:40 > 0:32:45Rembrandt's self-portraits were just product for the market, his personal stock in trade.

0:32:45 > 0:32:49When Rembrandt stepped to the mirror, he saw money.

0:32:51 > 0:32:55But I believe that paintings are their own form of evidence.

0:32:55 > 0:33:02Surely here, in his last days, Rembrandt is showing what it is like to be facing your end.

0:33:05 > 0:33:07Look again at this one.

0:33:07 > 0:33:13It really teaches you what it's like to be old, to be puffy and worn,

0:33:13 > 0:33:18tired, your eyes sunken, maybe you're a little bit absurd to yourself.

0:33:18 > 0:33:22And all those lessons are there in the art, in the brushwork itself.

0:33:22 > 0:33:28It's veined and knotty, a bit haphazard, a bit gnarled, in some places it's fading.

0:33:28 > 0:33:31It's as if the painting itself were on its way out.

0:33:32 > 0:33:36Rembrandt's depth is not an illusion.

0:33:38 > 0:33:42JAZZ SWING MUSIC

0:33:47 > 0:33:50But here's where things get complicated.

0:33:50 > 0:33:55In the way Rembrandt puts across the inner man, he 's something of an actor -

0:33:55 > 0:33:58playing himself, as if he were on the stage.

0:33:58 > 0:34:01I've come to ask the actor Simon Callow

0:34:01 > 0:34:05if he is can shed any light on Rembrandt the performer.

0:34:07 > 0:34:14- It's often said that great actors have almost - or can have - anonymous faces.- Mmm.

0:34:14 > 0:34:17They have, as an attribute changeability,

0:34:17 > 0:34:21unrecognisability, almost. Do you see that with Rembrandt?

0:34:21 > 0:34:26Very much so. He's got a wonderful actor's face,

0:34:26 > 0:34:28actually, because it's not distinguished,

0:34:28 > 0:34:31it's not a handsome face, particularly -

0:34:31 > 0:34:35small eyes, rather bulbous nose,

0:34:35 > 0:34:40thick lips, a tendency, as he got older, to be rather jowly.

0:34:40 > 0:34:45It's almost a face made up of Plasticine or dough or something.

0:34:45 > 0:34:51And, because of that, he's able, somehow, to be possessed

0:34:51 > 0:34:54by an idea or a person

0:34:54 > 0:34:58or an image or some sort of organic sense of something other.

0:35:00 > 0:35:06Self-portraiture is sometimes described as an inturned art, the artist alone with the mirror.

0:35:06 > 0:35:11But Rembrandt is magnificent proof of the opposite, putting on a one-man show for our benefit.

0:35:14 > 0:35:17It's a real character performance, there's no doubt about it.

0:35:17 > 0:35:24Even up to the upturned moustache, with wax at the ends.

0:35:24 > 0:35:29And there's a question over whether he is slightly Orientalised his own features. What do you think?

0:35:29 > 0:35:33I would think he has just done that by thinking about it. He's thinking Turkish.

0:35:33 > 0:35:35What about this dog?

0:35:35 > 0:35:37The dog's not thinking Turkish, at all.

0:35:37 > 0:35:42The dog's thinking, "When can I have my supper?", quite clearly!

0:35:44 > 0:35:46What expression is that?

0:35:46 > 0:35:51He is doing a low-life expression, is what it is - "Eurrargh!" -

0:35:51 > 0:35:55rather like a member of the chorus of Les Miserables.

0:35:55 > 0:36:02It's a, sort of, a rather drunken dirty laugh, actually, is what that is. "Hur-hur-hur!"

0:36:02 > 0:36:04"You old tosser!"

0:36:04 > 0:36:05THEY LAUGH

0:36:05 > 0:36:09Oh, God, we know that looks so well.

0:36:09 > 0:36:14That's just... Terrible things have happened to our faces, these nobbles

0:36:14 > 0:36:20and the bagging of the eyes and when the upper part of the eyes starts to hang over the eye.

0:36:20 > 0:36:25All these things unsparingly caught.

0:36:26 > 0:36:28Yes, there's no mercy, is there?

0:36:28 > 0:36:33No mercy at all. And his expression completely reflects that.

0:36:33 > 0:36:36But it is this

0:36:36 > 0:36:40incomprehensible capacity of Rembrandt

0:36:40 > 0:36:43to penetrate into

0:36:43 > 0:36:45what it is to be human.

0:36:50 > 0:36:55We live life forwards, it's been said, but we understand it backwards.

0:36:55 > 0:36:58Rembrandt was one of the first people in history who could,

0:36:58 > 0:37:05literally, see his life passing - the self-portraits were stacking up around him in the studio.

0:37:05 > 0:37:09Nowadays, we all have the bittersweet experience of looking at old photographs,

0:37:09 > 0:37:13of seeing our past and unrecoverable selves.

0:37:18 > 0:37:22Rembrandt must have had the same very modern self-knowledge,

0:37:22 > 0:37:28these time-lapse images deepening his understanding of life.

0:37:42 > 0:37:48Rembrandt's self-portraits were known and seen far and wide during his lifetime.

0:37:48 > 0:37:52They set a standard, which is perhaps why his century, the 17th,

0:37:52 > 0:37:57sees some of the most inventive and original self-portraits in art.

0:37:59 > 0:38:05Gerard ter Borch has one foot on the edge of the stage, like a dancer about to begin.

0:38:05 > 0:38:11And that foot's like a fuse that sends the eye up the black-cloaked body to the artist's face.

0:38:11 > 0:38:14It's a public performance, but he's a riddle.

0:38:14 > 0:38:18The Italian painter Sassoferrato appears against

0:38:18 > 0:38:22a pure blue background, his signature colour, known as Sassoferrato blue.

0:38:22 > 0:38:29Leaning forward deferentially, as if listening to your views, a camera-age pose three centuries in advance.

0:38:32 > 0:38:38Salvator Rosa comes on like a rock star, a lone crag of a man against a shelterless sky.

0:38:38 > 0:38:43He's got something to say, but since this is a picture, he's given the lines to a stone.

0:38:43 > 0:38:49Those words roughly translate as, "If you've got nothing worth saying, then shut up."

0:38:49 > 0:38:53Which is exactly what he's not doing in this cunning picture, of course.

0:38:53 > 0:38:58And Rosa was famously garrulous. As always with self-portraits, the truth will out.

0:39:04 > 0:39:09What pose to strike, what expression to show, what to do in a self-portrait?

0:39:09 > 0:39:12Big questions and none of them simple.

0:39:12 > 0:39:15For instance, do you show yourself in the act of painting?

0:39:17 > 0:39:20Here's one that does.

0:39:20 > 0:39:25It's Artemesia Gentileschi, in a dynamic self-portrait, at Hampton Court.

0:39:25 > 0:39:32Sleeves rolled up, getting down to work, she's like an action painter, three centuries in advance.

0:39:32 > 0:39:37Except, of course, that unlike Jackson Pollock and co, she's not a man.

0:39:41 > 0:39:45To be a woman painter in the 17th century was the opposite of easy

0:39:45 > 0:39:48and Gentileschi endured unusual cruelties.

0:39:48 > 0:39:54She was raped by her painting tutor and at the subsequent trial, she was publicly humiliated and tortured.

0:39:54 > 0:39:59Yet she survived to have a very successful 40-year career, her paintings were prized

0:39:59 > 0:40:03all across Europe and her self-portrait was the first by a woman

0:40:03 > 0:40:05to appear in a royal collection.

0:40:16 > 0:40:22It's actually very startling when you stumble across her in a dark corner of Hampton Court,

0:40:22 > 0:40:27still hard at work, three and a half centuries after Charles I invited her to England.

0:40:27 > 0:40:32She's showing herself doing something quite ordinary and traditional - painting herself at work -

0:40:32 > 0:40:35but what an original take on the theme.

0:40:35 > 0:40:42She's making this extraordinary kind of wild kiltering gesture up there to make her mark,

0:40:42 > 0:40:47and the sleeve is falling away, so you see the naked forearm, the dirty fingernails,

0:40:47 > 0:40:49lights flashing across her bosom and forehead.

0:40:52 > 0:40:56This is Exhibit A in any history of women's art.

0:40:56 > 0:40:59It's the first self portrait by a woman to be internationally famous

0:40:59 > 0:41:03and it shows something that was very rare for the 17th century,

0:41:03 > 0:41:05in fact, it was regarded as a freak of nature -

0:41:05 > 0:41:09a woman who paint and showed herself doing it.

0:41:11 > 0:41:16I love the fact that Gentileschi could be painting anything, large or small.

0:41:16 > 0:41:21The canvas is so far a promising blank and that she isn't wasting time making eyes at us.

0:41:21 > 0:41:24This artist is getting down to work.

0:41:25 > 0:41:30Showing yourself at work is the simplest way to declare your profession

0:41:30 > 0:41:34and it's no accident that it was frequently women painters, down the centuries,

0:41:34 > 0:41:37who chose to show themselves palette in hand, brush at the ready,

0:41:37 > 0:41:41even if they were dressed as if they were on their way to the ball.

0:41:45 > 0:41:49These are self-portraits that say, "Look, I'm an artist.

0:41:49 > 0:41:51"This is what I do."

0:41:53 > 0:41:58But the working self-portrait can also be used to make the personal political.

0:41:58 > 0:42:03That's certainly the case with a 20th century work in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

0:42:09 > 0:42:15Here's Laura Knight's wonderfully provocative self-portrait, it's called Self With Nude.

0:42:15 > 0:42:20Couldn't be clearer than that. And Knight is showing herself doing the very thing that hadn't

0:42:20 > 0:42:27been allowed for centuries - painting a nude figure, no drapes and no accompaniment - on her own.

0:42:27 > 0:42:31Even at this point, in 1913, this was controversial.

0:42:31 > 0:42:36In provincial art colleges, you still couldn't do it and even later in the century it wasn't allowed.

0:42:36 > 0:42:39So she's turning her back on tradition, snubbing tradition,

0:42:39 > 0:42:42and, of course, turning her back on us, as well.

0:42:43 > 0:42:49What I love about this painting is that it's absolutely of its political moment.

0:42:49 > 0:42:52This is the time of suffragettes and here she is doing indoors,

0:42:52 > 0:42:55in a sense, what they were doing on the streets.

0:42:55 > 0:42:59And I think she's asserting her women's rights in doing this.

0:42:59 > 0:43:02And she puts them on equal footing -

0:43:02 > 0:43:07the model, the artist - as if they both had the right

0:43:07 > 0:43:10to be in a painting and they both had the right to autonomy.

0:43:10 > 0:43:11To the vote, you might say.

0:43:11 > 0:43:14She's voting for women's art.

0:43:24 > 0:43:27It's clear that Laura Knight has a campaign in mind,

0:43:27 > 0:43:31but the motive behind many self-portraits is far less obvious.

0:43:31 > 0:43:36With portraits, you know that someone wanted a likeness of that person and probably paid.

0:43:36 > 0:43:41But self-portraits are not often commissioned, there's little money or glory involved.

0:43:41 > 0:43:44So why do artists make them?

0:43:44 > 0:43:48For all sorts of deep and surprising reasons.

0:43:49 > 0:43:56This is Murillo, portraying himself at the prayers of his children, that he may be with them after his death,

0:43:56 > 0:44:00as it says in the inscription scrolling out like a fax.

0:44:00 > 0:44:03Children were Murillo's subject and his passion.

0:44:03 > 0:44:05He raised 12 on his own, when his wife died.

0:44:05 > 0:44:10Those words express paternal love, but so does the gesture -

0:44:10 > 0:44:14the hand appearing to reach out of the frame, to quicken, as if still alive.

0:44:14 > 0:44:17The father no longer leaving his children in dying.

0:44:19 > 0:44:24Here's Michelangelo in The Last Judgement, in the Sistine Chapel.

0:44:24 > 0:44:28Not the magnificent Saint Bartholomew, but that ragged epidermis,

0:44:28 > 0:44:33dangling like an overcoat from his hand, the skin of Bartholomew, who was flayed.

0:44:33 > 0:44:38Michelangelo was in his late sixties, much preoccupied with death and resurrection.

0:44:38 > 0:44:41The only way to be redeemed was to shuck off the mortal flesh

0:44:41 > 0:44:46and be reborn at the last judgement, as this self-portrait shows.

0:44:46 > 0:44:50Here's Michelangelo, the famous broken nose is the giveaway,

0:44:50 > 0:44:53offering up his old skin to God, who's just above.

0:44:56 > 0:44:58It's the visual equivalent of a prayer.

0:45:05 > 0:45:09But in Vienna is a collection of self-portrait sculptures

0:45:09 > 0:45:14that have a purpose so strange it even eclipses this.

0:45:17 > 0:45:21This is the Austrian sculptor, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt,

0:45:21 > 0:45:24caught in a complete revulsion.

0:45:24 > 0:45:31His eyes are screwed up, his mouth's pursed tight, the whole face is a kind of rictus.

0:45:31 > 0:45:35And it's a head that makes you want to move your own in recoil.

0:45:35 > 0:45:38Real force of personality.

0:45:38 > 0:45:44The academic title they give it is Revolting Odour, as if what he was feeling and experiencing was simply

0:45:44 > 0:45:49a nasty smell, but I think there's something much worse going on here.

0:45:49 > 0:45:53Why would anyone want to portray themselves like this?

0:45:54 > 0:45:58Messerschmidt had the most troubling motive of all self-portraitists.

0:45:58 > 0:46:02His sculptures are, literally, a form of exorcism.

0:46:02 > 0:46:05If self-portraits could behave like real people -

0:46:05 > 0:46:10staring, acting, showing off - they can also descend into madness.

0:46:19 > 0:46:22Once, Messerschmidt had been a man with a golden career,

0:46:22 > 0:46:29winning prestigious commissions from the Habsburg Court, that are all 18th-century perfection.

0:46:29 > 0:46:33His abilities put him at the heart of the artistic establishment.

0:46:33 > 0:46:38In his time, this handsome building was the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

0:46:44 > 0:46:49Here on the second floor is where Messerschmidt studied and where he eventually became a teacher,

0:46:49 > 0:46:55with the written promise that he would one day get the job he really craved, Professor of Sculpture.

0:47:12 > 0:47:16This is the world that Messerschmidt lived and worked in.

0:47:16 > 0:47:19It's an incredible place and he must have seen it every day,

0:47:19 > 0:47:21because it's just along the corridor from his studio.

0:47:21 > 0:47:29Miles of neo-classical marble and cherubs and gold, and up here on the ceiling, this immense fresco,

0:47:29 > 0:47:36celebrating the arts and the sciences and, right in the middle, the two people who supposedly

0:47:36 > 0:47:40have helped them most, the Emperor and his wife, in a real kind of beautiful medallion there.

0:47:41 > 0:47:46It's unthinkable to me that anyone who could have lived in such a world,

0:47:46 > 0:47:50so rigid and formal and ceremonial,

0:47:50 > 0:47:55could have broken out and produced such wild self-portraits.

0:48:05 > 0:48:11Messerschmidt's series of so-called "character heads" rank among the strangest figures in art.

0:48:11 > 0:48:15It's impossible to believe they were made in the 18th century,

0:48:15 > 0:48:19they seem so modern, so out of kilter with their times.

0:48:23 > 0:48:28Around the time he started to work on the heads, Messerschmidt's life began to fall apart.

0:48:28 > 0:48:34In the archive of the Academy of Fine Arts is evidence of a crushing professional disappointment.

0:48:37 > 0:48:39This document is a report, by the supervisor of the

0:48:39 > 0:48:43Academy of Fine Arts to the Empress. Can you tell us what it's about?

0:48:43 > 0:48:47It is about who is going to succeed some Professor of Sculpture,

0:48:47 > 0:48:48who has died recently,

0:48:48 > 0:48:52and Messerschmidt, he was intended to get this position.

0:48:52 > 0:48:57And here it says why it's not such a good idea.

0:48:57 > 0:49:02"So he has been very confused in his head for the past three years."

0:49:02 > 0:49:06So do you think they're implying that he's mad?

0:49:06 > 0:49:07Yes, I do.

0:49:07 > 0:49:11There are other documents in which he's described as believing

0:49:11 > 0:49:16- his colleagues to be his enemies and so on.- So paranoid, as well?

0:49:16 > 0:49:21Yes. The Chancellor here asks for a pension.

0:49:21 > 0:49:23He gets a pension, in the end.

0:49:23 > 0:49:25- So they pay him off?- Yes, they do.

0:49:27 > 0:49:29Messerschmidt left Vienna,

0:49:29 > 0:49:34but many of the heads he spent the rest of his life working on are still here.

0:49:52 > 0:49:56We do have an account of how and why Messerschmidt came to make these heads.

0:49:56 > 0:50:02A visitor to his studio in 1781 found the sculptor pulling violent faces in the mirror.

0:50:02 > 0:50:06He was pinching himself until he grimaced, he was yawning convulsively.

0:50:06 > 0:50:11He was swallowing so violently his eyes closed involuntarily.

0:50:13 > 0:50:17Messerschmidt told the visitor that he was being physically tormented

0:50:17 > 0:50:19by a demon he called the Spirit of Proportion.

0:50:19 > 0:50:23He had angered this spirit, he said, but had figured out a system

0:50:23 > 0:50:27to drive it away, that involved pinching himself and grimacing.

0:50:29 > 0:50:34The heads are a record of the expressions he used to exorcise this demon.

0:50:37 > 0:50:40My sense, looking at the heads, is that they are kind of stand-off.

0:50:40 > 0:50:43A real head-to-head, if you like.

0:50:43 > 0:50:47A way of beating off the spirit that was tormenting him.

0:50:55 > 0:50:57Imagine making your own head.

0:50:59 > 0:51:02You know, this is a really ephemeral expression and he's carved this

0:51:02 > 0:51:05in alabaster, which is one of the hardest of stones.

0:51:05 > 0:51:11It must have taken him months and months to get something that lasts half a second.

0:51:40 > 0:51:43And you just don't know I'm here, at all.

0:51:43 > 0:51:44You've just gone, haven't you?

0:51:53 > 0:51:59Even this one is meant to represent something...like a smile.

0:52:01 > 0:52:04It's just, sort of, horrifyingly vacuous.

0:52:16 > 0:52:19This one's the most alien of them all.

0:52:19 > 0:52:22It just feels as though he's turned into his own bone.

0:52:22 > 0:52:26Just one bone, it's like bird's beak.

0:52:26 > 0:52:29It's really a horrifying thing.

0:52:29 > 0:52:34And it's a thing, you know. You feel he's turned his own being

0:52:34 > 0:52:36into an object.

0:52:41 > 0:52:43It's just too frightening, really, to look at.

0:52:43 > 0:52:45I can't really bear to look at it.

0:52:52 > 0:52:58These heads were first shown here in Vienna as a sort of medical freak show, forensic evidence.

0:52:58 > 0:53:03But even in his lifetime, people felt their power, their expression

0:53:03 > 0:53:07of what it is to be stuck with your own thoughts, your own demons,

0:53:07 > 0:53:10to be locked inside your own head.

0:53:20 > 0:53:23In Paris, there's a self-portrait that, like Messerschmidt,

0:53:23 > 0:53:27is all about about being stuck with oneself and also seems to bridge

0:53:27 > 0:53:30the 18th century with our own neurotic, modern world.

0:53:32 > 0:53:36It was made by a painter working at the time of the French Revolution

0:53:36 > 0:53:38and who was part of that revolution himself.

0:53:40 > 0:53:41This is Jacques-Louis David.

0:53:41 > 0:53:45Even if you don't know the dramatic back story to this picture,

0:53:45 > 0:53:47it still stops you dead in the gallery,

0:53:47 > 0:53:51this painting of a man who seems strange, even to himself,

0:53:51 > 0:53:54and with, I think, a powerful air of isolation.

0:53:55 > 0:53:59When David painted this picture in 1794, he wasn't just alone

0:53:59 > 0:54:02in the sense of closing the studio door to get down to work.

0:54:02 > 0:54:08He was a man in prison. Here he is, literally, in solitary confinement.

0:54:16 > 0:54:20David was the unrivalled propagandist of the French Revolution,

0:54:20 > 0:54:23a revolution partly enacted in images.

0:54:23 > 0:54:26But more than that, he was a politician himself.

0:54:28 > 0:54:32He sat in the National Convention, was a friend and political ally

0:54:32 > 0:54:35of Robespierre, and was known as "the fiery terrorist",

0:54:35 > 0:54:39even among such extreme company.

0:54:39 > 0:54:41He designed enormous public ceremonies,

0:54:41 > 0:54:44such as the Festival of the Supreme Being,

0:54:44 > 0:54:48in which thousands of Parisians sang songs, while Robespierre

0:54:48 > 0:54:53descended an artificial mountain, planted with the tree of liberty.

0:55:00 > 0:55:03In July of 1794, Robespierre,

0:55:03 > 0:55:08David's great ally and inspiration, fell victim to his own revolution.

0:55:14 > 0:55:16David, knowing he might be next, disappeared.

0:55:16 > 0:55:18Warrants were issued.

0:55:18 > 0:55:20Searches took place.

0:55:20 > 0:55:24When they eventually found David, they threw him in a makeshift prison.

0:55:24 > 0:55:30He was shocked to find himself there, when all he'd done, he repeatedly protested, was love liberty,

0:55:30 > 0:55:31France and the revolution.

0:55:37 > 0:55:43It was here that David painted himself, not knowing if the public would ever see his self-portrait.

0:55:49 > 0:55:53Captivity didn't turn out to be too harsh for David, physically.

0:55:53 > 0:55:55The guard's son turned out to be an old pupil

0:55:55 > 0:55:58and they allowed the painter to turn his cell into a studio.

0:55:58 > 0:56:06He managed somehow to acquire palette, canvas, paints, brushes, and, crucially of course, a mirror.

0:56:11 > 0:56:14Imagine being stuck with yourself, like this. Boxed in.

0:56:14 > 0:56:17The mirror's become the fourth wall of your cell.

0:56:17 > 0:56:19You cannot get away from yourself.

0:56:19 > 0:56:23The reflection is showing you back the injustice of your circumstances.

0:56:25 > 0:56:28Here he is, brought low by his own revolution.

0:56:28 > 0:56:33Gripping the brush and palette so tightly, he's probably lost all sense of them,

0:56:33 > 0:56:36as he tries to come to terms with his situation.

0:56:43 > 0:56:46David is just there with the mirror, there's nothing else to do.

0:56:46 > 0:56:50He's not allowed to communicate with the rest of the world. And just only with himself.

0:56:50 > 0:56:55But when you look at the painting, he seems not to recognise himself

0:56:55 > 0:56:59really at all. I think it's an experience one often has.

0:56:59 > 0:57:04You look in the mirror, hoping to get a picture of yourself that you really have some familiarity with,

0:57:04 > 0:57:07something stable and definite and you look there

0:57:07 > 0:57:13and there's this person you don't expect to see. And you're... shocked, bewildered, incredulous.

0:57:13 > 0:57:16"Is this really what I look like?"

0:57:16 > 0:57:20He's alone with himself, and yet, it's not an introspective painting.

0:57:20 > 0:57:23It doesn't have this deep, psychic inner drama.

0:57:23 > 0:57:29He's just looking at himself in the mirror, trying to make sense of what he sees there.

0:57:29 > 0:57:32And I think that he's baffled.

0:57:37 > 0:57:42David would spend six months as a prisoner, waiting for his case to be considered.

0:57:42 > 0:57:47Eventually, he was rehabilitated, becoming court painter to Napoleon.

0:57:50 > 0:57:53David's painting betrays the great fiction of all self-portraits,

0:57:53 > 0:57:59which is that the artist is looking at us when, literally, he's just looking at himself.

0:58:04 > 0:58:06None of us really needs a mirror to see ourselves.

0:58:06 > 0:58:10The daylight world is a sphere of endless reflections

0:58:10 > 0:58:14in which we are caught and held all the time in shining surfaces.

0:58:14 > 0:58:18But artists need a more reliable glass - the mirror,

0:58:18 > 0:58:21the painter's silent accomplice.

0:58:27 > 0:58:33A mirror is a curious object, almost invisible, except when the frame tells you it is there.

0:58:33 > 0:58:37Everything in it is reversed, so you never see yourself as others do.

0:58:39 > 0:58:43The artist can't see, never mind paint, both eyes at once.

0:58:43 > 0:58:46Which is why one eye is very often out of focus.

0:58:51 > 0:58:54The artist Patrick Hughes has written extensively on mirrors

0:58:54 > 0:58:58and knows the perils of using this tricky tool all too well.

0:59:03 > 0:59:04- Here's a mirror.- Here is a mirror.

0:59:04 > 0:59:08Slippery business. It doesn't quite give you reality as it is, does it?

0:59:08 > 0:59:12No, we're like ourselves, just like ourselves,

0:59:12 > 0:59:14but subtly different, with the...

0:59:14 > 0:59:20I'm touching my right cheek, but this guy in the mirror is touching his left cheek.

0:59:20 > 0:59:22Just turned around, mirror imaged.

0:59:25 > 0:59:29It's like...like a twin. That's my twin in the mirror.

0:59:29 > 0:59:33My other self. Or, as Peter Cook wrote in his autobiography,

0:59:33 > 0:59:40"Tragically, I was an only twin." It's just me and my twin.

0:59:40 > 0:59:44Do you find the mirror induces any form of introspection?

0:59:44 > 0:59:48I'm not very big on introspection. I'm rather not.

0:59:48 > 0:59:51But you can learn extraordinary things about yourself, can't you?

0:59:51 > 0:59:56What a fool you are. "What a nincompoop", is my first impression of me.

0:59:56 > 0:59:59But then, what a child, as well.

0:59:59 > 1:00:05There's so many different ideas you have about yourself, not all flattering.

1:00:05 > 1:00:07Your image is still to me when I am looking at it.

1:00:07 > 1:00:09But if I look at myself,

1:00:09 > 1:00:11my eyes are moving constantly.

1:00:11 > 1:00:15I can't quite see what I look like for all the detail.

1:00:15 > 1:00:17We can't really see ourselves in mirrors, can we?

1:00:17 > 1:00:20It wouldn't be able to be a self portrait probably without a mirror.

1:00:20 > 1:00:25But it's a hard thing to work with, it abbreviates things, doesn't it?

1:00:25 > 1:00:31It makes things a lot smaller. My head is much smaller, I believe it's about half the size of me.

1:00:31 > 1:00:34And it's all shiny.

1:00:34 > 1:00:36It's subtly different.

1:00:36 > 1:00:39It's not like a photograph, all flat and ready,

1:00:39 > 1:00:43it's shiny and 3D, and, like you say, it moves.

1:00:47 > 1:00:49'Patrick's art is like a mirror itself,

1:00:49 > 1:00:53'a visual illusion that moves and appears to have a life of its own.

1:00:58 > 1:01:02'He's currently working on a self-portrait based on his own death mask.'

1:01:04 > 1:01:06Actually, at this stage, you could so easily be turned

1:01:06 > 1:01:08into somebody else with a bit of lipstick.

1:01:08 > 1:01:11'It's an idea as strange as self-portraiture itself.

1:01:11 > 1:01:16'The artist trying to get the inner and outer selves to match up.

1:01:16 > 1:01:20'And Patrick's going to go further by turning himself inside out.'

1:01:20 > 1:01:22And his face is coming away.

1:01:22 > 1:01:24Wow.

1:01:24 > 1:01:26Wow.

1:01:26 > 1:01:28I'm here. This is me.

1:01:28 > 1:01:30- Reborn.- And this is me here.

1:01:32 > 1:01:40When painted inside, Patrick's face will appear convex and his death mask will become a life mask.

1:01:40 > 1:01:44And the real spark of life will come when you presumably put the highlights of the eyes?

1:01:46 > 1:01:48The real animation will come.

1:01:52 > 1:01:57His eyes are alive. It looks just so different.

1:01:57 > 1:01:59That's alive, it comes alive.

1:02:01 > 1:02:03That's terrific.

1:02:03 > 1:02:05Perhaps when I'm dead and gone,

1:02:05 > 1:02:09you'll be able to look at this and see, there I am. It's Patrick.

1:02:09 > 1:02:10It's still a life.

1:02:13 > 1:02:19Do you feel in some way that he is a fragment of you, or a relic of you?

1:02:19 > 1:02:22Yeah, he's got some of my hairs up his nostrils.

1:02:22 > 1:02:24And I fit him perfectly, you know.

1:02:24 > 1:02:27If you were there...

1:02:27 > 1:02:31And it's a strange feeling to be at one with yourself, in that way.

1:02:31 > 1:02:32- A snug fit.- Yes.

1:02:32 > 1:02:36If I wore him as a head piece, I'd just have a big square head.

1:02:38 > 1:02:43Patrick Hughes describes his art as being about the surface of things.

1:02:43 > 1:02:46It's not what artists are supposed to say.

1:02:46 > 1:02:50By the beginning of the 19th century, an archetype had emerged of the artist

1:02:50 > 1:02:55as a man of penetrating vision, capable of seeing deep inner truths.

1:02:55 > 1:03:00An outsider with a soul as powerful as the elements around him.

1:03:00 > 1:03:04But what's odd is that while you do see this in paintings,

1:03:04 > 1:03:08you don't really see it in self-portraits, which avoid this Romantic cliche.

1:03:10 > 1:03:15Here's the great Romantic painter Delacroix, formal and withheld.

1:03:21 > 1:03:25Here's gentleman Goya in cravat and top-hat.

1:03:25 > 1:03:28He's keeping a sharp eye on his public.

1:03:38 > 1:03:43In fact, for real Romantic self-portraits, you have to wait half a century

1:03:43 > 1:03:48for an artist who saw himself, more than any other, as a misunderstood genius.

1:03:48 > 1:03:53The supreme fantasist and patron saint of the avant-garde, Gustave Courbet.

1:03:56 > 1:04:01This is Courbet as The Wounded Man, stabbed through the heart,

1:04:01 > 1:04:05though the blood looks suspiciously like an afterthought.

1:04:05 > 1:04:08He could equally well be waiting to be kissed.

1:04:08 > 1:04:13It's sometimes said that self-portraits are vain, all that time spent in front of the mirror.

1:04:13 > 1:04:16In Courbet's case, they really are.

1:04:18 > 1:04:20It's a tremendously narcissistic painting.

1:04:20 > 1:04:25He's had to imagine what he might look like half asleep, rather drowsy.

1:04:25 > 1:04:29And I think with Courbet, you really can say that

1:04:29 > 1:04:34here, finally, is a self-portraitist who is in love with himself.

1:04:34 > 1:04:38He painted himself so often, and if he'd painted any other man

1:04:38 > 1:04:42as often as that, people would have said he was in love.

1:04:47 > 1:04:52Courbet is the hero every time of his own far-fetched stories.

1:04:52 > 1:04:56Here he is as The Desperate Man, all thrilling Hitchcock close-up.

1:04:56 > 1:04:58The artist as star.

1:05:00 > 1:05:02And then there's this.

1:05:04 > 1:05:06This is Courbet's L'Atelier.

1:05:06 > 1:05:10The largest and most grandstanding self-portrait I know of.

1:05:10 > 1:05:14The scene is Courbet's studio.

1:05:14 > 1:05:18Filled with people, he really makes you walk up and down the length of it

1:05:18 > 1:05:21to see everybody who's in it. It's 20 ft wide.

1:05:24 > 1:05:27L'Atelier is as strange as a dream.

1:05:27 > 1:05:29Why is Courbet painting a landscape?

1:05:29 > 1:05:31What's the nude model doing there?

1:05:31 > 1:05:34As for the crowd, which includes everyone from the street urchins

1:05:34 > 1:05:42to the anarchist Proudhon, and the emperor himself, the political allegory remains a mystery.

1:05:43 > 1:05:48'The world come to be painted at my studio', declared Courbet.

1:05:48 > 1:05:53What the picture shows above all is Gustave Courbet, centre of the world.

1:05:58 > 1:06:02'No other painter coined quite so many images of the artist as a free spirit.

1:06:02 > 1:06:09'One in particular became a blueprint for future generations.

1:06:09 > 1:06:13'In The Meeting, nicknamed Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, the artist is being

1:06:13 > 1:06:17'greeted by a new patron and his servant just outside Montpellier.

1:06:17 > 1:06:23'With his beard and staff, Courbet is a pilgrim-cum-prophet, and he's met with worship.

1:06:23 > 1:06:25DOOR BUZZES

1:06:29 > 1:06:32'The writer Julian Barnes, an authority on Courbet, believes this

1:06:32 > 1:06:37'painting marks the moment that artists tamed their patrons.'

1:06:37 > 1:06:41It's a wonderfully free image of an artist and a very new one.

1:06:41 > 1:06:43I mean, he's outdoors, he's completely free.

1:06:43 > 1:06:46He's wearing his rambling clothes. Nobody owns him.

1:06:46 > 1:06:52Do you think he's partly responsible for inventing a new archetype

1:06:52 > 1:06:55of the artist, the avant-garde artist?

1:06:55 > 1:06:58Yes, he was great at self-marketing, Courbet.

1:06:58 > 1:07:02He was the first artist probably to use photographs to promote his own work.

1:07:02 > 1:07:06In the Franco-Prussian war, he even had a cannon named after him,

1:07:06 > 1:07:09which he used to trundle round the streets, and he'd hand out

1:07:09 > 1:07:12the itinerary for when you can see Le Canon Courbet pass.

1:07:12 > 1:07:13Erm... Yes. It was...

1:07:13 > 1:07:15He was a great self-promoter.

1:07:15 > 1:07:20He was naturally, as he said to the head of the Beaux-Arts Academy once,

1:07:20 > 1:07:24"I'm the proudest and most arrogant man in France."

1:07:24 > 1:07:27It's a painting that's both

1:07:27 > 1:07:30simple and grand at the same time.

1:07:30 > 1:07:33And you sense there's a lot more going on.

1:07:33 > 1:07:41It's Courbet, of course, meeting his patron, Alfred Bruyas, and Bruyas' servant who was a man called Callas.

1:07:41 > 1:07:45He's sort of auditioning them rather than the other way around.

1:07:45 > 1:07:47I mean, the whole history of painting has been

1:07:47 > 1:07:51the patron auditions the artist, and the artist has to come up to snuff.

1:07:51 > 1:07:53You look at say, the eyes.

1:07:53 > 1:07:56Deeply cast down head.

1:07:56 > 1:07:59Erect head but eyes slightly cast down.

1:07:59 > 1:08:03Head cocked up,

1:08:03 > 1:08:08and a beard that's interrogatory-stroke-aggressive, I would say.

1:08:08 > 1:08:11Probing them. Will they do?

1:08:11 > 1:08:13Also greeting them is the dog.

1:08:13 > 1:08:16And the dog is turning away from its master.

1:08:16 > 1:08:22The dog is being, I think, lured towards the new king of the household who was Mr Courbet.

1:08:22 > 1:08:26This painting says, from now on, the artist is in charge.

1:08:26 > 1:08:29Yes, we need the patron, yes, we need the donor.

1:08:29 > 1:08:32But he is no longer the main player.

1:08:32 > 1:08:34And I think that's how it stayed.

1:08:34 > 1:08:38You know. If in 100 years,

1:08:38 > 1:08:41Hirst's Shark is remembered, it will be Hirst's Shark.

1:08:41 > 1:08:45And not Saatchi's shark.

1:08:50 > 1:08:54Bonjour Monsieur Courbet became an archetype for future painters.

1:08:56 > 1:09:00Van Gogh and Gauguin travelled to Montpellier to see it.

1:09:00 > 1:09:04Gauguin even painted his own version, Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin,

1:09:04 > 1:09:08in which he meets a Provencal peasant woman on rather more equal terms,

1:09:08 > 1:09:11showing himself as a roving outsider.

1:09:14 > 1:09:18But tradition has decreed that the ultimate outsider is not Gauguin,

1:09:18 > 1:09:20but his friend Van Gogh.

1:09:24 > 1:09:29A lone genius, unrecognized in his lifetime, poverty-stricken,

1:09:29 > 1:09:31driven to suicide by society.

1:09:31 > 1:09:34And all these agonies expressed in his art.

1:09:34 > 1:09:37The cliche's been hard to dislodge.

1:09:37 > 1:09:42Many people still think they experience Vincent's sufferings directly when they look at his works,

1:09:42 > 1:09:47particularly a self-portrait in London's Courtauld Gallery.

1:09:47 > 1:09:51It begins with the most notorious incident in art.

1:09:51 > 1:09:57Christmas Eve, 1888, Van Gogh, after a terrible row with Gauguin,

1:09:57 > 1:10:01cut off part of his ear and sent it to a girl he'd met in a bar.

1:10:01 > 1:10:04His landlord was trying to have him evicted.

1:10:04 > 1:10:07He'd run out of money. He'd very little food left.

1:10:07 > 1:10:10The local police were keeping him under observation.

1:10:10 > 1:10:14And even with the ear not yet healed, he managed to paint

1:10:14 > 1:10:18one of the greatest and most famous of all his self-portraits.

1:10:21 > 1:10:28This painting is generally thought to show Van Gogh at his most harrowed and deranged. But I don't agree.

1:10:28 > 1:10:33To me, he's at home. And he has all his familiar things around him.

1:10:33 > 1:10:38Behind him is the easel with a new work, something promising, the future.

1:10:38 > 1:10:41And his beautiful Japanese print here that he's put in.

1:10:41 > 1:10:46And this window opening out onto light and not darkness.

1:10:46 > 1:10:48And look at the colour in this painting.

1:10:48 > 1:10:50It's absolutely magnificent.

1:10:50 > 1:10:53The eyes, around the eyes, so beautiful,

1:10:53 > 1:10:56it's like water underneath an iceberg. Beautiful blue-green.

1:10:56 > 1:10:59This amazing green against the yellow behind,

1:10:59 > 1:11:02which is such a sort of encouraging colour.

1:11:02 > 1:11:06He always said yellow was the colour of hope and I think that's here in the picture.

1:11:06 > 1:11:10And it feels to me as though the storm has passed.

1:11:10 > 1:11:14And the painting shows the order and the composure. And the bravery.

1:11:14 > 1:11:15There is no self-pity here.

1:11:15 > 1:11:18It is not a martyrdom.

1:11:20 > 1:11:24Every mark in this painting is laid down slowly, carefully.

1:11:24 > 1:11:28You couldn't paint like this if you were just pouring out your inner anguish.

1:11:33 > 1:11:38Van Gogh's is one of the shortest careers in art, barely ten years.

1:11:38 > 1:11:42And nearly all of his self-portraits were painted in the last four,

1:11:42 > 1:11:45from the moment he arrived in Montmartre in 1886.

1:11:48 > 1:11:51"What impresses me most", Van Gogh writes,

1:11:51 > 1:11:55"more than all the rest of my work is the portrait.

1:11:55 > 1:11:56"The modern portrait."

1:11:56 > 1:11:59It's not the sunflowers, its not the cypresses.

1:11:59 > 1:12:03It's the portrait that drives Van Gogh's ambition.

1:12:03 > 1:12:07And it was here in Paris that he first really began to paint faces.

1:12:07 > 1:12:11Specifically, his own, because he could not afford to pay for a model.

1:12:15 > 1:12:17You can see his style develop,

1:12:17 > 1:12:20from the self-portrait made a few months after arrival.

1:12:20 > 1:12:23Ordinary brush marks and ordinary colours.

1:12:23 > 1:12:26To his departure two years later.

1:12:26 > 1:12:29Here, the short sharp lines are like exclamation marks,

1:12:29 > 1:12:32radiating around his head like a force field.

1:12:37 > 1:12:40Van Gogh's style is indelibly his own

1:12:40 > 1:12:46and, eventually, he becomes one with that style in the self-portraits.

1:12:54 > 1:12:58'In the Musee d'Orsay is what I think is his greatest self-portrait

1:12:58 > 1:13:01'made near the end of his life.

1:13:01 > 1:13:05'He wrote that he was working in between bouts of paranoia

1:13:05 > 1:13:11'that "spur me on as a miner who's always in danger, and makes haste in what he does."

1:13:11 > 1:13:14'It hangs away from the rest of his paintings.'

1:13:17 > 1:13:20This is one of Van Gogh's last self-portraits.

1:13:20 > 1:13:24He'd already been, for some time, in a mental hospital.

1:13:24 > 1:13:28But there's no sense of that when you look at this picture.

1:13:28 > 1:13:31It is dazzling, radiant, and so dignified.

1:13:31 > 1:13:34He's upright in the middle of the storm.

1:13:34 > 1:13:40And all around him it's what looks like the starry night by day time.

1:13:40 > 1:13:43All those fantastic whirls and striations and notations

1:13:43 > 1:13:49that he uses to describe cypresses and iris trees and stars at night.

1:13:49 > 1:13:51They're all here used to describe him.

1:13:51 > 1:13:58He's become one with his world of art, with his painting, his style.

1:13:58 > 1:14:03He said he was going to revolutionise portraiture through the use of colour, through colour effects.

1:14:03 > 1:14:09Nobody quite understands what he meant by that, but standing in front of this wonderful painting,

1:14:09 > 1:14:12I feel that the colour effect

1:14:12 > 1:14:15is like a sort of clear, pure song.

1:14:15 > 1:14:19It's uplifting, calming.

1:14:19 > 1:14:25It's Van Gogh in and as a sea of tranquillity.

1:14:30 > 1:14:34'Calmness, Van Gogh says in his letters, was what he sought in his art as in his life.

1:14:34 > 1:14:38'And it's what he achieved in this tremendous painting.

1:14:39 > 1:14:44'Anyone looking for neurosis or self-pity won't find it in Van Gogh's brush marks.

1:14:44 > 1:14:48'Ever since Freud's revelations about the psyche, artists turned

1:14:48 > 1:14:53'to the self-portrait to display their psychic wounds to the world.'

1:14:56 > 1:15:00This is Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait in Hell.

1:15:00 > 1:15:03He's bearing up with suspicious bravado.

1:15:03 > 1:15:06He'd been rejected by his girlfriend and turned a gun on himself,

1:15:06 > 1:15:09strategically nicking only a fingertip.

1:15:09 > 1:15:16This is a public 'j'accuse', made for display in an Oslo gallery where everyone, could see it.

1:15:17 > 1:15:20It's what you might expect from this exuberant miserablist.

1:15:20 > 1:15:22And who hasn't said it, I'm in hell.

1:15:22 > 1:15:25A metaphor made literal.

1:15:25 > 1:15:30This is Egon Schiele, a fellow expressionist, as Saint Sebastian...

1:15:30 > 1:15:34suffering for his art, after being sentenced to only three days in prison

1:15:34 > 1:15:38for displaying an image of a naked girl, a very qualified martyrdom.

1:15:38 > 1:15:43Hererida Kahlo in The Wounded Deer, self portrait.

1:15:43 > 1:15:48She'd endured terrible health, miscarriages, a philandering husband

1:15:48 > 1:15:51and she turns herself into a symbol of suffering.

1:15:51 > 1:15:58Self-portraits allow artists to put over their side of the story, to campaign, to weep, to protest.

1:15:58 > 1:16:00These artists are figurative painters.

1:16:00 > 1:16:03But with modernism comes a strange new dilemma.

1:16:05 > 1:16:11Not just how to turn yourself into a work of art, but whether this is actually possible.

1:16:13 > 1:16:17'In fact, what's interesting about coming to a gallery of modern art

1:16:17 > 1:16:24'is just how unlikely you are to find many self-portraits from the first half of the 20th century.

1:16:27 > 1:16:31'How are you going to present yourself? In or out of your style?

1:16:31 > 1:16:36'What if you are an abstract painter, a futurist, a minimalist and can get over any kind of likeness?

1:16:36 > 1:16:42'Faced with this conundrum, some artists just revert to old fashioned naturalism.'

1:16:44 > 1:16:47Here's Mondrian's Composition I ...

1:16:47 > 1:16:51The characteristic geometry, the characteristic colours.

1:16:54 > 1:17:02Now here's Mondrian himself wearing collar and tie in Self Portrait, 1918.

1:17:02 > 1:17:05Heitting in front of a Mondrian,

1:17:05 > 1:17:10but what the self-portrait shows is a disjuncture between the man and the art.

1:17:10 > 1:17:14Mondrian can't do himself as a Mondrian.

1:17:14 > 1:17:19The self-portrait disturbs our sense of him as an artist.

1:17:21 > 1:17:23There's no cubist Picasso.

1:17:23 > 1:17:26There's no abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.

1:17:26 > 1:17:29But recognizable likeness doesn't matter.

1:17:29 > 1:17:32Perhaps self-portraiture itself becomes redundant,

1:17:32 > 1:17:36if like Jackson Pollock you believe yourself to be present

1:17:36 > 1:17:39in every drip of Number 6, 1948.

1:17:41 > 1:17:44And just as Picasso was claiming that he could no longer understand

1:17:44 > 1:17:48what he looked like well enough to make a self-portrait,

1:17:48 > 1:17:53a young American got into a photobooth and took a pot shot at the whole business.

1:17:53 > 1:17:56MUSIC: "Waiting For The Man" by The Velvet Underground & Nico

1:18:03 > 1:18:08Andy Warhol sat down in a photo booth and began to act, putting his hand to

1:18:08 > 1:18:14his throat, tilting his head, arching his neck as if he was being hanged.

1:18:14 > 1:18:16What kind of man does that?

1:18:16 > 1:18:19What kind of man wears sunglasses in a photobooth?

1:18:19 > 1:18:21Well, a poseur certainly.

1:18:21 > 1:18:26But also a man who isnoing to show himself.

1:18:32 > 1:18:37Warhol's self-Portrait 1963-64 showed his two-tone face,

1:18:37 > 1:18:42perfect for mass-reproduction: Black specs, white skin, silver wig.

1:18:42 > 1:18:45But everything inside is kept out of sight.

1:18:45 > 1:18:50For Warhol, the self of these self- portraits is no more substantial

1:18:50 > 1:18:52than the paper on which it's printed.

1:18:55 > 1:19:00Even in a close-up as enormous as Self-Portrait 1967,

1:19:00 > 1:19:02he's able to hide in plain view.

1:19:04 > 1:19:09Andy Warhol, the most famous face in 20th century art.

1:19:09 > 1:19:11His face is as famous as his art.

1:19:11 > 1:19:13But where is he?

1:19:13 > 1:19:17You can hardly recognise him in this image.

1:19:17 > 1:19:22The painting's enormous, it's about the span of my open arms.

1:19:22 > 1:19:27And yet, the size of it just seems to enlarge the one enormous point,

1:19:27 > 1:19:29which is that he's not here.

1:19:29 > 1:19:33That he's slipped away, that he somehow, whatever trace of him

1:19:33 > 1:19:38there is here, is caught between the layers of this silkscreen process.

1:19:38 > 1:19:43The orange wiped across, then the red on top, horrible colour scheme,

1:19:43 > 1:19:45and then the blue, he's just vanished.

1:19:45 > 1:19:49He's a ghost in the mechanised process, I suppose.

1:19:49 > 1:19:55And the only thing that really tells you that he was alive at all,

1:19:55 > 1:20:00I suppose is that tiny highlight there in the eye,

1:20:00 > 1:20:04which quickens the painting, tells you that he was here, he was alive.

1:20:04 > 1:20:07He was looking, he was looking at you.

1:20:07 > 1:20:11Just one dot in something nearly as big as a billboard.

1:20:13 > 1:20:16Warhol's whole image was a kind of vanishing act.

1:20:16 > 1:20:21He'd lost his pigmentation at an early age, hence the colourless face and hair.

1:20:21 > 1:20:25Loathing his pockmarked skin, he went for primitive dermabrasion,

1:20:25 > 1:20:29which in those days involved actual sandpaper.

1:20:29 > 1:20:33No artist before had so desperately sought the spotlight

1:20:33 > 1:20:36yet been so pathological about disappearing within it.

1:20:36 > 1:20:39- Is he here?- No, he's camera shy.

1:20:41 > 1:20:44He repeated himself over and over again

1:20:44 > 1:20:48until he became like a kind of trademark for himself.

1:20:48 > 1:20:53Like an emblem. And here, six times over, repeating like a pattern.

1:20:53 > 1:20:57The work is called Self-Portrait Strangulation.

1:20:57 > 1:21:01There's no colon, no comma between the two words, he really means it.

1:21:01 > 1:21:06Self-Portrait Strangulation, as if he was doing in self-portraiture.

1:21:06 > 1:21:08I think you can see that in the work.

1:21:08 > 1:21:12It's self-portraiture coming to a stuttering end here.

1:21:12 > 1:21:18Six times over, getting a little fainter every time. It's wearing out.

1:21:18 > 1:21:23And you have a sense that the essential self or the soul, he was a Catholic,

1:21:23 > 1:21:30has somehow been evacuated from every single one of the Warhols in this grid.

1:21:31 > 1:21:37For many artists, the concise "this is me" of self-portraits just doesn't work any more.

1:21:37 > 1:21:41We think of our modern selves as complex and multi-faceted.

1:21:41 > 1:21:47Self-portraits limit us to one person, one face and that doesn't fit with our modern sense of ourselves.

1:21:49 > 1:21:52Moving into to the 21st century, artists show themselves

1:21:52 > 1:21:56ever-changing, never-ending, fragmented.

1:21:59 > 1:22:02The American painter Chuck Close makes gigantic pictures that

1:22:02 > 1:22:06from a distance show his face, but in close-up,

1:22:06 > 1:22:11break down into constituent pixels, multi-form shapes.

1:22:11 > 1:22:14Close speaks of the man in the pictures as "him, not me".

1:22:14 > 1:22:17Distant and impersonal.

1:22:22 > 1:22:27Cindy Sherman makes herself up like an actress performing different roles...

1:22:27 > 1:22:30portraits of people who've never existed.

1:22:30 > 1:22:32But they're also self-transformations,

1:22:32 > 1:22:35evidence of how one person can become someone else

1:22:35 > 1:22:40with only minimal adjustments of expression, wardrobe and make-up.

1:22:42 > 1:22:44While we were making this programme,

1:22:44 > 1:22:47there was an exhibition by Mark Wallinger,

1:22:47 > 1:22:49one of the most original British artists at work today.

1:22:53 > 1:22:56This is the self-portrait in its current state.

1:22:58 > 1:23:03Whatever you make of it, we've come a long way from Durer.

1:23:04 > 1:23:08This is Self, Times New Roman.

1:23:08 > 1:23:11by Mark Wallinger and that is what it is...

1:23:11 > 1:23:16A great big enormous capital letter "I".

1:23:16 > 1:23:19And in fact, it is scaled to the exact height

1:23:19 > 1:23:23of the artist himself, 180 centimetres.

1:23:23 > 1:23:27If he was standing up here on this pedestal, he would be this height.

1:23:29 > 1:23:33And the reason I think it's really very funny is because it's

1:23:33 > 1:23:38obviously about the slipperiness of this letter, this word "I",

1:23:38 > 1:23:40what is an I? What does it mean?

1:23:40 > 1:23:43What does it signify?

1:23:43 > 1:23:46How can one represent themselves with just an "I"?

1:23:49 > 1:23:53Mark Wallinger, it's quite clearly not a literal representation of you

1:23:53 > 1:23:56in any way, but does it in any sense represent your identity?

1:23:58 > 1:24:03It does, in as much as it does everyone else's as well.

1:24:03 > 1:24:06It's a conundrum in that respect.

1:24:06 > 1:24:10But...personified like this and raised up on a plinth,

1:24:10 > 1:24:15I guess there's a sort of, a kind of self-mockery of the idea

1:24:15 > 1:24:18that "I am important", it's quietly saying as well.

1:24:18 > 1:24:21Which we all like to feel occasionally, yes.

1:24:21 > 1:24:24I wanted to make something that was at the same time

1:24:24 > 1:24:28so generic as nominally to be almost invisible...

1:24:28 > 1:24:33and at the same time, something that was very specifically about my person,

1:24:33 > 1:24:37because that's kind of the relationship one has with that word

1:24:37 > 1:24:41in terms of language and how one relates to other people.

1:24:41 > 1:24:48I don't think that there's, there isn't some essential truth or...

1:24:48 > 1:24:53core of my being that's going to be found anywhere there.

1:24:54 > 1:24:57'It's the default "I"

1:24:57 > 1:25:00'rather than the dregs of my life.

1:25:00 > 1:25:02'To be honest!'

1:25:04 > 1:25:07This self-portrait doesn't represent the artist's face

1:25:07 > 1:25:09so much as his thinking.

1:25:09 > 1:25:12What a slippery thing is the self.

1:25:12 > 1:25:19How can I represent it? And what I love about it is that Mark Wallinger embraces us all in this question.

1:25:19 > 1:25:22It's a self-portrait for all of us.

1:25:22 > 1:25:24It's the last word on the subject.

1:25:26 > 1:25:29And yet at the same time, self-portraiture has no straight path,

1:25:29 > 1:25:34it's constantly circling back to its beginnings.

1:25:34 > 1:25:38Wallinger is at work at the same time as Lucian Freud,

1:25:38 > 1:25:41who's painted himself almost as often as Rembrandt.

1:25:43 > 1:25:47Here he is, naked in the studio, a maestro with a baton,

1:25:47 > 1:25:48a bare King Lear.

1:25:48 > 1:25:51All a self-portrait can ever be is an illusion,

1:25:51 > 1:25:54never the embodiment or the whole story.

1:25:54 > 1:25:58Yet Freud keeps on painting, keeps on trying.

1:25:58 > 1:26:03Like all of us, he's a work in progress.

1:26:09 > 1:26:13From Durer to Freud and Wallinger seems like A to Z,

1:26:13 > 1:26:15or at least A to I for self-portraits.

1:26:15 > 1:26:18They're all so different.

1:26:18 > 1:26:22It may look as if they're not even doing the same thing.

1:26:22 > 1:26:25And yet I see a connection.

1:26:25 > 1:26:30Each artist is making something that represents his or her thoughts

1:26:30 > 1:26:32on having and being a self.

1:26:32 > 1:26:39Each artist faces this strange idea of turning oneself inside out,

1:26:39 > 1:26:45of representing oneself both in and as a work of art.

1:26:45 > 1:26:49And for me, every one of these self-portraits

1:26:49 > 1:26:54is in a profound sense, a fragment of the artist's self.

1:27:04 > 1:27:07My father, James Cumming, was a painter.

1:27:07 > 1:27:10His work took the form of lyrical abstraction,

1:27:10 > 1:27:14celebrating the microscopic sources and structures of life.

1:27:14 > 1:27:17He never made a self-portrait, or so we thought.

1:27:17 > 1:27:24'But years after his death, we found a tiny image hidden in a sketchbook.'

1:27:29 > 1:27:34Here he is. Among the...

1:27:34 > 1:27:40seed pods and the ice structures and the chromosomes.

1:27:40 > 1:27:43All my life, I longed to see him through his own eyes,

1:27:43 > 1:27:46the great revelation of self-portraits,

1:27:46 > 1:27:47and here at last, I do.

1:27:47 > 1:27:53My father saw himself as just another element, a tiny element,

1:27:53 > 1:27:55a particle of the universe.

1:27:55 > 1:27:59He was very self-effacing, a very modest man.

1:27:59 > 1:28:05And that's there in this self-portrait and its diminutive scale, hidden away,

1:28:05 > 1:28:08just tucked in the margin of the sketchbook.

1:28:10 > 1:28:13And that's the unique thing about self-portraits.

1:28:13 > 1:28:15No matter how tiny or vast,

1:28:15 > 1:28:18how accurate or fanciful or outlandish,

1:28:18 > 1:28:22they always reveal a deep and incontrovertible truth.

1:28:22 > 1:28:28The truth of how the artist saw themselves from within as well as without.

1:28:28 > 1:28:30MUSIC: "Look At Me" by John Lennon

1:28:47 > 1:28:49Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

1:28:49 > 1:28:51E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk