Some Thoughts on the Nude Part 1 -- the Nude Self-Portrait

Have more women than men painted themselves in the nude?  It appears to be a far commoner theme, or at least a theme more intensively and extensively treated, in paintings by women than by men.  Think of Gwen John, Alice Neel, Suzanne Valadon, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Jenny Saville, Joan Brown (who is not totally nude in her self-portraits, but is sometimes semi-nude), Frieda Kahlo. . .  In photography there is Francesca Woodman, whose nude self-portraits were made mainly while she was still a teenager, before she committed suicide in her early twenties.  Here is a partial selection of female nude-self portraits:


Alice Neel, Nude Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 1980

Suzanne Valadon, Adam and Eve, oil on canvas, 1909

Suzanne Valdon, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1938



Gwen John, Self Portrait Naked, gouache and pencil on paper, 1902? (Sorry for the warning/watermark)

Gwen John, Self Portrait Naked, graphite on paper, 1902?

Eowyn Wilcox, Double Self-Portrait, oil on canvas over panel, 2007

Eowyn Wilcox, In the Bathtub, oil on canvas over panel, 2008

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self Portrait Semi-Nude with Amber Necklace and Flowers, oil on canvas, 1906

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait on her Sixth Anniversary, oil on canvas, 1906

Jenny Saville, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1991

I can think of a few male painters who have tackled their self-image in the nude, stripped-down and naked, so to speak.  Although it seems that on the occasion that men paint a nude self-portrait it is maybe only once in their career (with one or two notable exceptions), or there the portrait is only partial, or obscured, like Francis Bacon, whose wrestling nudes we can assume to be at least some of the time self-portraits.  There is Stanley Spencer, nude with his nude lover.  There is Lucian Freud, who made at least two nude self portraits, one with only his shoulders visible, the second full length, and that one of an even rarer sub-genre than the male nude self-portrait: being a male nude self-portrait in old age.  Pierre Bonnard also made some partially nude self-portraits at the end of his life, most notably his self-portrait as a boxer, seen without glasses, pink and red and vulnerable in the mirror.  There is a Francesco Clemente self-portrait where he is nude, but his face and body are disjointed, almost anonymous.  Perhaps the two most prolific male nude self-portraitists are Egon Schiele and Lucas Samaras, the latter mainly in Polaroids.   

Sir Stanley Spencer, Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece, oil on canvas, 1937

Francis Bacon, Two Figures, oil on canvas, 1953

Pierre Bonnard, the Boxer (Self-Portrait), oil on canvas, 1931

Lucian Freud, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1993



Francesco Clemente, Self Portrait with Two Heads, oil on canvas, 2002



Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation, Poloroid, 1976

Egon Schiele, Nude Self Portrait, watercolor, bodycolor and graphite on paper, 1917

It seems to me that the female nude self-portrait tends to be more often an exploration of identity and the tropes of the nude combined with the strange fact that the subject, painter and the genre are all one and the same: a nude woman.  ‘To be the painter and the painting both,’ as Paula Modersohn-Becker put it in one of her letters.  It makes a curious conundrum, a new image of what an artist is outside of the typical male-female artist-model relationship.  As a woman painting herself, the female artist is just that: acknowledging femaleness and acknowledging that the particular history of the female nude is generally from the other perspective: that of the male looking at the female.  So that a woman artist is embodied in her self-portrait in a different way than a man, because she is aware that the gaze at her painted portrait will be manifold, maybe more than a man would be, both male and female, with the long history and structure of desire and identity behind her.  Most of the female nude-self-portraits also seem to attempt a kind of self-acceptance, a vision of the female body and its uniqueness scrutinized in a non-sexualized way.  However, self-portraits like Jenny Saville's add a note of discontent, of self-loathing and the reverse side of the attempt to replace stereotypes with new, more thorough and inclusive images of the female body.  Her self-portraits are matched in discomfort and pain maybe only by Francis Bacon, with whom she shares a physical paint-handling and a willingness to manipulate the painted body to pyschological ends.

  

Then what about the male nude self portrait?  What particular themes does it embody?  Both female and male nude self-portraits are about vulnerability, self-hood, vision and nakedness, the difficulty of revealing oneself in a public-private situation.  There is nothing more private than seeing one’s own body in a mirror alone and making an image of it.  There is nothing more public than putting that image into the public forum of art history, where friends, relatives and strangers can see and regard this intimate moment always.

I think with the male nudes included earlier in this essay we can consider that some of the male nude self-portraits explore the narcissistic impulse more deeply than the female examples.  And that other paintings in this set of pictures explore in more depth the ravages of age or what masculinity is in certain situations: most specifically with a lover, as in Spencer’s nude self-portraits, or Picasso's prolific nude self-portrait-as-Minotaur-with-lover/model etchings, or Bacon’s couples, on both the heterosexual and homosexual ends of the spectrum.  I cannot think of any female nude self-portraits that deal with the same subject: that of the woman with her lover, both nude.  Does this make the male-nude-with-lover self-portrait another unusual sub-genre?  Maybe yes, but also maybe not.  Suzanne Valdon did paint herself and her husband as Adam and Eve.  There is also a further level of distortion in some of the male self-portraits.  Is it from a willingness to stretch and bend images for art's sake, and the self-portrait is simply a willing and easy subject, or is there also psychological content there--a longer history of the self-portrait as catharsis?

In any case, I think all of the self-portraits can be considered self-portrait as introspection, as revelation, as mirror, as a portion of the self, lasting beyond the self.