Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

and translate their “identity” by delivering an image - the result of how they saw themselves
in a mirror - that they intended as their double. From then on and for several centuries, the
self-mimetic sub-genre, the self-portrait, would remain very popular and in the nineteenth
century even came to be called the “portrait of the author”.
Nonetheless, it was practised much less assiduously in the twentieth century, except at the
beginning and end of each painter’s career. So much so, that today’s artists believe that their
respective self-portraits are vaguely and implicitly present in their oeuvre as a whole. Picasso,
Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Antonio Saura, Arnulf Rainer, Christian Boltanski and Cindy
Shermann, to mention just a few, appeared to be exceptions to the rule, repeatedly
producing self-portraits, from which it may be inferred that while not a major genre, it was
not wholly forsaken during the last century.
Artists have portrayed themselves in many different ways. They may appear surreptitiously,
such as in the case of Velázquez emerging from behind his canvas alongside the royal family
(centuries later this same strategy would be deployed in cinema: Alfred Hitchcock is a case
in point, with his fleeting cameo roles - a by-passer, a corpse floating in the Thames, a
photograph - in all his films). Or depicting themselves as historic, biblical, mythical or
fictional characters: Velázquez embodying Philip IV, Michaelangelo as the St Bartholomew of
The Last Judgement, Caravaggio as Goliath in his David, Rembrandt as St Paul in the Selfportrait
as the apostle Paul, or Van Gogh placing his face in the resurrected Lazarus in The
raising of Lazarus; (Flaubert would sustain: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”; and Wagner:
“Brunhilde is me”).
Others would portray themselves in close-up views, dressed as befitted the profession, with
or without their tools, in a reflexive attitude in their studios, either painting or not. Or
juxtaposing their own self-portrait with the portraits of their patrons, such as Goya in The
family of Charles IV. Or exchanging portraits with other painters. Or, when the genre was
taken over by photography, self-portraits could be fragmented because, according to Pol
Bury, “with the advent of photography, painting forsook the science of representation”.
But today’s artists, eschewing references such as “Rembrandt’s sarcasm” or “Ingres’
mockery”, occasionally decide to make mirrors gesticulate. Thus, while at first Matissse
used photography to pursue a distinctive trait, several decades later Arnulf Rainer, in his
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