Excerpts from art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall’s lively and comprehensive cultural history of self-portraiture, focusing on artists including Dürer, Gentileschi, Van Gogh, and Kahlo.
Art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall delves into the allure of self-portraiture in an engaging and accessible short history of the subject, revealing how it became the defining visual genre of our confessional age.
Across six chapters, Hall maps the genre from its medieval origins to its present-day manifestations. Along the way he investigates the importance of biography for serial self-portraitists such as van Gogh; themes of sex and genius in works by Munch and Modersohn-Becker; and the effect of globalization on the art of self-representation. From the exuberantly caricatural to the stoic and heroic, Hall covers a full range of portraits and looks deeply into the worlds and mindsets of the artists who created them.
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James Hall is an art critic and historian, currently Research Professor at the University of Southampton. Noted for his versatility and originality, his books include The World as Sculpture; Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body; The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art; and The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History, which has been translated into five languages. An abridged version, James Hall on The Self-Portrait, marks Thames & Hudson’s seventy-fifth anniversary as one of six ‘timeless’ texts. The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History was a Times ‘Book of the Year.’ Hall’s essays have appeared in the Burlington Magazine, Oxford Art Journal, and Simiolus. He is a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper and Times Literary Supplement.