APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
We live in a confessional age.
This is the first time in my life
I've ever told anyone how I'm feeling.
But the confessional is now a different kind of box.
Heartbroken.
I'm going to lose everyone.
Exposure to the max.
Privacy, so over.
How many artists are here from that show?
I'm here. I'm drunk, but I don't care.
I couldn't give a BLEEP! about it.
It's no surprise that sooner or later,
the long tradition of self-portraiture
would arrive at this.
There's no way I want this BLEEP! mic on me.
An archaeology of sexual disaster presenting itself as art.
Here, then, is the shrine of celebrity squalor.
Enthroned like a medieval relic.
Instead of holy toenails, the unholy, soiled sheets.
Condoms embalmed.
Half-squeezed lubricants
made venerable for modern-art pilgrims.
Tracey Emin's My Bed ought to be exactly what I most hate
and despise about some kinds of contemporary art.
The orgy of personal self-indulgence,
the assumption that art can really be just a document
of a broken life in which we ought to be interested.
The confusion of exhibitionism with an exhibition.
And yet there is something to it.
There is something odd, there is something magnetic. I don't deny it.
In its little corner here, simultaneously miserable
and then glorious at the same time,
it does kind of exude a certain smelly power.
That power comes from the drama at the heart of every self-portrait.
The passion play between, "Check me out. Aren't I something?"
And, "Look at me. What a mess."
When the artists look at themselves in the mirror,
the mirror becomes the site of a battle between vanity and verity.
Flattery and truth.
The artworks they make are courageous moments of candour
that are reports from this drama of the ego.
Self-portraiture is one of the most compelling, thrilling,
disturbing, unsettling, exhilarating
forms of portraiture there is.
It has manifold ways of expressing
the sense of the creative self.
And what it does is not just introduce you
to the abyss of the artistic soul,
it says something to us about our own relationship with it.
It's a document not just of the boiling creative mind,
but of the human condition.
In the medieval world, it would have been unseemly for artists
to offer their art as a product of individual talent.
Through the Christian centuries, the most prolific artist was anonymous.
There was only one creator, God, the Almighty.
And the artist worked for the glory of the Church,
not for the glory of himself.
But in the mid 13th century,
one Christian artist had the audacity to show his face.
William de Brailes lived and worked in Oxford.
It was a time when a market
for lavishly-decorated sacred books arose.
For the first time, those books
could be owned by wealthy individuals
and shown off as treasures.
And one of the most spectacular came from the hand of de Brailes.
It was a book of psalms he made around 1240.
And so proud was he that among these pages,
he felt bold enough to proclaim his authorship.
And he did it with his face.
It's really very, very early,
the 13th century, that we see the face of an artist
and we know who that artist is.
And where William de Brailes has painted his own portrait
is in a climatic moment, the last judgment.
So he wants to be there, right at the heart of the drama,
and, in case we haven't figured out who this little figure is,
his advertising logo is painted in at the end.
"William de Brailes me fecit."
William de Brailes did this. This is me.
This is a William de Brailes' fully-authorised,
there-shall-be-no-imitations production.
And what a production it is.
De Brailes' skill shines through in these golden leaves.
Stories of the Bible brought to life in his unique style,
both ceremonious and playful.
He was famous for pictures of demons
wearing little kind of Roman wrestler loincloths
with fringy, tasselly bits on.
Fashion for fashionable demons.
We always like those.
And there's a wonderful picture of King David playing the harp.
Remember, he's the author of all the Psalms.
Like the good businessman artist he is,
with a production line to promote,
De Brailes wants to have it both ways.
He wants to appear in his own work,
but at the same time make a point
that he is aware of the perils of arrogance.
Look at the context in which it's portrayed. It's wonderful.
He's not a hero, he's not the virtuoso artist.
He's not some anticipation of the great Michelangelo.
Just the opposite.
He positions himself teetering above
the vertiginous drop into the world of the damned.
The damned are all these naked little figures cowering with terror
because flying above them is the angel of the last judgment.
And the angel with wings outstretched
has his arms around two different things.
One arm is holding a mighty sword
which is about the whack the damned into the pit of hell.
Guess what?
He is also evidently the angel of all good artists,
publishers and bookmakers,
because his other arm is protecting de Brailes
from falling down amidst the doomed.
So I am after all a good Christian,
and I'm making something which ultimately
will propagate the light of the gospel.
As long as Christian humility was a sovereign virtue for an artist,
even an ambitious self-promoter like de Brailes has to
smuggle himself into his work.
300 years later,
artists had less trouble squaring humility with self-portrayal.
Even then, there were dangers.
The first full self-portrait in England that we know of
was made in a prison cell.
But not in solitary confinement.
In 1554, an elderly German artist named Gerlach Flicke found himself
sharing a cell with a gentleman pirate.
Gerlach Flicke had come to England in the wake of Holbein
and other German successes,
but this was a time of nervy rebellion and conspiracy
and you could find yourself in the Tower for reasons
you couldn't possibly understand,
and that probably was the case for poor old Gerlach Flicke.
As for the pirate, Henry Strangwish,
he was here for doing what he did best, pirating.
They were an odd couple to share this space.
But whatever the reason that brought these two men together,
from this moment came an absolutely exquisite work of art.
As if staring from the little windows of their shared cell,
the painter Flicke is on the left.
And to his right - the buccaneer, Strangwish.
This is one of the most extraordinary works of art ever seen, really.
Not particularly in its quality, although it is very, very beautiful,
but in its circumstances.
Despite the fact they are in fear of their lives,
the painter takes the most exquisite care
to produce a beautiful, beautiful image of the two of them.
It's also very striking that our first oil self-painting is not
a solo act, it's a duet.
It's about the company of each other in straitened circumstances.
Technically, this is an extraordinary feat of fine motor control.
My favourite passage is that each of them has a little attribute.
The pirate is not only a pirate, folks, he's a musical pirate.
He sings as he does "arrr, me hearties", he's the Red Rover.
And he has a lute there, and the lute is perfectly painted.
And then there is the pallet.
There is everything that makes this slightly elderly German artist
himself.
His thumb, stuck through the hole in the pallet,
and even the nail is beautifully painted here.
But this enigmatic work gets even more intriguing
with delicate inscriptions, painted in gold,
directly above the heads of Flicke and Strangwish.
Here's what the inscriptions say. And they are in two different moods.
On the pirate's side, we've got gallows humour.
"Hey, it's just prison, it's just hangmen,
"just an executioner's block. Laugh it off, everybody."
So it says this.
"Strangwish, thus strangely depicted is.
"One prisoner for th'other hath done this.
"Gerlach hath garnished for his delight
"the work you now see before your sight."
The word "garnished" is a piece of prison slang for greasing
the palm of a jailor - paying your way in prison to make life
a little easier - a bit more food, a bit more walk around the Tower.
So in some ways this suggests that the painter has painted this
beautiful thing for the pirate, or for them all,
to make life in prison just a bit more comfortable.
But on the other side is the other mood, which is
solemn and poignant and elegiac.
And in Latin.
This was the face of Flicke,
when he was painter in the city of London.
He had painted this from a mirror,
so that his friends might have some remembrance of him after his death.
So, despite the prison world,
we have a sense actually of art, both as joke
and as remembrance, in these two veins of humour, comedy and tragedy.
Both men survived the Tower, but their time in jail left us with
a marvel in which so much emotion is crammed into so minimal a space.
But another painter, a century later, would need maximal space
to carry the great weight of his outsized personality.
Brimming with artistic flair, Isaac Fuller depicts himself
as an erudite and virtuoso painter, but the eyes tell a deeper story.
Isaac Fuller could never decide
whether he wanted to be an entertainer or a high-minded artist.
What he did know was after 1660,
when Charles II was restored to the throne,
an opportunity opened up to supply exactly the things which
Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans had banished -
the painted glorification of the King
and enormous spectacular pictures in churches.
And one of Fuller's early commissions could not have been better calculated
to advertise himself as Mr Restoration.
It was the job of redecorating the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford.
He's not getting a little, tiny commission
from some weenie podunk church at the back of beyond
in some, you know, Blagwold-on-Pissmire
in the countryside.
No, it's All Souls College.
And these are fragments of an enormous decorative scheme
which would have covered All Souls Chapel.
And these paintings were essentially a mighty
and genuinely noble ambition.
As he set to work, Fuller drew on everything
he'd learned during his years of training on the Continent.
And visions of the great European painters marched through his mind.
You look at these figures from Fuller's programme for
The Last Judgment and you see he wants to be the English Michelangelo.
It's meant to express the power of the revival of Christian decoration.
He's taking this essential idolisation of Michelangelo -
and why not? - from his years in training in Paris
with the great Francois Perrier.
And he knows what he's supposed to do,
that you need to have the immense power of the human form.
There's a foot... What's the largest shoe size you can have,
size 25 or something? There's a bloody enormous foot
that's stepping over a ledge from this figure here,
and everything is sort of huge and beefy and meaty.
We've got acres of flying textile there
in the same sort of colour that Michelangelo uses
on the Sistine Chapel, this lovely delicate green.
And the head is rather lovely.
The head is very nice.
But here, Fuller's talent didn't quite match his ambition.
The problem is there is something catastrophically wrong
going on at the shoulder. And indeed at the hip.
It's all, kind of, apprenticeship
in surgical reattachment which is not actually going to pass the exams
at the Royal College of Surgeons.
So we have bits of muscles in different directions,
so it doesn't really work.
You have to BE Michelangelo in order to get the biceps right.
This looks like an advertisement for a gym.
If Fuller was aiming at posterity,
his choice of materials wasn't going to help.
He'd used oils directly on plaster and timber,
so not long after they were completed,
they started to degrade, leaving college with no choice
but to have them painted over.
I think wherever it was, on the ceiling,
he's spending too much time on the ladder
and needed to get down and step back a bit and say,
"That's gone really badly wrong!"
And look what's happened to the knee!
These fragments are all that survive.
But there was nothing Fuller believed he couldn't do.
A new kind of history painting, for instance.
Not ancient history, but the history everyone was talking about -
the ripping yarn of Charles II's miraculous escape from Cromwell
after the Battle of Worcester was currently a Restoration hit.
And Fuller thought he was the man to bring this history to life.
Painting as popular entertainment.
But Fuller's canvases were not so much Classics as comics, writ large.
So in this kind of extravagant showmanship, there was a danger.
Well, the danger is when you make the King a character in a cartoon strip,
you run very close to comedy.
And not everyone saw the funny side.
Do you not think that horse is looking a bit worried?
Maybe he's worried that he has got two riders instead of one.
"Didn't sign on for two bodies on my back," he says,
or is he worried because the face of Charles II,
the great king, is undecided? Or is he worried that,
"I don't think this picture is working out
"the way it was supposed to?"
We don't actually know where the Charles superhero pictures ended up.
But someone must've liked them because they survived
and turned up in the 18th century in a grand aristocratic estate.
But Fuller never succeeded in creating a new kind of popular,
contemporary history painting.
And in his disappointment, he sought solace in the taverns of London.
Spending his days decorating pubs with scenes of bacchanalian abandon,
spending the proceeds drowning his sorrows.
Yet even in his boozy period,
there were moments of sober self-recognition,
and one of them produced a tour de force of self-portraiture.
It's a phenomenally engaging painting,
and it's full of a kind of self-advertisement that he belongs
to the most seriously considered tradition of art.
It's extravagant, flamboyant. This is brilliantly painted.
Wherever you look, you see a really brilliant,
technically-gifted painter.
It's as though he has come off the stage,
as though he is the star of Restoration comedy.
It's larger-than-life, a good bit larger-than-life.
No artist, not even Anthony van Dyck,
does an image of his face which is that much bigger than the real thing,
and look how extravagantly he's dressed.
That fantastic red velvet cap that I've never seen anywhere else in art,
even in Dutch art, which has a very large hat department.
Down his shoulders comes this enormous waterfall
of oxblood-red velvet
and all put together with a pure Mick Jagger, rock'n'roller
silver and pink scarf - fantastic, I would kill for one of those.
So we have Isaac Fuller, the showman, the can-do man in any medium,
someone the world should acknowledge.
But look beyond the swagger
and this powerful self-portrait becomes a reckoning.
Fuller's fantasy majesty is shadowed by deep melancholy.
It is absolutely the painting of someone who's made it in every way.
But, of course, Isaac Fuller has not.
When he's not drunk,
he is looking for any jobbing work he can get.
And in that face is a kind of baroque cantata of regret.
It's a sorrow that he has in some ways wasted his potential.
What the painting says to us, in its brilliance,
is this, I could have been.
Fuller's art was a kind of city theatre,
straining for applause, the ego on parade.
Looking at us.
But a century later, finding oneself had become a kind of religion.
And the place to do it was not amidst the clamour of town, but in nature.
There, amidst God's unpolluted creation,
it was possible to recover what had been lost in the urban swarm.
The inner child.
And no-one was looking harder than Samuel Palmer.
He really hated what he called the "great national dust hole" of London,
but he had grown up in it.
He was the son of a quite prosperous bookseller who also happened to be
a Baptist lay preacher, and both those things
were important for the forming of Palmer
and his very peculiar, extraordinary, visionary kind of art.
What he hated was the crass vulgarity of what
he called the "flashy distraction" of the modern world.
"It was the kind of world", he said, "where solid facts and still more
"solid pudding nourishes a fat, waddling alderman."
So we had this kind of young man's fantasy of coming here
and getting towards a non-modern England.
If you could only get away from the tatty, tacky modern world,
you'd find this perfect heaven of a Jerusalem among the green fields.
In 1825, Samuel Palmer came to the Kentish village of Shoreham.
Here, he seemed to acquire a new pair of eyes.
Eyes which saw deeper, clearer than in the London murk.
And what he trained them on right away was, of course, himself.
Around the time Palmer is going to Shoreham,
he produces this extraordinary self-portrait -
perhaps the greatest romantic self-portrait ever,
in Britain, in any other kind of art. And why?
Because it does something which was indispensable
to the Romantic temperament.
It's an epiphany, it's a revelation,
but it's a revelation of the inner person.
When you look at it, you feel you're absolutely cheek by jowl with it.
And the technique is absolutely wonderful.
It's a drama of his own face
and the drama is made more spectacular by the special instrument
of Palmerian drama - white chalk,
to heighten accents, to give it light.
Look where the chalk heightening falls.
It falls in the temple of the imagination, on his forehead.
It occurs on the eyes - this is a man with amazing fine motor control.
Everything he does that's good is teeny-weeny,
but out of teeny-weeny comes immense emotional power.
So you do have this astonishing sense of being rather searingly,
and disconcertingly, spookily addressed
in a kind of confrontational way by Palmer.
But that, of course, is an illusion.
What Samuel Palmer is looking at, staring at
in this trancelike intensity, is the innermost Samuel Palmer.
Palmer stared and stared until the landscapes passing before his eyes
turned into mindscapes.
And a mind, for that matter, on a serious trip.
At the height of his creative fervour,
Palmer set down these startling little drawings.
The vision somehow both compressed and expanded,
dreamily, far, far away.
These landscapes come out of his own head,
from a superior, ecstatic illumination.
These are kind of magnificently clotted, little gem-like,
dense, concentrated miracles of compression.
Palmer said that the visions of the soul, being perfect,
are the only true standard
by which nature should be tried. And he clung to his vision.
Everything is really an earthly paradise.
It has that kind of fullness, the fecundity, the fruitfulness
that goes way back as Palmer wanted it to do.
And by going back, by consciously recovering an innocent vision,
he is at the same time archaic and profoundly, profoundly modern.
We don't see this kind of stylisation of landscape
until you get to the end of the 19th century.
This particular one, which I love very much...
There are these beautiful wheat sheaves
around a recumbent reader.
We are in Fairy Land.
We're really in the land of the child's imagination.
Another one of these has a tree which... Look at it,
it's a magic mushroom, isn't it? Absolutely.
There's the kind of...the hare from heaven with his ears
in a state of quivering attentiveness.
Samuel Palmer, at this perfect moment,
is a child in a glorious state of suspended animation,
a child who doesn't grow up.
And it's this child's vision of earthly heaven that he gives us,
and no-one else does it.
And it happens in the bosom of England.
For generations,
Palmer's startling, revolutionary work went virtually unseen.
Too strange for Victorian tastes, too out-there to make a living,
Palmer hid them away.
And, in time, he retreated from visions,
left Shoreham and became conventional,
dull, respectively successful.
Palmer traded in his originality for acceptability.
But for another whole category of artists,
being accepted was always going to be a prolonged battle.
It was very tough for women in Victorian England
because the governing institutions
and the schools of art were not designed to help female talent along.
Women were expected to do things that were all about being pretty
and feminine.
So, in Britain, there was this great, teeming mass of frustrated,
gifted women artists.
And one of them was Laura Knight.
Laura Knight was to become a front-line warrior who'd use
the self-portrait to violate gloriously all the confining
conventions that the men who ruled the art world had imposed.
She would bring a startlingly distinctive vision to what
women could do when they became painters.
But it was very difficult.
Her father had left and then died when she was very young.
The mother was in modest circumstances
and there was very little money in the family.
The mum essentially made ends meet from teaching at art school.
So when she saw that her daughter, aged 10, 11, 12, 13,
had this phenomenal, precocious gift for drawing,
she did everything she could to encourage it.
Laura won a scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art.
But, like most women,
she was excluded from the exalted art of drawing the nude,
and in the name of decency, confined to the inert forms of plaster casts.
Thus, she was denied the training that since the Renaissance had
been considered essential for any serious artist.
To find the freedom she craved,
Laura Knight would have to travel to the remotest edge of England.
By the time she arrived, in 1907,
Cornwall had become known as a haven for artists.
With its bohemian atmosphere and scintillating light,
Laura found herself living, she said, "A carefree life of sunlit pleasure."
And here, far away from the stuffy art establishment,
she found her artistic self.
In this barefooted freedom,
Laura's friends posed for her,
comrades in art.
No men, no poses to please men.
Instead, these women are caught in quiet pensiveness,
lost in thought and drenched in hot, radiant colour,
as if burning from pent-up emotion and frustrated ambition.
And in 1913, she brought all those instincts - a riot of colour,
the audacity of a strong woman, a compositional gift -
to make a self-portrait like no other that had ever been seen before.
It came from Laura Knight's bitter memory
all those years ago in Nottingham
of not being allowed to do life classes because she was not a man.
It came from an art memory, too.
It came from knowing very well that
when you had a portrait of a nude female model and a clothed artist,
what a surprise, the artist was always going to be a man.
I don't mean to say this is a political painting,
but it can't be irrelevant that exactly when this
is on show in 1913, the suffragette movement is at its height.
This is a painting about sisterhood,
but it's about the sisterhood of art.
The self-portrait shows Laura at work
painting her friend and model, Ella Naper.
The consummate professional, brush in hand,
gaze locked so tightly to the body she is celebrating.
Though the painting is an anthem to the female body, it is,
for the first time, delivered entirely on a woman's terms.
Both the women are masked from us.
She's sideways, there's a shadow falling down over her face.
Ella herself has her back to us.
We get her back doubled twice - rhymed, multiplied.
But the real boast of this sisterhood collaboration is in the staggering
cerebral cleverness and complexity of the picture.
If you take Ella out, if you take Laura out,
what you've got is a stunning abstract work of art.
If you want a kind of lesson in what the French New Wave
of painters are doing, all you have to do is look at
the tremendous stabbing marks on the back of her jacket.
These very loose brush strokes.
There's a rhyme between this beautiful rug
and the stripes on the back of the scarf
which Matisse would have killed for.
That huge red screen is a kind of abstract slab of colour.
All the planes are shifting this way and that, very ambiguously.
She's applied this fantastic streaky quality to the scarlet there,
so that your vision is absolutely gripped
by the energy she's put into it.
When she showed it in Cornwall, Laura called it Self Portrait With Nude,
and although there are two people here, it is
essentially a self-portrait, a manifesto issued by someone
who knew exactly who she was and what she wanted to be.
But not everyone was so self-assured.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
few parties were more notorious than the Chelsea Arts Club Ball.
And if you were to grace the dance floor, it is
more than likely you'd have come across this man.
Or this man...
or this man.
All of these men are in fact the Irishman, William Orpen,
painter and party animal.
While self-portraits were supposed to reveal the real,
unique inner painter, Orpen thought, "Why bother?"
It was much more fun being a quick-change artist.
He imagined himself as champion jockey one moment...
..a heroic hunter the next,
then a virtuoso painter from a bygone age.
All with that look of impish mock severity.
He was never sure which persona he'd next adopt.
But then, he was given a chance to dress up once more.
And it was a costume that would change his life forever.
The painting is called Ready To Start,
and since Orpen is the master of irony,
you pretty much know that he never is going to be quite ready.
He had arrived in France in the spring
and he is in the little town of Cassel in a small hotel.
He writes about its picturesqueness, about the sweetness of the town.
He says, "In this place are all kinds of people -
"some thoughtful, some unthoughtful. Misery, delight, all mixed up..."
Beautifully, he puts it, "..all mixed up like a kaleidoscope."
But despite Orpen's playfulness, there's a mood here
that's not seen in any of his previous incarnations.
There is, very unusually for Orpen's self-portraits,
a sombre expression to his face underneath that Tommy helmet,
and a very watchful, apprehensive, nervous look in his eyes.
There is something in Orpen's letters and something about Orpen's art,
too, at this moment which is fearful.
"I don't have the courage, really, for what lies ahead,"
says Orpen, "except one kind of courage - Dutch courage."
The kind of courage represented in this spectacular still life
at the front of the painting. It pretty much dominates everything.
He might as well have called the picture Whisky And Splash.
Orpen had been drinking heavily in Cassel,
hoping to lose himself in the warm embrace of intoxication.
But the alcoholic haze disappeared swiftly with the first salvos
of the Battle of Arras.
EXPLOSIONS
The great offensive of 1917 saw Orpen on the front line.
And it was here, amidst the labyrinth of trenches,
that Orpen's soul-searching came to an end.
In the summer of 1917,
in the pit of human horror, he finds, at last,
the incarnation which somehow makes sense.
He becomes the most unlikely tommy perhaps in the entire British Army.
He had been able to have the rank of second lieutenant
and then he was jumped up through social connections to become a major.
And he was still insecure about what he was supposed to be doing,
which, officially, of course, was to be a war artist.
He sends a letter back to his mistress, which has a little picture
in which some British Army officer says, "And what exactly can you do?"
And Orpen, 'ickle Orps, little Orps, as he constantly called himself,
said, "Nothing, sir. I'm an artist."
And he never lost that sense of kind of withering...
almost humiliation about his impotence
in the face of human horror.
And look, just look at how he is standing.
The cigarette there is not the way a tommy is going to smoke, is it?
This is the way you hold a cigarette in a fashionable
Mayfair cocktail party.
The stance, actually shifting your weight to one leg,
has an enormous art historical provenance.
It is called "contrapposto" - one leg nonchalantly against the other.
He's still crawling in the skin of a fashionable man.
And yet, he wants to embody the experience of every man
in the trench.
It's here in the Somme, at this moment, that the Orpen who is
constantly searching for himself has found something and someone
he wants to be, but he's also losing something at the same time.
What he's losing is the belief that humanity can do anything.
What he now believes is what humanity does is to
kill each other in ever-increasing numbers.
With this new sense of himself came a new sense of purpose.
Orpen set about making a devastating set of paintings that captured
everything he'd witnessed.
No dressing up, just the implacable truth.
This is what Orpen saw.
Summer 1917, and the sunlight was boiling down.
Orpen has the genius to make this painting about the cruelty
of radiance.
Because what's it shining on?
These figures found at the bottom of the trench.
German soldiers, putrefying bodies, a hand held up in rigor mortis.
This is the ultimate picnic in hell.
More than any other picture that I know of, bathed in hot sunlight
on one side and deep, dark, infernal shadow on the other,
this really is an open grave.
Orpen returned home after the war to resume a successful career
as a society painter.
But he was never the same man.
Unable to forget,
his memories of the war shattered his fragile sense of self.
Two years before he died, he painted his masterpiece -
the self-portrait of a tormented and fragmented soul.
What do self-portraits do?
They're investigations of the self, of the artistic self.
And the investigation here, even though
the face isn't completely bleak or despairing, none of that...
Don't you think it's more anxious
and tentative in its questioning than any other Orpen self-portrait?
I think so.
And what he has done, of course,
is play this extraordinary mirror game with his own image
and the painting of his own image using multiple mirrors.
Endless versions of the painting and of Orpen, receding endlessly,
multiplying endlessly, each one more broken than the last.
What is so brilliant is that as you get further away,
they're not the same.
They're not identical. He knows what he's doing.
That bloody, red, juicy, fruity lower lip goes all pink and anaemic and,
as you go further and further back, it becomes more and more like a mask.
And the message, the payoff of all this,
is if you want to ask me the question fundamental to self-portraiture,
"Who am I?", poor 'ickle Orps's answer is simply,
"Damned if I know."
The fractured sense of self will become an obsession among
artists and writers of the 20th century.
For them, the self was no longer something that could be
discovered and located.
Instead, it was nothing but a chimera.
Recoiling from that futile search, artists fell back on the only thing
they could be sure of - the anatomical facts in the mirror.
But even this was too much for one young artist.
In the 1940s and '50s,
Lucian Freud was fanatical about avoiding anything sentimental.
Instead, we get the glittering eye of the hawk, flat, linear forms,
as hostile and spiky as the dried thistle on the sill.
There's something spooky about it.
We don't know whether that's a window or a mirror or both.
It's as if he's stalking himself.
Yes, Freud means all this to be a study in watchful cool, but in
its chilly calculation, it's as cold as the grave and wooden as a coffin.
But at some point in the 1960s, Freud suddenly warmed up.
And it was because he fell deeply and irreversibly in love.
I don't know if Lucian Freud was ever in love with anything
so much as he was in love with the texture of paint itself.
He almost made a religion out of it.
He said very often, "I don't paint likenesses of people.
"I create flesh.
"I create a kind of living sense of their presence, their immediacy,"
and this is a trip into the heart of majestic oil painting.
Freud's creative revelation led him
to believe that he could match the texture of oil paint,
in all its unctuous ooze, to the substance and colour of human flesh.
Match it, in fact,
to the felt physical experience of being in a body,
and to do it without any of the emotional baggage he so detested.
Give Lucian Freud a passion, sorrow, desire, joy, he couldn't do it.
But a black eye, given to him by a taxi driver,
becomes a symphony of discolouration.
In the most powerful works, like this one painted
when he was in his 60s, the Siamese twins of the self-portrait
tradition are with him -
sombre watchfulness and a hint of self-admiration.
But he has one supreme concern - the physical truth.
Look at the work of time squarely in the face and you'll defeat it.
You may wear out, but this portrait never will.
What you have here is an unflinching look at the work that time
does sculpturally, almost, on the face.
If you look at the kind of red rims on the lower eyelid under the eye,
that kind of red sense of concentration, the slight break
in the line of the nose, the wrinkles in the brow,
you look at the crevices under the cheekbone,
that's full of different kinds of colours - an incredibly exact
and creative sense of the way you would do shadow.
Of the darks and lights.
You can go from feature to feature, from passage to passage
of painting with absolute, gripping, poetically-precise clarity.
All those things somehow resolve themselves into nothing
but the naked truth.
So, is that all there is?
Once, when the artist looked in the mirror, the image called out,
"I made this.
"Remember me. Pity me."
And, turning inwards, they set off in search of the soul,
only to find it had gone AWOL.
And when the self-portrayers couldn't find anything in their faces,
they turned instead to the body.
Even when that body had left the premises.
So, we have this.
Marc Quinn has gone as far as to make a face out of his body fluid - blood,
the metabolical juice of life suspended in liquid silicon.
It's hard to tell if this is a death mask or if, one day, the artist
may awake from his bloody sleep.
So is this the fate of self-portraiture,
to go so far inside the body that it disappears entirely into our DNA?
There's one modern work of art at least in which self-portraits
look not inward but outward to the world.
On the very western edge of Britain is a beach at Crosby Sands.
To walk this deserted coast ought to be a lonely experience,
but here, you are never alone.
Spread over two miles are 100 iron figures,
each one identical, each one staring impassively to the great beyond.
Together, they form an installation of self-portrait
sculptures by one of Britain's most visionary artists.
This is the body of Antony Gormley, cast in iron
and then reproduced on an industrial scale.
Well, you would suppose when the age of the self meets the obsession
of the body and an artist makes a body cast of himself
and then clones it 100 times and then plants those clones all over
a beach near Liverpool, it would be the ultimate ego trip.
Oddly enough, that's not the way we read Antony Gormley's figures,
because they are faceless.
They become an emblem of the human condition, not of A Gormley, Esq.
They are planted there on the edge of the earth,
on the rim of the land facing the ocean.
So there's a way in which something which begins
physically as a self-portrait becomes a symbol of humanity.
These are very, very poignant figures.
An individual self-portrait is now dissolved, featureless,
into the universal human condition.
And these iron men, standing for all of us,
seem oddly, touchingly skinless...
vulnerable,
forever worked on by time and tide.
But there they stand, as must we.
Not masters of the earth,
not separate from the physical world,
but inevitably and fully part of it.
So, these figures are not just Gormley, they're really all of us.
This is the self-portrait made plural, made collective, forever.
As the tide comes in,
disappearing in the water, re-emerging,
coming from and going back into the element from which we all came.