Word: self-portrait
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...soon as I saw your pictures illustrating isometric exercises [Jan. 29], I thought of the painting Self-Portrait by John Kane in the Museum of Modern...
...most surprising self-portrait in the show is Beckmann's depiction of himself at twenty-three as the young aesthete. Standing before a window overlooking Florence, his pose is archly self-critical. The effeminate position of the hand, the soft, glistening, sensual mouth and the almost humorous defiance and cynicism of the worldly young man, set the stage of his subsequent quest for what he perceptively refers to as "male mysticism...
...contrast, the "Self-Portrait in Tuxedo," painted in 1927, radiates unprecedented self-conscious affirmation. Here stands Beckmann in a piercingly direct encounter with himself and with the viewer. In an effort to counterbalance the fluidity of his development, indicated by the amazingly protean variety of his many self-portraits, he takes a stand as absolutely assured, solid, immovable. In the midst of the uncertainty and change which prevails around and within him, he captures forever on canvas the transitory element in himself. Permanence, solidity, self-confidence--to these qualities, so precious and so rare in everyday existence, he give lasting...
...these moments of the self-portrait, Beckmann comes to grips with his own inner space and manages to fill up the horrifying area surrounding...
Beckmann painted "Self-Portrait with a Cigarette" in 1950, the year of his death. Here he steps back from the overpowering stance of the "Tuxedo." He averts his eyes, as if from his immediate presence to a meditation on his past, in a review of all of the various stages of his life history captured in his previous self-portraits. This is his last. He stands before an empty canvas, smoking to a finish the cigarette which he has always held before him, the symbol of transitoriness, burning to an end. Beckmann is dying...