8 The New York Reviewthirty- year- old artist was seriously chaf-
ing at her marriage (“I am I,” she wrote
that same year, “and I hope to become
so more and more”), the work gains
greater poignancy from the knowledge
that its maker became pregnant the fol-
lowing year and died in the immediate
aftermath of her daughter’s birth.
The emotional contrast with the
image of another naked woman that con-
cludes Higgie’s book—Alice Neel’s Self-
Portrait (1980)—couldn’t be sharper.
Neel herself painted many portraits of
pregnant women over the course of her
long career, but in this picture she turns
her gaze on her own naked and aging
body. Composed when she was as old as
the century, Neel’s Self- Portrait doesn’t
hesitate to depict her sagging breasts
and belly or the flabbiness of her upper
arms. But there is nothing flabby about
how she perches on her blue- and- white
chair, one hand grasping a brush while
the other holds a paint rag, and looks
keenly through her spectacles at the
viewer.
“I paint myself because I am alone,”
Frida Kahlo observed in her diary. “I
am the subject I know best.” The ex-
treme constraints under which she ex-
ecuted much of her work were unique
to Kahlo: bedridden from the com-
bined effects of childhood polio and
a terrible bus accident in adolescence,
she took to making self- portraits with
the aid of a mirror suspended above
her. But something like her sentiment
recurs from others as well. “I painted
myself because I knew her,” the Aus-
tralian artist Nora Heysen remarked,
adding, “With self- portraits you can
be alone with yourself and not have
to worry about another person.” Hey-
sen, who compared self- portraiture to
“an animal marking out its territory,”
was attempting to escape from the in-
fluence of her famous father, the land-
scape painter Hans Heysen—one of a
number of such father- daughter pairs
that figure in Higgie’s book.
But even self- portraits, of course,
are also made of other paintings. Hig-
gie calls attention to some prominent
cases: how Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s
Self- Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) pays
mischievous homage to Rubens’s so-
called Chapeau de Paille (circa 1622–
1625), for instance, even as she tacitly
corrects its erroneous French title by
substituting an actual straw hat (cha-
peau de paille) for the beaver felt of the
original; or how the Hungarian- Indian
artist Amrita Sher- Gil plays on her
own ambiguous identity, while offering
an implicit critique of Gauguin’s exoti-
cized figures, by posing bare- breasted
for her Self- Portrait as Tahitian (1934).
At other times, however, Higgie lets
similar opportunities slide. Though
she notes in passing that Heysen’s Self-
Portrait of 1932 poses the artist’s head
against a reproduction of a Vermeer on
the wall behind her, she fails to regis-
ter that the work in question is The Art
of Painting (circa 1662–1668), and that
Heysen preserves the mirrored orien-
tation of the picture- within- the- picture
and partly obscures its female model,
as if to underscore that she prefers to
identify with the painter. (Heysen later
characterized Vermeer and Piero della
Francesca as her “gods.”) Nor does
Higgie ever take up James Hall’s res-
onant comments on how Modersohn-
Becker’s Self- Portrait on Her Sixth
Wedding Anniversary at once echoes
and transforms Raphael’s portrait La
Fornarina (1518–1519): “Whereas thatpicture proclaimed the great artist’s
ownership of his model (he signed her
armband), Becker’s self- portrait im-
plies that this model is self- creating and
indeed self- reproducing.”The Mirror and the Palette is not the
first book on female self- portraiture,
having been preceded by Frances
Borzello’s groundbreaking—and more
comprehensive—study, Seeing Our-
selves: Women’s Self- Portraits (1998).
But the fact that none of the painters
in either work appeared in the standard
textbooks on which my generation was
raised—Higgie specifically mentionsE. H. Gombrich’s Story of Art (1950)
and H.W. Janson’s History of Art
(1962)—is a sobering reminder that
what we learn to see depends almost as
much on the pen as it does on the paint-
brush, especially for those whose gifts
are apt to be questioned or overlooked
in the first place. Recording your name
is clearly no guarantee of immortality,
but it’s no accident, I think, that pio-
neers like Van Hemessen and Anguis-
sola took such care to inscribe what
they had achieved on their canvases, or
that so many of the women who figure
in The Mirror and the Palette appear
to have been prolific writers as well as
painters.
Despite Artemisia’s unusual fame in
her lifetime, few of her self- portraits
survive: we primarily know about
them, Higgie reports, from the artist’s
voluminous correspondence. “I will
show Your illustrious Lordship what a
woman can do,” one such letter char-
acteristically announced to her patron.
“You will find the spirit of Caesar in
the soul of a woman,” declared another.
The written word also helped shape thecareer of the seventeenth- century Brit-
ish painter Mary Beale, whose advice
on how to paint apricots, composed in
1663, is not only the first known piece
of writing about art by a woman but one
of the earliest accounts of artistic tech-
nique in English. Beale’s reputation got
a further boost when a relative by mar-
riage, Samuel Woodford, attributed a
few passages of his Paraphrase Upon
the Psalms of David (1667) to “the
truly vertuous Mrs. Mary Beale”—an
imprimatur that apparently confirmed
her respectability as a portraitist, espe-
cially among the clergy.
In 1835 and 1836, the more reputa-
tionally challenged Vigée Le Brun, thefavorite painter of Marie Antoinette,
capped a tumultuous career in image
management with three volumes of
best- selling autobiography. Later in the
century, the posthumous publication
of The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff
(1887) turned the fiercely ambitious
young Russian, dead of consumption
at twenty- five, into an international
phenomenon. “As a man, I should
have conquered Europe,” Bashkirtseff
had written in the journal four months
before her death; and though it is her
Self- Portrait with Palette (1880) that
accounts for her appearance in Hig-
gie’s book, she ultimately had more im-
pact as a writer. Among the journal’s
many admirers were George Bernard
Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, and Anaïs
Nin, as well as the twenty- two- year- old
Paula Becker, who responded to its
author’s example by concluding, “I’ve
wasted my first 20 years.”
Modersohn- Becker’s own letters and
journals in turn became posthumous
best sellers and the initial source of her
fame, though she, unlike Bashkirtseff,
is now better known for her painting.Even the British Surrealist Leonora
Carrington, who explicitly downplayed
the power of words—“There are things
that are not sayable. That’s why we
have art”—was a writer as well as a
painter, whose memoir and short sto-
ries provide Higgie with keys by which
to unlock, however partially, a myste-
rious Self- Portrait (1937–1938) with a
lactating hyena and a rocking horse.
Avowedly “meandering and per-
sonal,” Higgie’s book is surprisingly
word- heavy for a study of visual art:
her publishers have chosen to repro-
duce only twenty- seven pictures, one of
which goes oddly unmentioned in the
text. (There are more reproductions of
women’s self- portraits in Rudd’s short
handbook than in The Mirror and the
Palette, despite the fact that Rudd aims
to survey the entire genre.)
Though Higgie is herself a painter,
she appears at least as concerned to
offer readable accounts of her subjects’
lives as to analyze their work, espe-
cially its more material dimensions. In
2005–2006 the National Portrait Gal-
lery in London and the Art Gallery of
New South Wales co sponsored a major
exhibition on the self- portrait from the
Renaissance to the present that delib-
erately confined itself to oil painting,
on the grounds that “the mirror- like
gloss and perceived transparency of
illusionistic painting in oils dramatises
the relationship between the images
of themselves that artists observed in
mirrors and the perfect paintings that
they produced,” but Higgie doesn’t en-
gage the argument, despite her interest
in mirrors.^3 Nor does she always make
clear the medium in which her subjects
were working, though unlike Rudd—
whose expansive definition of the
self- portrait includes everything from
a plaster torso by Louise Bourgeois
and a Faith Ringgold quilt to instal-
lation art like Tracey Emin’s My Bed
(1998)—Higgie limits her self- portraits
to paintings.
Among the variations on the genre
with which Rudd’s book concludes are
several that might be termed indexical
self- portraits: works that originated not
in mirror images but in physical traces
of the artist’s presence. Emin’s My Bed
partly qualifies as such a work, and so,
clearly, does Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s
Breath (1960), despite the fact that the
balloon formerly inflated by its creator
has since collapsed into a flaccid resi-
due of its former self.
From the perspective of the past sev-
eral years, however, perhaps the most
evocative such object in Rudd’s col-
lection is another work by a woman
artist: Helen Chadwick’s Viral Land-
scape No. 3 (1988–1989). The image,
which belongs to a digitally assisted
series created during the AIDS crisis,
was generated by overlaying cell sam-
ples taken from the artist’s own body
and prints made by swirling pigments
into the waves along the Welsh coast-
line with panoramic landscape photo-
graphs. Viral Landscape No. 3 looks
nothing like a self- portrait as it has
been conventionally understood. But
its representation of that self’s immer-
sion in the natural world, at once beau-
tiful and terrifying, couldn’t be more
timely. QNora Heysen: Self-Portrait, 1932Bridgeman Images(^3) Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall,
Self- Portrait: Renaissance to Contem-
porary (London: National Portrait
Gallery, 2005), p. 11.
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