Book reviews – ‘A Face to the World’ by Laura Cumming
We asked Bristol Festival of Ideas fans to review some of the books shortlisted for the 2010 Book Prize. Here are their responses to Laura Cumming’s A Face to the World:
Review by Jamie Butler:
What do you want this book to be? A pretty set of reproductions with an interesting-enough text to justify it? The secret to how we see ourselves, as revealed by artists unwise or brave enough to put themselves in the public gaze? Or an entertaining ramble through an area that one might not have looked at properly before? Like the beds in Goldilocks’ story, perhaps the first is too soft, the second too hard, and the third just right – certainly that seems to be the path that Cumming has chosen.
Self-portraiture is complicated, different from painting pictures of other people. Look round a gallery of portraits and it’s often possible to pick out the self-portraits – and not just because the eyes follow you round the room. It might be that there’s a greater sense of life in the picture, or maybe that the character doesn’t seem to have been ‘resolved’. In the National Portrait Gallery, for instance, a room of pictures of important late-Victorian figures (William Morris, Cecil Rhodes, John Stuart Mill, etc) by GF Watts are all so smoothly complete that the eye passes over them without stopping, until you reach his picture of himself, brush in hand, and there, suddenly, is a person.
It’s this sense of a personal presence that marks out the best in self-portraiture (although other portraits can succeed in giving it, too – Cranach’s picture of Martin Luther and the neighbouring one of a young man in Bristol City Museum both feel particularly alive), and Cumming sets out to examine it from a variety of angles. She looks at individual pictures, at artists and at themes, and brings a lot of learning to it.
In its best parts, this book of essays is like a conversation with a knowledgeable friend or one of those gallery visits when you manage to focus on a couple of pictures properly rather than rushing on to ‘do’ them all. The chapter on the Dürer self-portrait that is reproduced on the cover of the book is a measured delight, bringing together acute description of the picture with historical and biographical context. The chapter on Velázquez’ Las Meninas leaps about, pointing out this and that detail in a way that mirrors the busy construction of the painting, full of inversions and reflections.
The one on Courbet’s L’Atelier unfolds from the central self-portrait to reveal the whole picture, gradually bringing in aspects of his life and art, so that when you’re finally shown the whole thing it’s a dramatic moment. It’s in this call to us to look at a picture again, to look better, that Cumming succeeds most strikingly.
These things are good, a pleasure to read and I came away having learned stuff without feeling that I’d been lectured at – and this matters because surely in order to get the most from a picture we need to respond to it as ourselves rather than be given some anodyne official view. But is it enough to make this a good book? Cumming says that she hasn’t tried to write the definitive book about self-portraiture, and while some essays echo others there is no overall argument. Add to this that some of the essays work significantly better than others, and this makes it at times a rather fractured read.
A more serious criticism is the language, which too often strays from the conversational into journalese, with no verb being denied an adverb and unhelpful phrases like ‘vectoring hyphens’ and ‘the lexicon of marks’ (both in the chapter on Van Gogh). This gets in the way of the writing too often, and the pity of it is that Cumming has shown in other parts that she can bring her perceptions to life on the page without needing it.
Overall, however, are these criticisms important? This book’s call to examine self-portraiture properly is valuable, Cumming’s learning is worn lightly enough and her ability to make you look and look again is a joy. It may not be a ’necessary’ book, but it does leave the reader with a feeling of seeing more clearly, more fully. And the pictures are really nice, too.
Review by Suzanna Maas:
In A Face to the World Laura Cumming shows a change in art criticism, steering away from the academic path with a more psychological view. She presents new ideas in individual interpretation of each self-portrait and its relation to the known life of the artist.
It is perhaps a slightly unstructured book, as the chapters are divided in essays but aren’t consistent in their choice of angle: either artists (Rembrandt, Velásquez), themes in the art itself (mirrors, behind the scenes) or personalities (Loners, Pioneers). However, in content all focus on the psychological state of the artist and its reflection in the self-portrait.
A Face to the World is bordering between old-fashioned art criticism and a good coffee table book – well-illustrated, fascinating and robust descriptions, yet sometimes getting lost in details. Still, unfortunately, it is too extensively written for a pleasant long read – it gives you an information overload, and there doesn’t seem to be an overall conclusion to be drawn from self-portraiture.
Although it has inspired me to want to visit the Uffizi self portrait collection, there is an enormous amount of individual ideas and a lack of general theory.
I appreciate A Face to the World as an excellent example of a refreshing angle in art criticism, but it is lacking in broader ideas to win a broader Bristol Festival of Ideas award.
Review by Simon Prosser:
Art history is not a subject for the faint-hearted, with such a dizzying array of interpretations and opinions proffered by nearly every heavyweight intellectual for centuries. Add to this the fact that the art historian will be required to take forays outside the technical world of artistic process into psychology, philosophy and cultural, economic and political history and the task of creating a significant work is, to say the least, daunting. All the more impressive then that, in A Face to the World, Laura Cumming successfully attempts the rehabilitation of that most maligned, but doggedly ubiquitous of artistic genres – the self-portrait. That she does so in a fresh, insightful and eminently readable way is a remarkable achievement.
And rescue the self-portrait she must, for as long as the genre has existed it has been defamed with accusations of narcissism, self-advertisement, cheapness or, simply what an artist does when he’s bored or without a proper commission. More modern criticisms that self-portraiture couldn’t have even existed prior to the Enlightenment and 18th/19th century Romanticism, when the idea of the self was supposedly invented, also need to be met head on.
In presenting her counter arguments, Cumming introduces us, or re-acquaints us, with the work of the great self-portraitists – masters like van Eyck, Dürer, Rembrandt and Velázquez. Is van Eyck’s self portrait less a work of art than his other masterpieces? Can Dürer, who so single-mindedly laboured for posterity, have had time to waste on doodling in front of the mirror? Can Rembrandt, who painted himself in so many contradictory, unresolved, often unflattering ways really not have been grappling for the elusive reality that was his self? Could Velázquez really not have realised that by placing himself in the great Las Meninas he was putting a whole new perspective into the painting? Of course not – all these artists (and there are many more in the book) must have brought the same insightful genius to their paintings of themselves as they do to all their other work. They, like we all do every day, were searching for the face they would present to the world.
All these are fascinating arguments, but I think where Cumming really wins the day is in her examination of the unique metaphysic set up by a self-portrait – the artist simultaneously as creator and subject, but also joining with the viewer in an examination of the subject. This reciprocity, this sharing of knowledge and inquiry, accounts for the peculiarly strong impact of a self portrait. Cumming maintains that a self-portrait, through its immediacy and power, is instantly distinguishable from a portrait of a third party. It should be noted that this is a beautifully laid out book, comprehensively illustrated so one is never reading blindly.
Cumming approaches the subject with the passion of an enthusiast and the clarity of a critic and in doing so has written the best book on art since David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge. That’s not bad company to keep.
Review by Barry Ramshaw:
By the time Cumming advises the reader not to take self-portraits for granted, this intelligent and magnificently illustrated book had already ensured that I would never look at self depiction in art in quite the same way again. Ranging freely through the history of Western art, the author carefully unravels the endless combinations of means and motivation behind this most personal of genres.
Although Cumming brings into play a broad and complex range of historical, artistic, philosophical and even psychological analyses, her lucid style and infectious enthusiasm keep the reader engaged throughout.
From Van Eyck’s tiny reflected presence in an imagined tableau to Courbet, trying to lunge out of the frame in a histrionic attempt to convince us of his tortured genius, the eternal and almost universal human urge to be part of the picture is laid bare. Moving effortlessly from Titian’s overwhelming sense of his own importance to Poussin’s manifest distaste for the whole unpleasant exercise, Cumming provides fascinating explanations for how the images came to be made.
Woven into the narrative are illuminating insights into the images themselves. A naked Lucien Freud looking like he has been brought to life, golem-like, from a solid mass of paint. The intimidating thunderhead of Ron Muerk’s Mask. The molecular gigantism of Chuck Close. Dürer’s 1500 love letter to himself – a man who, despite Cumming’s valiant attempt to let him off the hook, clearly knew that he was well tasty.
The author casts an appraising eye over them all and, through a combination of biographical detail and informed analysis, furnishes the reader with the means to look at the works anew. At times, although Cumming never fails to provide pertinent and revealing commentary, the images are powerful enough to speak for themselves – none more so than Artemisia Gentileschi’s astonishing Self-Portrait as La Pittura. Prefiguring Rosie the Riveter by 300 years, Gentileschi catches herself in the act of not so much painting as fearlessly attacking the dark legions of reaction and convention with nothing more than a strong right arm and a small paintbrush.
However, notwithstanding the erudition displayed by the author, the real value of this remarkable book (like all great books on art) is threefold in that it introduced me to works that had inexplicably passed me by; encouraged me to exercise my own much more modest critical faculties; and convinced me to make even greater efforts to see as many artworks ‘in the flesh’ as I possibly can. As a wonderful example of the first of these, a work that I had not been previously aware of, I offer Sassoferrato’s self-portrait, which looks like it was painted not in 1650 AD but at 16.50 yesterday.
Cumming finally cautions us that “…all that a self-portrait can be is the illusion of the artist’s self.” Do not be deterred. Through a seamless fusion of learning and accessibility, this wonderful book will leave you in no doubt as to just how compelling, moving and enduring these illusions can be.
Review by Mike Zeidler:
Laura Cumming clearly possesses a fantastic knowledge and love of the visual arts, and she’s managed to cram a lot of great material into this book. By the end, I felt I’d been slightly cheated of a great read. The key connecting narrative through the book was weak, and the writing seemed to have three styles, as though aimed at three distinct audiences.
Some passages were academic, some were filled with the author’s personality, and between these were the artists’ stories I really enjoyed. If only she’d stuck to one of these, I’d have known what to do with the book. As it was, I constantly alternated between a desire to put the book down (treacly academic writing), throw the book away (OTT gushing Art Luvvy writing), or read it avidly (glimpses of the worlds that shaped the artists and their work).
It’s a lonely feeling when a discussion starts up around you about a soap opera you’ve never seen. The more you know about the characters, the more interesting the discussion becomes, but Laura’s encyclopaedic knowledge was lost on me and at times I was left out in the cold. She confides with readers to draw them in – “Vincent, as we intimately call him” (nope – it’s Van Gough to me) and writes at length about minute details of some of the portraits, magnifying them until (to me) they seem out of proportion to the art itself. She projects herself into the artists’ lives to describe their feelings (“devastated”, “hopeless”, “blazing” etc.), but I’m left feeling she’s daubed too much of her own vivid colouring all over their palettes. I wish I could have shared her joy, but her enthusiasm made mine wane.
Overall, I was disappointed. It felt like a fascinating train of thought about self portraiture had arrived at the platform, but it pulled away leaving half the carriages behind. My verdict would be “light reading, heavy in parts, with scattered enjoyable bits.”
Links
Read more reviews from the 2010 shortlisted authors here.
Read more about the Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize here.
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