A Face to the World On Self-Portraits by Laura Cumming

Description

The secret history of the self-portrait. In A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, acclaimed critic Laura Cumming — author of the bestselling The Vanishing Velazquez — explores what self-portraits really tell us, from Dürer and Rembrandt to today’s selfie culture, with her trademark elegance and forensic insight.

Cumming moves through centuries of artists confronting their own faces: vanity and honesty, disguise and revelation, the young Rembrandt trying expressions in the mirror and the old one facing mortality without flinching. Each chapter is a small masterpiece of looking — teaching readers to see familiar pictures entirely anew, and to ask what any portrait, painted or photographed, can possibly tell the truth about.

Beautiful and wise, this is essential for art lovers — a book that will change how you look at every portrait you ever see, including your own, and a masterclass in the lost art of paying attention.

A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits by Laura Cumming is a beautifully written and lavishly illustrated exploration of the self-portrait through art history. Published by HarperPress in 2009, it comes from one of Britain’s most respected art critics — Laura Cumming, art critic of The Observer.

From Albrecht Dürer’s piercing self-images to Rembrandt’s lifetime of self-scrutiny and the intimate revelations of modern painters, Cumming examines why artists have always turned the canvas on themselves. With an expert eye and engaging prose, she unpacks what these images reveal about identity, vanity, honesty and the act of looking itself.

Part art history, part meditation on selfhood, this is a book for anyone who loves painting — or who has ever wondered what a self-portrait really shows. Erudite, elegant and richly illustrated, A Face to the World is essential reading for art lovers and students of visual culture alike. An illuminating guide to the art of looking — at portraits, and at ourselves.