Vivien Gaston’s scholarly and illuminating publication, The Naked Face: Self-Portraits, whichaccompanies a major survey exhibition of the same title at the National Gallery of Victoria, has drawn on some 160 works from its extensive collection of portraits. Her discursive essay and the exhibition contextualise artistic practices from the Renaissance to the present. Within this historical sweep, Gaston muses upon the sociological, cultural, psychological, biographical, political, and entrepreneurial factors that have affected artists’ views of themselves, their careers, and the face and body in vision. The evolution of individualism and ‘the self-examined life’ is further considered through allegorical, iconographic, literary, symbolist, or spiritual conventions, and through more contemporary technical or digital modes of self-representation. These position the work and the artist – can they really be separated at such a reflective moment of capturing the self? – within the fashionable strains of the day. Whether a romanticised Byronic mode of representation or a Faustian twist, as in Max Klinger’s paradox of identity – he who would save his soul must first lose it – the self-portrait is testimony to the artist as ‘a self-governing individual’.

It was not until the manufacturing in the early sixteenth century of non-distorting glass mirrors that artists were able to satisfactorily paint their reflections. This coincided with the humanist tradition, the rise of the individual, and the cult of the celebrated and inspired artist, otherwise known as the age of genius. The aesthetic analogue of the master artist was often, as in the case of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck, an advertising calling-card to attract patrons. Things changed as bourgeois wealth increased and collectors began acquiring portraits and self-portraits, usually of men of distinction. After the Industrial Revolution, consumerism and the art market flourished and the romantic view of the bohemian artist in his studio offered the public a private view of the gifted artist at work – Van Gogh’s self-portraits are more therapeutic and show the artist psychologically struggling with his identity.

Australian expatriate Hugh Ramsay set himself up in Paris and painted energetic, often moody, self-portraits with a studied casualness that invites us to participate in his creative performance. We respond strongly to the sense of solitude and intimacy, yet remain excluded from the intensity of the artist’s visual dialogue with himself. As an art and cultural historian, Gaston provides a vital bridge between the artist and the viewer.

Hugh Ramsay, Self-portrait in white jacket, 1901–02, oil on canvas, 92.3 x 73.5 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Nell Turnbull, niece of the artist and by her children John Fullerton, Patricia Fullerton and Fiona Fullerton, Founder Benefactors, 2002

The commercial art world and the artist’s role substantially changed with the capitalistic system of mass production and with the advent of photography from the mid nineteenth century onwards. Andy Warhol’s ‘factory model’ gave us ‘the unedited everyday world’ of commodity culture, an art representative of asloganised milieu. Extending the notion of the unedited self, Gaston casts her eye over the defiant ‘new savage’, where the artist aggressively exploits himself in sexually provocative ways. Gareth Sansom’s He sees himself (1964) turns the artist’s self-perception into a performative act of inverted voyeurism. Juan Davila, Julie Rrap, Cindy Sherman, and Stelarc can be added to this category.

The poet Schiller confessed, ‘With me emotion is at the beginning without clear and definite ideas; those ideas do not arise until later on.’ Many creative processes begin and end this way, and there is a limit to how far a curator or art historian should intrude upon such intimate modes of expression as a self-portrait, but Gaston examines this genre with commanding perception and knowledge, seamlessly weaving the conceptual and theoretical throughout.

Anne Gray’s catalogue and exhibition, Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960, at the National Gallery of Australia, considers portraiture as a genre more openly read in terms of social categorisation and individual distinction, both male and female. Centred on a much smaller exhibition of fifty-four works, from the 1880s to the 1960s, this is a more restrained scholarly publication, a history lesson with excellent entries on each artist by various curators. An emphasis on the anecdotal rather than the analytical gives this book an accessible edge. Gray includes artists’ views about their own work, such as William Dobell’s comments on why he painted Dame Mary Gilmore with such an elongated, spindly neck. Gray observes how the naming of the subject encodes a portrait or self-portrait as an identifiable, if not a familiar, character, thus endorsing its popularity in the artistic styles stakes, as with theArchibald Prize. The convenient practicality of the artist using herself as a patient model, and the serialising of self-portraiture over time as an autobiographical vision that ‘charts the artist’s development’, tends to define this art form as functional rather than as some esoteric mystery.

Montaigne’s view that ‘All contradictions may be found in me’ chimes with the naked vulnerability of the self-portrait. Whether a sensuous or serious mental formulation, an image of brutal honesty or a controlled, objective formalist design, the art of portraiture and self-portraiture emphasises the complexity of human nature. It is the face, however, that composite structure with its vital emotional range, that best expresses the ‘labyrinth of existence’. These comprehensively illustrated books offer a rich and intelligent survey of the pictorial face.