A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits
By Laura Cumming
Harper Press £30, 309 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24

Our eyes meet across a crowded room. It might be love at first sight, or we can’t stand the sight of each other. The glance might be too tentative, blank, disaffected, and we turn away forever. So it is, argues Laura Cumming in a vivid, insightful, superbly illustrated study, the first time we encounter a self-portrait. Among the gazes which follow us round an art gallery, those from self-portraits have a “special look of looking. Even small children can tell self-portraits from portraits because of those eyes. The look is intent, actively seeking you out of the crowd; the nearest analogy may be with life itself: paintings behaving like people”.

The most enthralling thing about Face to the World is that Cumming, art critic of The Observer, writes about paintings as if they are alive. Tintoretto’s dark-eyed stare is “a hook so strong you cannot immediately pull away for the sense of being held in his sights ... not to mention Tintoretto’s burning good looks”. Serial self-portraits by both Rembrandt and Warhol are shape-shifters which convince you that “having multiple personalities is the human condition”. Courbet’s fantastical self-depictions – lover, dueller, troubadour, cellist – “are made at speed and for immediate release like updates off the wires”.

Cumming mediates art for the Facebook generation, yet inflects it with values – individuality, genius, moral vision, transcendence – that would not be out of place in the 19th century. She opens with Degas’ famous rhetorical question: “We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?” – rooting art in its social context. We all have both a self and a public existence, daily putting together “some sort of face to the world”, which may be a fiction but carries its own truth about how we hope to be seen and known. Self-portraiture compels because it takes that game to a formal extreme, and also turns picture-making inside out: as artist becomes subject, the sitter’s gaze, usually directed at the painter, turns on us, the viewer.

This directness brings unique creative dilemmas and anomalies. Cumming explores them in thematic chapters (“Eyes”, “Mirrors”, “Performance”, “Stage Fright”), scraping at pictorial detail, illuminating unlikely parallels and undermining historical expectations. Her 17th-century Sassoferato “leans forward with extraordinary candour, open for viewing, with the immediate appeal of his camera-age pose”, while romantic Delacroix emerges as a master of self-containment. Refreshingly anti-theoretical, she offers few conclusions except human ones: “I take these truths to be significant and am struck by the reticence of Poussin, fastidiously withdrawing into an enclosure of his own paintings, almost an abstract of his art ... or Titian in a magnificent self-portrait in which he is looking away and clearly impatient to be gone ... appearing as far as possible in the alibi of a third person.”

The scholarly meat of the book is a dazzling trail through Flemish painting’s world of shining surfaces and reflections. After long dispute, the National Gallery’s 1433 “Portrait of a Man” by Jan Van Eyck has recently been accepted as the first Renaissance self-portrait. Cumming extends the debate, discovering repeats of this figure everywhere in Van Eyck – a matchstick-size reflection in the breastplate of bumptious St George in the altarpiece “Madonna and Child with Canon van der Poele”; a miniature red-turbaned visionary, posted like a watchman at the bridge between this world and the next in “The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin”. And while we know the artist signed the Arnolfini marriage portrait “Van Eyck was here”, what allows us now to enter this archaic domestic scene of wooden shoes and abundant robes is that he still is here – a fleeting blue figure in a mirror who, “as his reflection passes over the threshold to enter the room where the Arnolfini stand ... creates the illusion that we may accompany him there as well. The tiny self-portrait is the key to the door. Art need not be closed”.

If Cumming has a unifying theme, it is EM Forster’s optimistic “only connect”, extended across six centuries. Strongest on the Old Masters, she is generous on the myriad ways in which artists exteriorise their personalities until she comes to modernism, which wears its heart on its sleeve and tries to connect too loudly. She is over-strict on the expressionists, saying they were “never too distraught to paint”; some Munch and most Kirchner and Beckmann are likened to “unimpeachably righteous” letters penned at night which we “very rarely send in the morning”. She is oddly skimpy on Picasso and Matisse but things look up again in the late 20th century, with astute unravellings of Philip Guston’s “The Studio” – the smoking paintbrush a stand-in for a self-portrait – and of Cindy Sherman’s tricks as model and medium.

Sherman’s play on truth/illusion depends on her use of photography. It would not work on canvas because “painting declares its own status as fiction”. What arrests Cumming above all is painting’s ability, like fiction’s, to suspend time. Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz once left the Prado after viewing “Las Meninas” with the remark: “Now we go to have a real Spanish lunch, but they stay: and that is the terror of Spanish painting!” Cumming reads that lifelike terror more brightly: she sees this great painting as not only a meditation on art and consciousness but as a novel – Velázquez’s self-portrait carries within it the linchpin of the cycles of connections and reversals giving mystery, grace and, especially, the power of earthly consolation. For although these golden children in obsolete clothes are age-old, piercingly sad, dead too young, “the figures of the past keep looking into our moment, our present, as long as we keep looking back at them ... We live on in each other’s eyes and our stories need never end”.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic