James Hall on the Self-Portrait

Excerpts from art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall's lively and comprehensive cultural history of self-portraiture, focusing on artists including Dürer, Gentileschi, Van Gogh, and Kahlo.

Art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall delves into the allure of self-portraiture in an engaging and accessible short history of the subject, revealing how it became the defining visual genre of our confessional age.

Across six chapters, Hall maps the genre from its medieval origins to its present-day manifestations. Along the way he investigates the importance of biography for serial self-portraitists such as van Gogh; themes of sex and genius in works by Munch and Modersohn-Becker; and the effect of globalization on the art of self-representation. From the exuberantly caricatural to the stoic and heroic, Hall covers a full range of portraits and looks deeply into the worlds and mindsets of the artists who created them.