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Self-Portrait

Painted portrait of seated man in a dark suit.

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  • Painted portrait of seated man in a dark suit.

Date:

1924

Artist:

Lovis Corinth
German, 1858-1925

About this artwork

“The times are not the same for us old folk anymore,” reads a 1923 diary entry by Lovis Corinth, who suffered a stroke in 1911 and never quite recovered. “We have lost our way … so sad, so very sad.” The following year, the artist created this tortured self-image; he was sixty-five, with one year left to live. An inveterate self-portraitist, Corinth produced more images of himself than almost any other artist except Rembrandt van Rijn. In this haunting gouache, he gazes at the viewer in anguish. The brooding palette portrays a deeply shadowed face— contorted, haggard, and sunk into hunched shoulders. The pain that both the diary entry and this portrait convey is curiously at odds with Corinth’s professional life, which had, in fact, been successful. Challenging traditional approaches to art, his early figure compositions, with their overt sexuality and theatrical movements, made his reputation. Later he executed intensely colored, windswept landscapes that became his most popular works. But Corinth was a deeply patriotic man, and his personal accomplishments failed to assuage the torment he experienced after Germany’s humiliation in World War I and his despair over the values of the Weimar Republic that followed.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Prints and Drawings

Artist

Lovis Corinth

Title

Self-Portrait

Place

Germany (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1924

Medium

Gouache, with possible additions in oil, on heavy ivory wove paper

Dimensions

48.6 × 30.5 cm (19 3/16 × 12 1/16 in.)

Credit Line

Clarence Buckingham Collection

Reference Number

1987.280

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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