Face à face: l'autoportrait de Cézanne à Bonnard = self-portrait : Cézanne to Bonnard

Abstract

The self-portrait represents the most mysterious and inaccessible question in the history of painting. In the twentieth century, the self-portrait is no longer just the affirmation of a well-defined function, but the seat of a deeper reflection, a way of questioning one's double, in a constant search for inner truth revealing an invisible part of oneself to the gaze of others. This search of self-awareness is metamorphosed into a fiction through each self-portrait, in an often very distant representation of what the artist sees in the mirror, somehow depicting a momentary truth which is reproposed in each work and expressed in extremely different manners according to painters. Beside the artworks of Bonnard, the book presents also those by Balthus, Bernard, Cézanne, Chagall, Denis, Maillol, Matisse, Manguin, Marquet, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Vallotton, as well as Buffet, Goetz, Hélion, Ibels, Poliakoff, Roussel, Tal Coat and Vieira da Silva. In this adventure of the gaze, the essays by Jean Louis Schefer, Alain Lévêque and Véronique Serrano shed historical light and open up paths of reflection. The essay of Roberto Mangú Quesada bears the voice of a painter, a precious testimony of the person who inevitably rubs shoulders with the other living inside himself. 00Exhibition: Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France (26.06.-03.10.2021).