Art Mirrors Art

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Maxwell G. Miller - Self portrait (c.2020)

Charcoal on paper, ~ 20x24 cm

(more accurate title would be 'A self-portrait of an artist painting a his self-portrait from his reflection in a mirror')

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Lillian Bassman - Dovima, for Harper's Bazaar, New York (1954)

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Anna Airy - Interior with Mrs Charles Burnand Colchester (1919)

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Max Ernst - The Stolen Mirror (1941) When his son Jimmy asked him where is the mirror in the painting, Ernst supposedly answered 'It was stolen', and it became the title of the work.

The painting is made with the use of decalcomania, the technique when the image is partly created by pressing various objects against the canvas with wet paint and then pulling then away, leaving the traces. Did he used a mirror for some of the parts?

Oil on canvas, ~ 65 × 80 cm; I shared it here, long ago, but had a very poor quality copy back then.

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Nan Goldin - C Putting On Her Make Up, Bangkok (1992)

From the same series as this photo

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Utagawa Kunisada - Shiro (白), or White, from the series 'Five colors of the floating world' (1844) Notice a brush with white powder laying at the mirror; we also see the word 白 (shiro, white) - written on the top of the cartouche (tanzaku) stylized as an animal head (lion or perhaps baku)

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Jacob van der Heyden - Allegory of Vision {Gezicht} (c.1620s)

Engraving,~ 12x12 cm

[psikonauti]

Giovanni Boldini (Italian,1842-1931)

Cardinal Bernini in the studio, 1899

Oil on canvas

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Giovanni Boldini - Bust of Cardinal Bernini in the artist's studio (1899)

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Got a nice AMA postcard: it’s a charcoal and pastel sketch by Isaac Israëls, known as Het Toilet (c.1900s).

It’s sometimes also referred as Woman with Red Lipstick, but that's anachronistic in Dutch. The word lippenstift wasn't used in Dutch until the later 1930s - before that, it would be lippen verven, literally 'to paint the lips'

So, a more coeval title would be Jonge vrouw verft haar lippen:

Around 1900, Israëls started to work with the Amsterdam fashion house Hirsch and got access to its whole behind-the-scenes machinery. During this time he painted its numerous models, their assistants, seamstresses and sometimes clients:

Most of the drawings of this period remain undated, so they are collectively described as c. 1900-1904 (in 1904 Israëls moved to Paris, where he began working in a somewhat different style). This above drawing is described by M Leuven as Jonge vrouw bij haar opschik (or 'Young woman adorning herself'). That’s too generic, the original description would be something like Ze maakt haar ogen op (literally 'She makes up her eyes')

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Workshop of David Teniers II, or the Younger - Interior with the scene of hair washing (c.1660s) Oil painting on canvas, ~ 35x45 cm The 'washing' that we see here is different from how we would do it today - there is no flowing water, instead the maid combs the hair (likely by a wet comb), removing dirt, grease (and often lice) with fine teeth, and using coarser teeth to separate and arrange the hair:

The mirror is here, but it's not used at all: the maid doesn't need it, and the young girls can't see herself either - it's this dark rectangular object on the windowsill at the far left, partly cut off by the edge of the painting:

The funny small detail is another dog's face peeping in through window.

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Marcos Beccari - Terça-feira, or 'as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happen' (2024)

Surprisingly for the painter that depicts all kind of reflective surfaces (water, glass, also displays of modern gadgets etc) so often, Becarri has very few works with mirrors. This is only the second I found, out of many dozens.

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Monochrome version of the water-color by Marcos Beccari I've just shared; I don't think it's a separate art-work, looks like a digital post-processing of the colorful image, but it shows the texture better. Anyway, I also wanted to share a short movie showing the making of:

[artmialma]

 Marcos Beccari (brn 1987)

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Marcos Beccari - Terça-feira {Tuesday} (aka 'Time doesn't heal anything. Time just displaces the incurable from the timelight') (2022) I don't think that these terça-feira or quinta-feira {Thursday in Portuguese) are parts of the titles, they look like time-stamps in his blog. Yet - with time - they became an essential part of the work, too. I also found a nice short clip showing the making-of of this water-color: Oops, I can't add videos to re-blogs :( Will write a separate post - see it here

[granstromjulius]

Marcel Duchamp

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I study mirrors in art, and I like Duchamp (and I did research his own mirror art, too) - and yet I missed this work entirely! I guess the reason is that these mirrors (there were four of them) were almost completely hidden from the public till 2019 - especially this one.

Duchamp made these mirrors during his visit to the Milan Triennale in 1964, as an artistic response of some sort to the works by Enrico Baj (those were made from broken mirrors):

Apparently, Duchamp found them interesting but too complicated, and made his own minimalist art-mirrors. Basically, he just scratched his signature into the silvered backing, so that anyone standing before the mirror would produce a portrait with Duchamp’s own signature. As he wrote himself: Je suis en train de signer de futurs portraits readymade (‘I am signing future readymade portraits’). He made four such mirrors: three with elaborate light wooden frames:

and the forth with a dark frame; it is also the largest of them, ~ 45 x 55 cm with the frame.

After the exhibition Duchamp gave this dark variant to Cesare Nova, a Milanese collector and gallerist. It stayed with his family and had never been publicly exhibited, or even included in a catalogue of Duchamp’s works

An exceptionally clever AMA piece:

Thanks @nonhapiupareti for the hint!

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Eva Gonzalès - La Psyché (c.1870) Oil on canvas, ~ 26x40 cm 'Une psyché' was the name of such full-length mirrors in French around this time. The model is Jeanne, Gonzalès’s younger sister. A small red flower reflected in the mirror is the only bright spot in this otherwise very subdued painting:

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Benny Andrews - Everything That Rises Must Converge, #1 (1961)

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of etchings inspired by the short story by Flannery O'Connor.

The story's core element is a bus trip that one man takes with his bigoted mother. The mother insisted that her son accompany her because of the recent introduction of 'integration' in the Southern states of the USA - she doesn't want to ride alone in the presence of Black people. The guy is disgusted by his mother’s open racism but agrees to ride with her.

The tensions between them escalate when a Black mother and son board the same bus - with the woman wearing the exactly same hat as the mother. A very complex social interactions then follow, but I don't want to spoil your experience of reading it yourself.

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Benny Andrews - Mirror, mirror (1964) The back side of the painting: