Analysing a (self-) portrait

Medium (Oil, watercolour, gouache, photograph, etc)
Size, colours, shapes, texture, light + shade
Style ("school") : cubist, expressionist, surrealist, dadaist, impressionist...
How is the subject treated ? (the "atmosphere")
What do you think the artist tried to say ?
About himself ? What do we learn about his personnality ?
What have others said about the portrait ?
When the artist did the portrait, how old was he, what was his situation ? Are his circumstances revealed in the portrait ?
For whom was the portrait intended ?
What are your thoughts, memories, emotions (association of ideas) when looking at the portrait ?

Artists write about painting portraits….

The distance from the chin to the nostrils makes up a third of the face. It is the same from the nostrils to the eyebrows, and again from the eyebrows to the hairline. From one ear to the other, the distance is the same as from the eyebrows to the chin. The width of the mouth is the same as that from the middle of the lips to the chin.
Leonardo da Vinci

Biography of my favourite artist

My favourite artist is Salvador Dali (with an accent on the i). He was a spanish surrealist artist but also a sculptor and a screenwriter. He was born on May 11, in 1904, in Catalonia, Spain.

When Dali got his bachelor he went in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando, but even if he was very gifted, he was expelled from there because he stated that no one in there was smart enough to examine him.

In 1926, he made his first trip to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso. This one had already heard favorable reports about Dali from Joan Miro.

Three years later he came back to Paris for the shooting of "Un chien andalou" and met with the Surrealists : Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard and his wife, Gala. He had dreamed and drawed her before they met, they'll never leave eachother.

1929 had been a decisive year for him because he integrated officially the surrealist movement.

One year later, his has been considered as crazy because he wanted to kill himself.

In 1932, he went to the States for participate to his first surrealist exposition and had a triumphal sucess. Then, it's the beginning of the methode paranoid-critic which wants to cretinized the world.

After his exile to New York between 1939 and 1948, his came back to his beloved Catalonia were he drew criticism. He'll practise it until the end of his life. Late in his career, he integrated in his paintings the gigantism, the pointillism, the tachism... Well, all the possible words ended by -ism.

Dali was also interested in other arts like cinema, photography, mode or publicity. He was passioned by science and in particular by the "relativity theory" of Albert Einstein that he showed in the painting "The Persistence of Memory", most known as the "melting clocks".

In 1982, Dali became Marquis of Pùbol and lived in the castle that he offered to his wife ; unfortunnetly, she died the same year, destroying the artist. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom, in unclear circumstances.

On January 23, 1989, he died of an heart failure, at the age of 84, and was burried in the crypt of his Teatre Museu in Figueres.

Some of Dali's most known paintings :

-The Dream

-The Persistence of Memory

-Metamorphosis of Narcissus

-The Hallucinogenic Toraedor...

Some of Dali's most know creations :

-The Chupa Chups logo

-Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas

-The Mae West room...

My favourite artist's self-portrait

So, those are the self-portraits that I've choosen of my favourite artist : Salvador Dali. I've choosen two photos because they "work" together. They're named "Self Portrait as Mona Lisa"(on the right) and "LHOOQ"(on the left).

Those are (unfortunatly) not paintings, because Dali never paints any self-portrait, so those are photographies taken by Philipe Halsman, Dali's collaborator who decided to make a book named "Dali Moustache" in 1954. The most known is "LHOOQ" (taken in 1919) because it's a very controversial picture. Moreover, we still don't know yet what is the tittle meaning. Some tell that it's supposed to be read in english like the word "look", and some are think that it should be read in french which would give the sentence "Elle a chaud au cul"*. They are much more ideas about the tittle but it would take to much place to write them all.

I loooove this portrait because it was bold to made this : Mona Lisa is such a beautiful and well-known picture that it's almost a crime to make a "parody" of it. But it's very funny and mysterious, just like Dali actually, that's why it became my favourite portrait.

Questions about the exposition.

1-Why did Gisèle Freud choose to take only portraits of well-known people ?
2-Why has the girl on the picture "disepeared" ?
3-What's disturbing about Katherine Marx's Photos ?
4-Is the "black and white" style represent sadness or happiness ?
5-Why did Marc Le Mené choose to make his pictures misterious ?
6-Can a portrait represents the personnality of the models ?
7-How can we show sadness on a picture ? Is there a special light ? A special colour ?
8-Why did all those artists choose to be artists ?
9-How can we show mouvement on a photo ?
10-What's special on Ouka Lélé photo ?