It's All About Me: California Artists' Self-Portraits

May 3 - August 17, 2008

This exhibition of fourteen paintings and photographs celebrates both the richness of California art over the last century and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s permanent collection.  Being one of the oldest art museums in California with a commitment to contemporary art, the collection of self-portraits by California artists has grown significantly over the years.

Artists have explored a wide range of approaches and assumed differing social stances. There is no one defining style or typical self image that defines this exhibition. Two works by Clarence Hinkle, a Santa Barbara artist, bracket the exhibition.  In his Self-Portrait with Bowler Hat, he plays the handsome, young art student, with a dash of bohemianism.  While in his last self—portrait, Today and Yesterday, which was painted when he was eighty, meditates on this youthful self-image and records his own decrepitude.

Helen Lundeberg, one of the first California surrealists used her own self-image as a memory device, recalling her youthful self, but distancing herself from it by reproducing it as a portrait within a portrait.  Robert Arneson’s drawing is a world away in feeling:  the artist as a rude, boorish breaker of social conventions.  Henry Miller, better known as an author, adopts the vigorous style of the French artist Georges Rouault to convey his sense of himself as a rebel.

Alma Lavenson, whose identity was shaped by her passion for photography, offers a close up of her hands protectively holding her camera as she focuses her lens.  In contrast, Mary Latour reclines in a euphoric reverie as she lights a long-stemmed pipe, an image that defied the rules of ladies’ behavior and women’s proper place.