In Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (1994) I utilize the myth of Narcissus and Echo in its literary, pictorial, and psychoanalytic versions as a means of viewing Monet's many paintings of reflections of landscape in the waters of his pond, as well as his rare paintings of his own reflection in the stdio mirror, as traces of an ambivalent project of recovering and repelling an absent male and female gaze, a project I see as one of the chief manifestations of the masculine culture of modernism. In this presentation I will extend my investigation of these pictorial and philosophical mirrorings of self and other to Monet's precursors and successors from the age of the Renaissance in France to the postmodern self-portraitists of today.

This presentation will focus on a series of exemplary self-portraits from Poussin, David, and Courbet to Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp and also on a parallel series of literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic accounts of self and other from Montaigne, Descartes, and Rousseau to Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida. On the one hand, the self-portraits in question variously reflect their periods' contested beliefs regarding the status of the self as a corporeal, psychological, social, and linguistic subject and, on the other hand, they actively contribute to the reproduction or transformation of these same ideological assumptions through the historical effects of their visual reception.

In the early seventeenth century a searching self-portrait drawing by Poussin already resonates with the mundane and embodied temporality explored by the autobiographical essayist Montaigne in his relentless query, "Que sais-je?" or "What do I know?" To Montaigne's skeptical inquiry into the irreducible worldliness of the self, Descartes later opposes his resolutely transcendental axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum," "I think therefore I am." Descartes thus affirms the self's autonomous existence, but at the high cost of separating body, mind, and world, a cost that we have continued to pay to our great peril today.

Poussin's painted self-portrait of 1650 destabilizes the Cartesian coordinates of an unchanging, disembodied self, offering instead a precarious negotiation between an effigy of the Roman painter, his absent patron in Paris for whom the painting is inscribed, and a depicted female personification of painting that is the object of their gaze. We encounter this same triangle of painter, patron, and matron throughout the French tradition here under inspection, nowhere more notably than in The Painter's Studio of 1855 by Courbet in which the artist works upon a landscape in the presence of his female model/mistress/mother/muse while flanked by a worldly cast of characters including a disguised Napoleon III as well as the poet Baudelaire, the preeminent nineteenth-century writer of the private self "stripped bare" and of the practice of "face painting" that is its public mask.

This self is stripped bare neither to some imaginary introspective core nor to some real instinctive embodiment but rather to the externally symbolized traces of its unconscious desire, and it is this lost object that is the great, elusive subject pursued in the psychoanalytic interrogation of Lacan. My presentation will end with a restaging of these same mirror dynamics of self-projection and self-annililation in the work of male artists such as Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp who offer to our socially avid gaze their sexualized and mechanized self-images in the face of the ever-present absence of their matrons and patrons of life and art.