in vogue, self-portrait

While doing a project, I needed some cutouts from Vogue, and I decided to reread the September 2006 issue. Just goes to show you, that the magazine does get it right occasionally.Picasso's Self-Portrait, 1972.

Chuck Close's Big Self-Portrait, 1967-1968. (I covet this piece, and love to imagine hanging it in my future home).

There's that wonderful Picasso self-portrait, crayon and whatever, of a big head with very big eyes and stubble all over. It's such a great, great work, one of the last things he did. It looks like a skull. My self-portrait with beard stubble, which I guess was done a few years earlier than Picasso's, is in the same spirit--nonheroic, not portrait-as-celebrity or the Warhol sense of superstars, but reality and awkwardness and painfulness and all of that stuff.

It's hard to remember how late Picasso was trashed, as was late de Kooning. To really have an impact, an artist has to finish great. Had Matisse not done his cutouts, which he reinvented in Nice, I don't think he would be considered a great artist today. You really need a great endgame. And when Picasso was marginalised at the end of his career by the critics, he had tremendous urgency for artists. Artists looked at that work and saw unbelievable energy and invention at a point where most artists are just content to plow the same field. Attitudinally he's saying, vital to the end, inventive till the end, take risks. It was extremely encouraging.

What you do is you go out and reinvent the whole God-damn ball game.

source: Vogue Sept 2006