SELFHOOD: Explorations of Being and Becoming in 20th and 21st Century Ar

To celebrate the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery, Christie’s will hold Selfhood: Explorations of Being and Becoming in 20th and 21st Century Art, a selling exhibition focusing on art as a vehicle for the expression of self-identity as part of the gallery’s Portrait Mode campaign. Curated by the Private Sales team and opening at Christie’s King Street, London on 20th June, and on view until 13th July, the cross-platform exhibition will also be available online until 31st August and includes works by Tracey Emin, Lucian Freud, Alice Neel, Suzanne Valadon and many more.

The exhibition will aim to engage with artists that investigate, reclaim and celebrate the many iterations of self as a unique bodily, societal and psychological experience.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Alice Neel’s portrait Nancy, depicting her daughter-in-law, and is on loan in the exhibition.  Likely painted while Nancy was already pregnant, Nancy would soon become the subject of Neel’s famed series of pregnant sitters and new mothers. “She could keep up a really interesting conversation, she was concentrating on painting and trying to keep the subject loose and not frozen. The conversation was very animated, but she never stopped painting.” - Nancy Greene

Neel described herself as “a collector of souls,” referring to her deep and emotional introspection of those who posed for her. She had a particular interest in working with those who were not typically painted such as pregnant women, people of colour, labour leaders, children and members of the LGBTQ+ community. What is so distinctive about Nancy and Neel’s practice as a whole is that her portraits are timeless and focus on the individuality of each subject.

Neel has recently been the subject of a major travelling retrospective exhibition in Paris (The Centre Pompidou) and London (Barbican Art Gallery) in 2022-2023. Her works continue to make top prices at auction, with  Christie’s having set the top four records for the artist, most recently in May 2023 with The De Vegh Twins  achieving the second highest price at auction for work by Neel, selling for over $2.5M.

Painted in 1917 Suzanne Valadon’s Femme aux seins nus (Autoportrait) is  an important loan in the exhibition. Living in Montmartre with her son throughout the 1880s and 1890s, she posed for some of Renoir’s most significant masterpieces, also serving as model to Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Valadon was self-taught and this radical portrait was painted when she was 52, the first of a series of candid nude self-portraits painted at a time when it was considered scandalous for a woman to paint herself bare, and defying the traditional version of the idealised, sensual female body. Baring her breasts both as a symbol of courage, beauty and vulnerability, Valadon would go on to challenge the status quo with alternative representations of the female body, foregrounding interrogatory self-portraits by post-war artists such as Alice Neel, Caroline Coon and Tracey Emin. Christie’s has achieved the three highest records for Valadon’s work at auction, and all top five auction records have been achieved in the global market since 2020, indicating renewed collecting interest in her work.

In a self-portrait by Marc Chagall he faces forward, making direct eye-contact with the viewer, a painting on his easel in the background featuring a woman in a red dress that evokes his second wife Valentina Brodsky, to whom the dedication and title of the work most likely refer to as “Tine”. The gouache was painted in 1965, a time of deep contentment and professional recognition, much of which was spent in the South of France with his loving partner.

Another central work in the exhibition is Lucian Freud’s Portrait of a Man. This work depicts Bernard Walsh, the renowned restaurateur and owner of Wheelers, one of Lucian Freud’s favourite Soho restaurants. A popular haunt for artist’s at the time, Freud would frequent Wheelers and spend long meals with the likes of Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. Freud frequently painted those who were close to him, and with Portrait of a Man, the significance of Bernard Walsh in the artist’s life is clear.

Contemporary highlights include Tracey Emin’s 2019 You Carried my Soul, depicting Emin’s most iconic, recognisable and revisited motif: the figure of a reclining nude (on loan). Throughout her painting practice, Emin explores the notions of love, longing, personal tragedy and a sense of physical vulnerability. Painting, a medium that the artist previously abandoned in 1990, has been consistently connected to the artist’s own bodily experience throughout her life. Emin moved back to her hometown of Margate in 2017, where she has recently opened a studio with an artist’s residency programme. Christie’s set the record for a painting by Emin last year when Like a Cloud of Blood sold for £2.3M.

Portrait of Carol Rama (overleaf) is a striking example of Ewa Juszkiewicz’s distinct surrealist portraits and an ode to Italian painter Carol Rama, her signature braided hairstyle prominently displayed.

Often basing her portraits on little-known works, or canvases that were lost or destroyed, Juszkiewicz deliberately obscures her sitters’ identities, replacing their heads with fungi, hair, flowers, insects and drapery. In doing so, she seeks to provoke new associations, liberating her female protagonists from the male gaze and forcing them into bold confrontation with the viewer. They are no longer quiet, pristine specimens, but sensory, metamorphic hybrids, each alive with stories and secrets. By transforming her classical subjects into surreal apparitions, Juszkiewicz prompts the viewer to reflect upon the role of women in historical portraiture.

Other Exhibition Highlights: