Knowing Me, Knowing You

Self-portraits; now, we've seen quite a lot of exhibitions of those over the years. You know how Rembrandt or Vincent van Gogh saw themselves. But how do artists depict other artists? What happens when Peter Blake meets David Hockney, when Eric Ravilious takes on Edward Bawden? Answers can be found at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in a very interesting and illuminating exhibition entitled Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists. 

And sometimes the artist you see is a different artist from the one you might be expecting. When Mary McCartney photographed Tracey Emin in 2000, what came out was Frida Kahlo. McCartney felt a close affinity with the Mexican artist, and so did Emin, whose controversial My Bed had just been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. McCartney said she'd had a daydream of Emin as Kahlo, who spent a lot of time in bed herself as a result of her disabling injuries. 

Emin was made up and dressed for the shoot, and then, according to McCartney, "I picked the camera up and she stopped talking and just really started channelling Frida." 

Of course, you don't have to dress up to express your admiration of earlier artists. You can quote from the classics in paint, daring to put yourself on the same level as the great masters (nearly always male, obviously) of history. When Peter Blake and Howard Hodgkin went out to California to see David Hockney, they marked the occasion with a pastiche of Gustave Courbet's The Meeting or Hello Mr Courbet from 1854.

Hockney stands with hat in hand, like Courbet, though his walking stick is replaced by a giant paintbrush. Blake and Hodgkin assume the poses of Courbet's host and servant, who've come to greet him on a country road. And while the dog looks rather similar, the southern French landscape is replaced by the very Californian glamour of Venice Beach, with its roller-skaters. It's a very knowing painting. 

Hockney also appears in a photograph by David Dawson, Lucian Freud's assistant, sitting next to the portrait Freud has painted of him. Freud looks something like a butcher, come to cut up a carcass. 

Freud and Francis Bacon appear quite a lot in this show, in various guises, and indeed a Freud portrait of Bacon is the first you see as you make your way in. On a Wanted poster. 

What's going on here? Freud issued this poster in a bid to recover a small oil-on-copper portrait that he'd painted of Bacon at the beginning of their friendship in the early 1950s. The picture was stolen from an exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie in 1988, and Freud wanted it back for a retrospective at the Tate in 2002. It's still missing, so if you have any idea where it is, you could always try ringing that Berlin number for the reward that could be more than 150,000 euros.

Bacon's also the subject of one of the strangest portraits in this exhibition, created by Clare Shenstone. Bacon bought a cloth head made by Shenstone for her degree show and commissioned his own; this is a study for it. 

For Shenstone, cloth has similarities with human skin because it's warm to the touch and is pliable, with the potential to move. This three-dimensional image is fascinating, if somewhat disturbing. It brings up associations with the Turin Shroud, with the symbol of the Green Man, or with gargoyles on a medieval cathedral or a Renaissance fountain.

Among the most striking pictures in this show are a pair of portraits of each other by unhappily married couple Jean Cooke and John Bratby, an exponent of the kitchen-sink realism school of painting. We learn from the wall caption that the marriage, which lasted more than two decades, was marred by Bratby's abusive and violent behaviour towards his wife, which included limiting her time to produce her own work. In Bratby's picture of Cooke, painted just a year after the wedding, she's sat naked behind their kitchen table, which is bizarrely covered by food packets and utensils. She looks utterly disconsolate.  

Hung nearby is Cooke's own Early Portrait of John Bratby RA , with him at the other end of the same table. It's more simple, sparse, neat and tidy, but it tends somewhat to undermine Bratby's persona of the Angry Young Man, the Enfant Terrible. He's only in his mid-20s, but with his sweater and sandals and balding hair, he looks about 20 years older. 

Ageing is certainly part of the theme here as Ishbel Myerscough takes an honest look at herself and her friend Chantal Joffe, who've been depicting themselves for more than three decades. It's not just the faces that are showing the passing of time. Lucky is the woman who hasn't cringed at the sight of that bulge of flesh over their bra when they looked in a fitting-room mirror.

This is one of several pictures by the pair in this show, Myerscough working with a very fine brush, Joffe with a much broader one. 

Most of the images we've picked out here are of relatively recent date. Though this exhibition goes back to the start of the 20th century, we have to say that, once you get past the introduction, the first couple of rooms feel a little dry, a touch staid, with pictures such as William Orpen's portrait of a rather self-satisfied looking Augustus John setting the scene. 

You need to get to World War I for the action to start; with the men away, Gladys Hynes had the women taking over, depicting her artist friends after a morning swim in a modern version of Botticelli's Birth of Venus. 

The androgynous Gluck, on the left, wears a man's bathing costume. 

Let's end in the studio, though; not the paint-spattered atelier of a Bacon or Freud, but a rather more refined affair. This picture by Eric Ravilious of Edward Bawden at first appears rather simple with its calm colours, but it's filled with details that are a delight to explore and recall the way both he and his subject focused on quirky minutiae. Obviously, Bawden the artist at work is centre-stage -- smartly dressed and neatly framed by the black window surround and the draping golden curtains. Don't miss the cat, the discarded guardsman's tunic, the organ pipe arrangement of the upright canvases and the glass dome display case.

This is a big, wide-ranging show with lots to discover; another excellent reason to visit Chichester.

Practicalities 

Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists is on at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until November 2. The gallery is open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Saturdays and 1100 to 1700 on Sundays and bank holidays. Full-price admission for this and the other concurrent shows is £17, including a £2 Gift Aid donation, and you can book online here. Allow yourself perhaps 90 minutes for this exhibition. 

The gallery is just a few minutes walk from Chichester station, to which there's a train every half hour from London Victoria Mondays to Saturdays. The journey takes about 90 minutes. Hourly trains on Sundays take longer. 

Images

Mary McCartney (b. 1969), Being Frida, 2000, Courtesy of the Artist. © Photograph by Mary McCartney
Peter Blake (b. 1932), 'The Meeting' or 'Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney', 1981-83, Tate
Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Wanted Poster, 2001, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Clare Shenstone (b. 1948), Study for Bacon Cloth Head, c. 1980, Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich
John Bratby (1928-1992), Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window, 1954, Southampton City Art Gallery 
Ishbel Myerscough (b. 1968), Two Painters, 2025, Courtesy of the Artist and Flowers Gallery. © Ishbel Myerscough. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery
Gladys Hynes (1888-1958), Morning, 1916, Collection RAW 
Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), Edward Bawden Working in his Studio, 1930, Royal College of Art. © Royal College of Art/Bridgeman Images