The Cleveland Museum of Art
Self-Portraits: Forms of Identity
How we see ourselves influences our perspectives, our decisions, and the daily experience of living. Artists create tangible evidence of their process of reflection through self-portraits. By observing how luminaries from Rembrandt to Picasso represent themselves, we explore a variety of artists' personal statements, historical moments, and technical approaches. Discussion includes self-perception as related to images students may create of themselves as a follow-up or precursor to the program.
Program Format:
- Introduce ways in which artists may choose to depict themselves in terms of the amount of information revealed or concealed.
- Discuss naturalistic self-portraits by Rembrandt, Matisse, and Kollwitz.
- Discuss instances of borrowed identity in which artists present themselves as someone else.
- Discuss obscured identity where the individual is hidden but present in unexpected ways.
- Self-portrait interactivity.
Objectives:
- Students will reflect on the different roles in which they find themselves.
- Students will learn of the relationships between shape and color and how they can be used to express oneself.
- Students will see how other artists interpreted themselves; sometimes in many different ways and attitudes.
- Students will assess the role depicted in the self-portraits of Rembrandt, Matisse, and others.
- Students will choose three aspects of their own identity to use in creating three self-portrait sketches.
Source URL: https://www.clevelandart.org/learn/distance-learning/high-school/self-portraits-forms-identity
Links
[1] https://www.clevelandart.org/sites/default/files/documents/lesson-plans/Self%20Portrait%20WEB%20TIP%202017.pdf
[2] http://www.cilc.org/program_detail_new.aspx?id=2158
[3] https://cmaweb10.clevelandart.org/cgi-bin/Education.py