Template:Did you know nominations/Self-Portrait (Ellen Thesleff)
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Self-Portrait (Ellen Thesleff)
- ... that art historians believe Self-Portrait may have been drawn by Ellen Thesleff in a trance-like state?
- Crabbe, Gilee (2019). "Hidden Influences". FNG Research. 4. Finnish National Gallery. Retrieved 19 November 2024.
- Quote, p. 3: "Thesleff was known to have practised automatic drawing...Thesleff continued working on the piece however, and when it was shown again – she dated it twice – the artist had worked on it further in sepia ink, giving it a deeper chiaroscuro, a technique resembling the sepiatone spirit photographs that were popular among esoteric circles at the time. 'The way the head emerges from the dark background makes it seem like an immaterial spirit in the process of materialisation,' said Lahelma. 'This processual method resembles the surrealists' quest to liberate the creative imagination by using experimental methods based on psychic automatism and trance states. Before the surrealists turned this into a conscious artistic method, this kind of technique was used in mediumistic art.' In Thesleff's piece, Lahelma continued, 'the introspective attitude is manifest both in technique and in the facial expression and the artist appears to be in some kind of creative trance. And this is a significant point, here it is not only the content or the subject matter that is connected to esoteric ideas but also the technique – not only what has been represented but how it has been represented. Perhaps here we can think of art as an esoteric practice.'"
- Lahelma, Marja (2014). Ideal and Disintegration: Dynamics of the Self and Art at the Fin-de-Siècle. (PhD thesis). University of Helsinki. pp. 148-179. ISBN 9789521097287. OCLC 897998723.
Viriditas (talk) 05:30, 26 November 2024 (UTC).
Extremely cool hook—absolutely love it. Appropriate sourced in the article with a citation at the end of the sentence. Article is solid with no issues jumping out at me about copyvio. Painting is well into the public domain so I say we run it (especially since it's a woman's self portrait, which we lack representation on). Thanks for overdoing it on the QPQs! ~ Pbritti (talk) 23:53, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, User:Pbritti. I feel that in the interests of openness and transparency, I should mention that it's possible to make the hook even better. I neglected to do this because I was working on too many articles at once, but if you are interested in keeping this nom on your watchlist, I may be able to add an even better hook. It wouldn't change the current hook all that much, but it would add one additional component, namely that Thesleff was trying to evoke the style of a spirit photograph. As you can see, I only got as far as adding a see also link to the composition section. But I could probably work it in by tomorrow and update the hook if you like. I haven't figured out how to word it just yet, but it could read something like "... that art historians believe Self-Portrait may have been drawn by Ellen Thesleff in a trance-like state to resemble a spirit photograph?" Not sure how to do it, but it's something I've been thinking about. Just a note, there was one missing element that I was unable to track down. The Finnish language Wikipedia has an article that makes a curious claim. It says "Thesleff's father had died a couple of years earlier, and the gaze of the self-image of grief is thought to be due to the death of [her] father." I was able to confirm that her father had died (and I need to add that to the article, so I'm glad I'm having this discussion now), but I couldn't confirm anything about the relationship between the death of her father and this work, which could also add additional light on the nature of the spirit photograph. Was she trying to communicate with her dead father? We don't know any of this. But I did make a source request that is attempting to get to the bottom of this. For what it's worth, the Finnish Wikipedia claim is somewhat odd, as I could not find a single source that says this image is one of "grief". Viriditas (talk) 02:54, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
- This is endlessly fascinating. It turns out User:Bsoyka may have just helped solve this conundrum. They were able to share one page from OCLC 42579323 with me, which as it turns out, might be the very page that answers this question. The so-called "grief" appears in an entirely different self-portrait, but one from the same series during the same year as this one. This might explain why the Finnish Wikipedia editor added it to that article. They got confused between the two different self-portraits. Amazing. Viriditas (talk) 20:12, 11 December 2024 (UTC)