Fin de partie: A Group of Self-Portraits by Jean-Léon Gérôme (original) (raw)

Between 1886 and 1902, during the period before his death in 1904, Jean-Léon Gérôme produced a series of painted and photographic self-portraits depicting himself at work on his sculpture with a nude model. These representations seem to reiterate his mastery by displaying his virtuosity in two media, but this paper argues that the series was simultaneously a response to a crisis in masculine professional identity in which overcompensation served to diffuse Gérôme’s increasing anxiety of lateness. When Gérôme made his sculptural debut in his mid-fifties the Universal Exposition of 1878, he was at the height of his professional career as a painter. The turn to sculpture complicated his public persona. While on the one hand the initiative extended his artistic identity, on the other it returned him to the bottom of professional hierarchies as measured by official awards. He was simultaneously master and novice. During the subsequent decades, as he received awards for the sculptures he exhibited at the Salon, he reascended the professional hierarchy, but simultaneously, the aesthetic values and official structures on which he had built his career were--from his point of view--subverted, as avant-garde artists whose work he considered degenerate were welcomed into the Musée de Luxembourg and women were admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As he entered the endgame of his career, the self-portraits provided a vehicle for negotiating the instability of his professional persona and the increasing uncertainty of his legacy. The first works in the series suggest his difficulties in coming to terms with the place of sculpture in his oeuvre; the final painting reasserts his aesthetic values and challenges the modernism that was displacing the traditions to which he belonged.