Why does this 1909 portrait look contemporary?

October 17, 2022 1:43 AM

A self portrait by Zinaida Serebriakova, painted in 1909, featured in this twitter thread today. Many people commented that it looks contemporary. Are there technical reasons why? Is it something specific to the composition, the palette, her facial features lining up with current tastes?
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye to Media & Arts (20 answers total)

Response by poster: Here's a link to the same painting if you don't have a twitter login: Self-portrait at the Dressing Table
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 1:46 AM on October 17, 2022

Something about the way it is 'cropped' close in around the subject, as though its a photograph. And the view is aimed down a bit (the items on her dresser appear much larger) suggesting to me some distortion, as though this image was being viewed through the a lens of a camera, not through a person's eyes. And, this isn't technical, but the subject is smiling. That alone adds to its contemporariness. Also, she's smiling at herself in a mirror, which makes it feel like a selfie.
posted by marimeko at 2:56 AM on October 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think it's mostly the lighting. Oil paintings were often much darker, or at least more vivid-- like the other paintings of hers in that thread, in fact. The lighting here is very bright and flat, like an overexposed photograph. It doesn't hurt that the hair is down and doesn't (I think) look like what you'd wear in 1909 in public.
posted by zompist at 4:06 AM on October 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

I was wondering the same thing (The Cultural Tutor who posted the above thread), recently featured it for 1909, as part of a series of "just one painting for each years of the Twentieth Century" - is certainly stands out in that context too.

Maybe something to do with "female gaze" - art by and to some extent, for women - Serebriakova's self portrait is about hair, the particular way she is styling it, the objects she has on her dressing table, and on what she was thinking. The realism points to the photographs which were starting to become more prevalent at the time - but it removes the photographer from the reflection in a way which would have been tricky to do until recently. Being able to take (and light) a self portrait - as a photo - of such an intimate and solitary moment - is actually something that has only really become practical in an era of smartphone cameras - which adds to the feeling of modernity.
posted by rongorongo at 4:22 AM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

For me it’s definitely the bright light, which itself is a cool (blueish) color rather than the warmer color of candles or evening sun, in addition to the fact that, with the way subject is in the middle of combing out her hair, the painting looks like a candid snapshot.

The bracelet and uncovered shoulder also give me a sense of fairly modern, though not contemporary, fashion.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 5:19 AM on October 17, 2022

Yes, lighting, mood, and color pallette, but also because it looks like the framing and activity of a YouTuber. The 'getting ready in front of a mirror in the bedroom' is ubiquitous among lifestyle and beauty vloggers.
posted by ananci at 5:24 AM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Because contemporary fashion/interior design is evocative of an earlier time. Without the obvious tells of a 1909 hairdo, hat, and day dress this could easily be a painting of a young woman in 2022 wearing a white nap dress in a 2019-era bedroom with wood floors and white walls after she carefully decanted her beauty products into glass bottles because she saw it on TikTok.

In 1986 this painting probably looked of its time, and in 10 years this will look dated again.
posted by kimberussell at 6:02 AM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I first saw this self-portrait twenty years ago and it hit me like a thunderbolt. Serebriakova depicts herself in an intimate setting, full of self confidence. The diffuse morning light resembles that created by a "ring light." She's wearing what appears to be a night gown. It's not really a self-portrait so much as a moment captured in time. Her face is intentionally distorted: small chin, big eyes. What Asians call a "small face." It's a female statement in a world dominated by men; it transcends time.
posted by jabah at 6:09 AM on October 17, 2022 [7 favorites]

The large eyes are the key, I think. Exaggerated or prominent eyes were not at that time part of Western portraiture or even caricature in the way they are today. She is also thin with an angular face instead of the large, soft face and decolletage of late Victorian fashion, which reads as "fat" today. (It should not, but it does.) And, of course, she is smiling openly and naturally, not being solemn for a photograph or aloof like a Sargent painting or a Gibson girl.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:29 AM on October 17, 2022 [7 favorites]

I think it’s because the panelling on the wall in the upper right looks like an interior door like this.
posted by Erinaceus europaeus at 6:35 AM on October 17, 2022

The dramatically oversized eyes are doing a lot here. They look like they've been run through a filter.
posted by ssg at 6:37 AM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, the face and body are stylized and that makes it look post WWII, maybe sixties-ish in particular.

I also think that Serebriakova's paintings look modern because of the spirit with which she paints people, women in particular. Not only do many of the women look right at you, they look at you with a friendly, confident but neutral and self-contained gaze. Or else they are focused on what they are doing rather than giving the impression that they are performing it cutely or sexily or symbolically for the viewer. The women she paints don't (at least to my mind) symbolize, eg, the eternal feminine, the state of society after WWI, the inherent self-absorption of women, vanity, youth, the tragedy of age, motherhood, etc.

Being interested in painting women as individuals in their individual situations seems relatively unusual even now - I was just reading some articles about figurative painters who focus on women and for nearly all of them the women were fantasy and allegory of one kind or another, endless pictures of basically the same woman being sexy and angry, sexy and sad, sexy and vengeful, tragically-formerly-sexy-because-now-old, sexy-and-vain-because-of-the-internet, sexy and pensive, sexy and scholarly, sexy and righteous, etc.
posted by Frowner at 6:49 AM on October 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

She's got knitting needles on her dresser and is using a comb not a brush. I guess people see what they want to see. Also people assume that fashion has changed dramatically, but it's not really true.

Casual clothes have been relatively consistent for a long time:
1890s -1900s runners.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:45 AM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

They're not knitting needles, they're hat pins.

I think it's a combination of subject and composition. It's a female subject performing a daily activity, portrayed in a candid style like a photograph. The subject is depicted looking forward, as if looking into a mirror a la a selfie. All this seems very modern.

There's also what's mentioned above about the female gaze and the subject not being depicted in a cute/sexy/symbolic way but as a person living her life.
posted by fiercekitten at 8:35 AM on October 17, 2022 [6 favorites]

She totally has Disney Princess face, which runs counter to the very "realistic" facial features we associate with paintings of the time -- though often, those were also done in a way that was more flattering to the subject.

Other portraits of around that time show a shift toward the subject looking directly at/engaging with the viewer, or having a more dynamic expression in general (I am thinking of a couple works in particular but sadly don't know their names!), but still with the very smooth, blended brushwork and fundamentally very realistic/proportionate features of, say, Singer's Madame X.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:18 PM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

The colors are quite white-heavy; there's surely a better term, but I don't know it. There's a feeling of activity, older paintings often seem more indolent.
posted by theora55 at 1:23 PM on October 17, 2022

Something else just occurred to me - so often when women are painted looking in the mirror, it's sort of a comic book trick so that the viewer can enjoy (or deplore, or deplore-enjoy) both the face and the ass, so to speak. The women are painted so that we see the reflection, the whole mirror and the woman's body as separate things. The women are looking in the mirror, not at us - we're spying on them in private, we're not challenged by their gaze because they are (so like women!) narcissistically absorbed in their own appearance.

Here the artist is looking right at us, we're the mirror or we're the artist looking at ourselves. And while we see her face and body, we see them as one thing.

Also, she's doing her hair but not, like, sexily - she doesn't have her arms up to reveal her breasts, she isn't pouting, she hasn't gotten to the hair ornaments stage so she isn't showing off wealth and vanity by sticking jewels in her hair, she isn't idly fussing at a single curl the way women (so vain!) tend to do.

(I think that this is a woman-looking-in-the-mirror painting that hits almost all the tropes - she needs either a pet or a familiar spirit to convey how vain and frivolous she is but that's about it.)
posted by Frowner at 1:36 PM on October 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ha, I saw that tweet last night and had such a similar thought about it that I spent a little time looking up another painting from 1910 that I remembered as strikingly contemporary--like it could have been painted yesterday: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Artistin (Marzella)." Both paintings are relatively bright, bold, and flat. Also, the style and the subject matter seem more casual and less affected than older realist portraits.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:13 PM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also saw that tweet, and read the entire thread. It's a pretty incredible thread!

This pic strikes me as 'modern' because has a woman as the main subject, doing a prosaic act, and radiating happiness while doing it. It almost looks like a frame out of a TikTok, where someone's gonna go on a rant while preparing for the day.
posted by spinifex23 at 8:52 PM on October 17, 2022

For me, it's the expression, the clothing, and the bracelet, plus what she's doing with her hair.

When I look at the picture, my attention is drawn immediately to her face. Her expression is one I recognise from my own mirror, and not so much from portraits; and I comb my hair like that when I'm trying to detangle it, so that strikes a chord too. Meanwhile in my peripheral vision, I have the impression I'm seeing a strappy top (something I don't associate with women's clothing prior to the 1960s) and a wristwatch. I don't have the same referents other people are talking about - I prefer my social media static, so it's not reminding me of anything on YouTube or TikTok - but the impression of modern trappings is enough to mislead me very effectively.

Of course, looking at anything in the picture directly, it's obvious that it's not a contemporary image; but that first impression is very powerful, every time.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:01 AM on October 18, 2022