British Self-Portraits in the 20th Century: The Ruth Borchard Collection
Kings Place Gallery, 90 York Way, N1, until 29 August
This makes self-portraits fascinating documents but not always easy to live with. Self-communing can be a very private matter, and if the artist has used the painting to exorcise devils, the results can be deeply disturbing. Nevertheless, Ruth Borchard (1910–2000), a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, decided to concentrate her collecting entirely on the self-portrait, citing the fact that her taste in literature was introspective and confessional — towards diaries, letters and autobiographies — and that she should collect paintings on a similar theme. To this end, she wrote to a considerable number of contemporary artists in the 1950s and 1960s, offering to buy or commission a self-portrait from them. She offered a maximum of 21 guineas, and sometimes paid as little as seven to the lesser-known among those she approached.
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