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. Over the years she built up a very respectable collection which is interesting primarily for the range of practitioners it covers: from the well-known to the unknown, and the infinite shades between.
At Kings Place, the 100 self-portraits she amassed (plus rather a severe portrait of Borchard herself by Michael Noakes) are hung alphabetically in two groups. The larger section is distributed around the spacious landings flanking the escalators at the centre of the building, while in the gallery itself is hung the cream of the collection. This inner sanctum contains a sequence from Michael Ayrton to Anthony Whishaw, and includes many fine things. Peter Coker in an apron, William Crozier as a screaming skull (existentialist angst taken to the extreme?), Dennis Creffield in Bombergian mode, achieving remarkable sensitivity through slabby paint, Cecil Collins hieratic as an Egyptian dignitary, Tony Eyton adding and subtracting light in his studio, fencing with self-revelation, William Gear spiky but dynamic in a flat cap, drawn in Indian ink, Anthony Green in (now) uncharacteristic thick impasto, beneath a hanging light bulb (still a favourite motif).
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