Self-Portrait

Late-career self-portrait realized in 1924, conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the historic Alfred Stieglitz Collection (MET DP72001), made by Eugene during his Leipzig professorship at the Königliche Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe. Twenty-six years after the theatrical Man in Armor self-portrait (1898) and eleven years after the Selbstbildnis of 1913 — the consecration-year image taken upon his appointment to the world's first university chair in pictorial photography — this 1924 portrait shows a mature, almost valedictory painter-photographer at the end of his teaching years, three years before his retirement from the Akademie in 1927. The pose is sober, frontal, stripped of allegorical staging: Eugene faces his own camera as a master craftsman documenting his own face at the moment of disciplinary maturity. The platinum print exhibits Eugene's late-period restraint with scratched-negative intervention — minimal hatching reserved to the background, allowing the modeled face to dominate — a pictorialist economy that contrasts with the dense painterly engravings of his Munich years (Adam and Eve, Brigitta). Acquired by the MET via Stieglitz, the print is a key piece of the 1933 Stieglitz bequest documenting the Photo-Secession's surviving founders. It complements but does not duplicate the 1913 Selbstbildnis held at the Münchner Stadtmuseum: the two self-portraits frame the Leipzig professorship's beginning and end, forming a paired biographical document. For Maison Picturale, the print serves as a model for the contemporary platinum-palladium self-portrait protocol: digital negative engraved selectively at the burin, contact-printed on hand-coated palladium, in the genealogy of the scratched portrait practice Eugene institutionalized in Leipzig.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / MET Open Access (CC0)