Why Final Self Portraits Are Terrifying

Source: Why Final Self Portraits Are Terrifying, Deburke321, 13:14, uploaded 2024-03-12, playlist index 376.

Pablo Picasso’s Self-Portrait Facing Death opens Deburke321’s account of artists who make a last direct image of themselves. Picasso was 91, and the drawing came less than a year before his death. He worked through several versions over a period of months. The final face looks anxious and frightened enough to seem like a record of his state of mind, although his friend and biographer Pierre Daix first understood the fear as something Picasso had deliberately invented. When Daix saw the drawing again, its darker, deeper lines had changed the impression. Picasso seemed to be staring at his own death.

The opening image gives the phrase “final self-portrait” its weight. These works appear when an artist’s body or mind has begun to fail, so the portrait records more than appearance. It can show the loss of a face, a body that needs support, or a person trying to understand what remains. Deburke321 treats the form as a small area of art history with its own recurring tension: the artist is making an image of decline whilst the ability to make images is itself under threat.

William Utermohlen and the loss of a face

William Utermohlen became known for figurative paintings that described the visible world with care. He made self-portraits throughout his life, including one in 1967, when he was 33. In 1991 he began to suffer memory loss. His Conversation paintings became an attempt to hold on to the life he had known before the diagnosis.

Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1995. The diagnosis led to a series of self-portraits made whilst his abilities were changing. Deburke321 follows five especially well-known images from 1996 to 2000. The first remains close to Utermohlen’s earlier manner. The 1997 portrait shows an older face, altered through his own self-observation. By 1998, the face has separated from the body and carries an expression of anguish. The 1999 portrait loses even that expression. It barely presents a face at all, with a thin suggestion of background and colour around it.

The 2000 image removes almost everything that still gave the earlier portraits their descriptive force. Deburke321 presents it as Utermohlen’s final self-portrait and his last attempt to make art. The series gains its meaning from the relation between the first image and the last one. A painter who could describe the world in detail keeps returning to his own face until the face becomes difficult to recognise. The work turns a terrible condition into a record that other people can study and remember.

The artist’s estate dates his last pencil drawings to 2000 to 2002, so “final” here describes the sequence Deburke321 selects rather than an uncontested last work.

The video then follows Utermohlen beyond the paintings. His condition worsened, and he died in London in 2007. People around him said that the person they knew had disappeared before his death. The late self-portraits therefore become his last visible artistic expression, even though the person who made them had already become difficult to separate from the disease.

Bryan Charnley and a diary of schizophrenia

Bryan Charnley studied at the Central School of Art in London before an early diagnosis of schizophrenia forced him to leave. His paintings gave form to paranoia, confusion, and the strain of living with an illness that shaped his daily life. He also felt that heavy medication had flattened his artistic ability. In 1991 he began reducing his medication and made a series of self-portraits to document what happened.

Charnley kept a diary beside the paintings. His website contains seventeen portraits and a note for each one, so Deburke321 selects a handful rather than pretending to cover the whole series. The first portrait discussed comes from 20 April 1991. A large rabbit ear appears behind Charnley’s head, which he connected to the voices and sensory overload that accompanied his increasing paranoia.

The next paintings move between abstraction and recognisable faces. A work from 6 May returns to a clearer portrait whilst keeping the imagery disturbing. Nails cover the eyes. Charnley’s diary describes feeling like a target and being unable to see what other people seemed to perceive. The phrase “Love hurts” remains as the briefest part of the entry, and the painting turns social fear into a physical obstruction.

On 18 May, the bullseye moves into the mouth. Charnley had reduced his medication further, slept less, and seemed to be moving into a deeper depression. The mouth stands in for the brain, which gives the painting a way to show thoughts that he could not control and an inability to speak with other people. Deburke321 treats this as a turning point because the symbol becomes more than a strange detail. It becomes a working language for an invisible mental state.

On 23 May, Charnley repeated the brain-as-mouth device in a portrait that looks more like him. His diary links the blue colour to depression and describes the difficulty of giving thought a visible form. He understood symbols as necessary tools because paint could not show thought directly. The symbol had to carry a poetic charge whilst remaining legible enough to express what was happening in his mind. The repeated mouth shows how a device can become a structure for thinking through a series, rather than a single effect used once.

By 27 June, Charnley was trying to make a portrait that could express his schizophrenia in full. He wrote that he remained at an acute social disadvantage and wondered whether the anger would ever leave. He wanted the portraits, taken together, to become a document of life at the end of the twentieth century and of what it meant to be human whilst living with schizophrenia.

Two paintings followed. One contains words such as “enemy”, “rival”, and “past”, with a central line about holding cards that would only be useful if they came from another world. The final painting is a field of red and yellow. Charnley left no diary entry for either work, so the series ends without the explanations that had guided the earlier paintings. The two images were found on the day he took his own life, 19 July 1991. Their place in the sequence carries the event’s weight, although the paintings themselves cannot explain it.

The series became Charnley’s best-known work after his death. It gives viewers access to a process that he wanted to document, while also exposing the limit of that access. His diary can describe what a symbol meant to him on a particular day. It cannot give the viewer his full experience, and the last paintings arrive without even that partial account.

Goya and the failing body

Francisco Goya gives the video a different kind of final portrait. He was a major Spanish painter whose work criticised social vice, government, war, corruption, and ignorance. He also lived with long private health troubles. An illness left him deaf in the late eighteenth century, and the darker tone of his work deepened around the same period.

When Goya was 73, a serious illness brought him close to death. His friend and doctor Eugenio García Arrieta nursed him back to health, and Goya lived for another eight years. He painted Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta as a record of the event. Goya appears weak and barely conscious whilst the doctor holds him upright. His hands clutch the bedclothes, as if the body were trying to keep hold of life.

Shadowy figures stand behind the pair. They could be family members, spectators, or figures from the afterlife. Deburke321 treats the afterlife reading as speculation that several critics have also made. The painting’s strongest fact remains closer to the bed: Goya is surrounded by people, yet his failing body makes him seem alone.

Goya’s portrait changes the relation between illness and artistic ability. His physical condition is collapsing whilst the painting remains controlled and technically assured. Utermohlen and Charnley are presented through the video’s simplified distinction as artists whose mental illnesses altered their visual language. Goya’s mind remains capable of making a clear painting about a body that can barely support itself. That distinction allows the video to separate the artist’s tool from the artist’s subject. The brain can be intact whilst the body becomes the thing being painted.

The attempt that remains

Deburke321 closes by calling the brain an artist’s ultimate tool. When that tool begins to fail, the artist can become helpless, yet the late work exists because the person keeps trying to make something. The final portrait becomes an attempt to recover a former ability whilst the evidence of its loss gathers on the canvas.

The conclusion carries a small hope. The portraits are authentic attempts made during mental anguish, and their value does not depend on the artist winning the illness or reaching a clean final statement. The darkest part of a mental decline remains outside the image. What survives is the decision to work during it.

That hope needs a limit. The video arranges very different illnesses, lives, and artistic practices into one story about deterioration. Its readings of the faces and symbols belong to Deburke321 unless the artist’s own diary or another source confirms them. A final self-portrait can document a person’s situation without giving anyone a complete view of the person behind it.

Further reading / references

• William Utermohlen’s late self-portraits, the artist’s estate archive.
• Bryan Charnley’s self-portraits, the website named in the video description.
• The Disturbing Final Self Portraits of Bryan Charnley, Blind Dweller, the related video named in the description.