Have a go at this exercise! I dare you! It is an exercise on whether we can use terms used in talking about art, in this using the term ‘style’ alone, to recognise a artist’ s work.

Me as a more-than-tubby queer angel.

The title of this piece is a bit presumptuous. Too few read this blog, and very much fewer respond (though I am grateful for those who do feedback their thoughts either personally or in public) to assume anyone either wants me to set them a little experimental exercise or will decide to try it out. The thought came to me on reading g two books I was handling because of the recent cataloguing of my personal library.

The first is a glamorous book using portraits of well-known known artists, that were contemporaneous to their subject’s lives,in order to show something of how there may be what Michael Baxandale called a ‘period style’, of portraiture.

The aim is to show portrait painter and subject in unconscious, and perhaps even sometimes conscious, collusion in creating an ‘image’ of the artist, that exemplified notions of performative, or even cult, roles.

The second book,however, though now nestling against the former on my shelves, has a total different presumption. Hete, the interest is on individual artists in the same period, each considered to be painted in a specific style. The second book is an old exhibition catalogue from The Tate Gallery of, in the main, self-portraits of artists – all from the twentieth century.

I want to stick with self-portraits, for the purpose of the e perimental exercise, or quiz if you like, is to see if a random.ly chosen work from each artist sel-portrayed on the basis of style alone. Of course, it won’t be on style alone if participants know the face of the artist involved and therefore know or guess the matching work from knowledge of the artist’s name. Hence, if that happens, please say so in your answer.

The aim then is to look at all the self-potraits below, labelled A to J, and then match them to the works following them numbered I to X (1 to 10 in Roman numerals). I will respond soon, even if no one tries the exercise, with the correct matchings, name of artist, and my comment.

First, the list of self-portrait details.