Look me in the eye 
James Hall
- The Artist's Body edited by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones
- Five Hundred Self-Portraits edited by Julian Bell
- Renaissance Self-Portraiture by Joanna Woods-Marsden
According to the catalogue for the National Gallery exhibition of Rembrandt self-portraits, the artist’s portrayal of himself is ‘unique in art history, not only in its scale and the length of time it spans, but also in its regularity’. But Rembrandt’s production of self-portraits – at least forty paintings, 31 etchings and a few drawings – is unique only if we ignore the last fifty years. Nowadays, it is not unusual to find artists whose oeuvre consists of little else. Indeed, the mounting of the first big exhibition devoted to Rembrandt’s self-portraits is symptomatic of our fascination with the genre. Rembrandt by Himself opened within a few days of the announcement that Tracey Emin – whose etchings, collages, installations and performances constitute a lurid confessional – had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
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James Hall’s The World as Sculpture is published in paperback by Pimlico.
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