ABSTRACT
PREAMBLE, REPRESENTATION The self-portrait cannot help but raise the question of its own status. Clearly it falls within the purview of representation in so far as it re-presents. And yet does representation delimit its specificity and describe what is unique to it? Part of the difficulty in dealing with the self-portrait or indeed with ‘representation’ in general stems from the growing recognition of the inability of representation to provide an adequate interpretive mode in which to analyse paintings (if not all purported ‘representations’).
