Self Portrait

"Self Portrait" — ink on woodblock print on paper, "20th century" — is among Munakata's self-portraits, a genre he returned to throughout his career as a way of subjecting his own face to the same direct, unsparing scrutiny he brought to all subjects. His self-portraits were rarely flattering or composed in the conventional sense: the face looked back from the woodblock with the concentrated, slightly startled expression of a man who has just caught himself in the act of looking. The thick-lensed glasses that became his visual signature — he was severely myopic — appear in many of these works as an ironic comment on the nature of seeing.