Portraying the self

This is the season of the self-portrait. At the Royal Academy until 11 December are 150 self-portraits by Edvard Munch (reviewed in this column three weeks ago), the depth of his obsession bordering on sheer tedium. Just opening at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major museum study in this country of the self-portrait, from the Old Masters to now. A most distinguished collection of self-portraits by 20th-century British artists assembled by the writer Ruth Borchard, which has been touring this country and will visit America next year, has now found a permanent home in London. And an exhibition of 30 pictures by Cherry Pickles (born in Bridgend, South Wales, in 1950) opens at Piano Nobile Fine Paintings, 129 Portland Road, London W11, consisting entirely of self-portraits (until 29 October).

Munch almost gives self-portraiture a bad name. He had the visual equivalent of verbal diarrhoea (this is a man who left more than 20,000 works by his own hand to the City of Oslo), and he turned to self-depiction again and again for relief from his latest neurosis. Munch was incarcerated in the prison of self, but at least he painted the bars different colours and drew his nightmares on the cell walls. The range of media he employed, and his very considerable skills with paint and line, make this rampant self-obsession (just about) tolerable. A smaller show than the RA’s would have done him greater service, but as a point of comparison with the NPG’s survey it is valuable viewing: Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary is a blockbuster with attitude — 55 painters glaring down at us mere mortals from the Olympian heights of their creativity (until 29 January 2006).