Portraits of an artist's parents and self-portraits are among the few places that we see old men and old women in modern art. In part, this development stems from the very notion that to be modern is to be avant-garde, to represent what is new and vital in culture. Each generation defined their own terms and wrote their own manifestos. In this session, we will analyze differences in how Western artists convey the physical and psychological changes of mothers, fathers and selves through three lenses: gender, the rise of psychology, and self-awareness of how physical change would affect artistic vocation.
