Self-Portrait 1941

This is Niels Larsen Stevns, Self-Portrait, painted in oil, but we don’t know when. The way he's handled the paint is so great, it’s all about marks, how they build up and what they describe. Nothing's overworked. It looks like he’s really letting the process lead him. There's such an attitude in the brushstrokes, a kind of confidence, but also a willingness to leave things unresolved. Look at the way he's modeled the face with these thick, buttery strokes of pink, yellow, and green. It’s like he's not trying to capture a likeness so much as he’s trying to capture a feeling, an experience. The shadows under the chin, those dark, almost violent strokes, they give the whole thing a real punch. I see something of Kirchner or Heckel in the boldness of his color choices and the angularity of his forms. These guys were not afraid to get raw and a bit ugly in their paintings, and I think Stevns shares that spirit.