Selfportrait

Self-Portrait, painted in 1921 and one of several self-portraits Ury made across his career, shows the artist at sixty-three, looking back at nearly four decades of professional painting and forward into the relatively brief remainder of his life — he died in 1931. Self-portraiture in the modern era from Rembrandt onward carries the weight of self-examination, and for an artist of Ury's generation and circumstance — a Jewish painter who had spent his career in Germany, excluded from major official recognition, sustained by private collectors and smaller galleries — the self-portrait in 1921 carries particular charge. The aftermath of the First World War, in which Germany had been defeated and the Kaiser forced to abdicate, changed the social landscape within which Ury had worked: the bourgeois café culture and fashionable boulevards that were his primary subjects were being reconstituted in the more volatile Weimar context. Ury's self-portrait of this year is both a stocktaking and a demonstration of technique — a painter examining his own face with the same optical intelligence he brought to rain-wet streets and café interiors.

Ury applies to his own face the same approach he uses for his single-figure café subjects: concentrated tonal modelling in the face against a looser, less described background. The self-portrait context adds psychological intensity — the gaze that meets the painter is his own, requiring a different kind of honesty than the anonymous café subject. Paint handling is relatively direct and confident, appropriate to the subject's intimate scale.