Self-Portrait as Self-Presentation in the Works of Female Painters of the Turn of the 19th—20th Centuries

The article examines the creativity of women artists, which experienced an upsurge at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, associated with the removal of restrictions on their education at the Imperial Academy of Arts and the increasing need for self-realization in art. General tendencies are revealed, which do not concern the subject-technical side of the paintings, but allow us to draw generalizing conclusions about the artists’ thinking: self-determination and correlation of themselves with the creative environment, drawing attention to themselves as individuals. An attempt is made to understand the ways in which women were included in the full-fledged learning process as a group with its own socio-cultural characteristics. The aim of the paper is to analyze the creative approach to self-portraiture of the female artists E.A. Kiseleva, E.K. Luksh-Makovskaya, O.L. Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, who started their professional path under one teacher — I.E. Repin. The relevance of the article lies in the attempt to raise the problem of studying women’s creativity in the creation of self-portraits, identifying its artistic specificity, defining the cultural and aesthetic basis. The article focuses on the prerequisites for the formation of the creative method of female artists, based on the combination of individual and imitative. On the basis of consideration of the gallery of works the author develops a typology of female self-portrait: professional self-portrait, self-portrait-emotion, family self-portrait, self-portrait-image. It is traced how in the work of women-artists various artistic influences in Russia and Western Europe of the turn of the 19th—20th centuries, interpreted by them in their own way.