T. Lux Feininger

Selfportrait. Cain's Head

Repro: A22

1958, in Cambridge, 6 Bennett St.
Oil on canvas
Size not known
Inscr. lower left: L.

Destroyed by the artist, in later years overpainted with a nude
TLF: "some four or five of those [paintings] I regret having destroyed, and the foremost of them is the last picture I did in Bennett Street before moving out – a self portrait. It ... had been full of surprises for its artificer, both in the manner of shaping itself as a beautifully solid head, and as a, perhaps queer, but certainly psychologically true portrait. ... [It] was shaping itself so seemingly independently of anything that I might have to say or do about it, it finally came out as such am monumental “cubist” head... From the moment the final brushmark had been applied to the canvas (on the forehead) I called the portrait a Cain’s Head. To have sacrificed this picture because I thought I had to have a painting ground for some idiotic nude that I wanted to paint ... strikes me now as nothing short of blasphemy, in consideration of the mark on the forehead." [105]
Themes: Self