About 20 years ago, I purchased this small etching by Chicago artist Walter Moskow. The title, Why not me? Expresses interiority. What is missing or wrong with me? Why am I not chosen? The girl uses a mirror to discover what others see. Gazing into a mirror portrays exploration of self and other, interior and exterior. The self, filled with feeling, asks the question. The reflection is surface. It addresses our inability to experience ourselves as others do.

I recently explored how modern artists use mirroring at the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Édouard Monet, Before the Mirror (Devant la glace)1876, at the Guggenheim. The unidentified avant-garde woman is believed to be a courtesan. The museum description: “Before the Mirror captures a woman in front of the mirror, in a state of partial undress… it is difficult to make out her features, and the mirror’s reflection lends a mysterious aura to the work; one only imagines what one cannot see. While the woman appears to be absorbed in contemplating her own image, her folded arm suggests that she is aware of the presence behind her. The viewer assumes the role of spectator, intruding upon this private moment in the boudoir, during which the woman – back turned – grasped an extended corset string.” It is less aimed at the woman’s interiority than the observer’s access to her private world and control over her.

Cecily Brown’s exhibit, Death and the Maid, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 4th – December 3, 2023. In an online exhibit video, she speaks about mirroring.

The woman looking in the mirror is a subject I have returned to so many times over and over again. It’s the world reflected back at you, but you also feel that you’re seeing into another world. It is that sense of looking into another world that is so fascinating about art in the first place. And in fact, in the Only Game in Town there is that sense of the optical illusion of my wife and my mother-in-law, which is a three-quarter profile of a young lady, but it can also be the face of an old woman … it is fascinating to try and see both readings at once and failing to.

The exhibit documentation suggests that women’s obsession with their appearance due to media and cultural standards of beauty is behind some of her paintings. This is her work Vanity.