T.C. Cannon's 'Self Portrait in Studio,' The Greatest Self-Portrait in American Art
By Chadd Scott on
The boots. The hat. The jeans.
The bandana.
That shirt!
Brushes casually laid across his lap like an Old West gunfighter’s six-shooter.
Discarded cigarette butts on the floor. You’ll have to get up close to see those.
Aviator sunglasses.
Everything about T.C. Cannon’s Self Portrait in the Studio (1975) is cool.
More than cool, this is the finest self-portrait in American art history.
T.C. Cannon, 'Self Portrait in the Studio,' 1975. Tia Collection.
You can see it through December 1, 2024, at the Baltimore Museum of Art during its institution-wide “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” project, a 10 month Native art takeover. The painting is on loan from Santa Fe’s Tia Collection, an astounding treasure trove of New Mexico-focused artworks amassed by a private collector since 2007, named for the collector’s daughter.
Cannon’s (1946–1978; Kiowa/Caddo) Self Portrait stretches 6-feet tall and over 4-feet wide. It possesses a commanding presence. Wall power.
Its vibrant colors include a rich, purple band of mountain shadow behind the artist. We can reasonably assume a Diné textile covers the floor. To the left, partially cut off by the picture plane, an African mask hangs below what appears to be a painting in the style of Henri Matisse. Ironic, that. The Baltimore Museum of Art houses the largest collection of Matisse artworks in the world.
Self-Portrait’s brilliance, however, what makes it the greatest of its type in American art history, comes not from the tangible, but from the intangible. Everything Cannon shares with viewers about himself. A great self-portrait intimately reveals the maker’s persona.
The artist’s self-possession. The way Cannon positions himself in the chair is eminently confident – he’s good and he knows it – but not cocky. Not arrogant. Cannon depicts himself as a cool dude, but still likeable. As viewers, we want to know this guy.
His adornment doesn’t go overboard into caricature. He’s not trying too hard. We don’t roll our eyes at a poseur. This is who T.C. Cannon is. Relaxed. A master of his domain.
A sexual being.
I mean, come on.
Super cool rodeo cowboy James Dean Native artist.
Something like that.
T.C. Cannon is not my favorite artist – although he’s close – but he is the artist I’d most like to have been able to hang out with. His Self Portrait explains why. Who wouldn’t have enjoyed sharing a beer or road trip with Cannon? He remains approachable despite the pomp.
Art history’s premier self-portraitists – Albrecht Dürer, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon – none were American. T.C. Cannon was, and what an archetypal American fashion he portrays himself in, with the blue jeans and hat and big Western landscape in the background.
Cannon would die in a car accident three years after this painting’s completion.
Belonging to a private collection, Self Portrait in the Studio doesn’t have a regular public home for people to see it in person. There’s no telling when the next chance might come. Drop whatever you’re doing and make your way to Baltimore.
Bear Claw Necklace
As if T.C. Cannon’s Self Portrait weren’t reason enough to visit the Baltimore Museum of Art for “Indigenizing the Museum,” also on view through December 1 is a Pawnee Bear Doctors Society bear claw necklace. This item, the most memorable art object I’ve ever seen, typically calls the Denver Art Museum’s Indigenous Arts of North America galleries home. Unlike the painting, it can regularly be visited there by the public. It’s another rare and special loan to Baltimore.
Pawnee Bear Doctors Society Bear Claw Necklace. Before 1870s, remade 1920s with community consent. Denver Art Museum.
Thought to have once belonged to Pawnee leader Sky Chief (Tirawahut Leshard), the necklace was first made some time before 1870 and then later remade in the 1920s with community consent. The bear represents power, and so does the necklace; the animal’s strength imbued in the wearer. It’s a spiritual item.
Thirty-four enormous grizzly bear claws ring the otter fur interior lining, with the otter pelt continuing down the back of the necklace.
I think of the animals who gave their lives for the production of this object, the numbers in which they must have populated the Pawnee’s historic homelands along the North Platt River in present day Nebraska. The biodiversity and wildlife numbers across the Great Plains prior to European contact would have rivaled the African Serengeti.
Imagine finding a grizzly in Nebraska today! Let alone the six it is believed were required for the necklace. Only the middle three claws from front paws – the largest – were used in its making.
The area was the bear’s historic range, all of what is now Nebraska, almost all of the West stretching from western Missouri and Iowa, south through Texas and into northern Mexico, west to the Pacific Ocean. The University of California Los Angeles mascot isn’t a bruin for no reason.
I think about the people who made the necklace, their culture and society. How such a beautiful way of life, such beautiful artwork, could be targeted for extermination by the white man. When this necklace was being made, the market buffalo hunters were sweeping across the Great Plains like a plague, destroying the buffalo – and the grizzly and otter and wolf and cougar – and the Indigenous way of life those animals made possible. Forced removal of the eastern tribes to what became Oklahoma – Indian Territory – had been underway for decades, the same fate would befall the Pawnee in 1874.
The necklace represents an ecosystem, a way of life, a genocide – human and animal. Human creativity of the highest order, rivaling anything made before or since. It’s a humbling thought to stand in its presence, and in some sense, the presence of the men who wore it, the women who produced it, and the animals from which it originates.
