Self Portrait
Georgette Chen (1906 to 1993) · About 1946
A woman in her late thirties looks straight out of a small canvas, her dark hair drawn back, her face composed, her gaze steady and a little distant. Georgette Chen painted this portrait of herself around 1946, in the months after her husband, the Chinese diplomat Eugene Chen, died in Shanghai, where the couple had been held under house arrest by the Japanese. It is a picture of survival rather than grief. The palette is restrained, warm browns and sepias, and the brushwork is quiet and exact. Chen was already a well-known painter in Paris, New York and Shanghai; within a few years she would settle in Singapore and become one of the most important artists in its history.
Look at the economy of the painting. The face is built from a few softly blended planes, the eyes are set with small, sure touches, and the contour of the cheek and jaw is drawn in a single dark line that owes something to Cézanne, whose work she had studied in Paris in the 1920s. There is no background, no jewellery, no sign of the fashionable woman she was; only the direct look and the firm mouth. Compare it with the still lifes and portraits of Malay and Chinese sitters she painted later in Singapore, in far brighter colour, and you see how deliberately sober this picture is.
Chen was born Zhang Liying in Zhejiang, grew up between Shanghai, Paris and New York, and arrived in Singapore in 1954 to teach at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, where she was the only woman among the founding generation of Nanyang painters. The Lee Foundation gave this portrait to the national collection, and it is one of the works chosen for Singapore Stories. It has become her most reproduced image, a face that stands for the whole first generation of modern artists in Singapore.
Did You Know? Georgette Chen was the only woman among the pioneer Nanyang painters who taught at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.
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