Zelfportret met vlinderdas 1913

Jan Mankes made this self-portrait etching on a metal plate. It’s a delicate, intimate image, full of quiet intensity. I see him looking out at me, or maybe it's at himself, with those eyes that seem to hold a whole world of thought. I imagine him bent over the plate, hand moving carefully, guided by the image in his mind. The lines are so precise, but there's also a vulnerability to them – a sense of searching, of trying to capture something elusive. There’s a starkness to the self-portrait that reminds me of other early modernists, like Paula Modersohn-Becker, who were trying to strip away artifice and get at something raw and true. Mankes died young, and you feel that fragility here. What he has etched here feels less like a definitive statement and more like a question asked in the dark. But that's what makes it so compelling, that openness, the invitation to bring our own selves to the encounter.