James Haddrell speaks on holding up the ‘mirror’ in the art world

In the history of western art, mirrors have held an important position since at least the renaissance.

Hamlet describes the power that drama has “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature”, forcing us to see the world as it really is.

In the visual arts, however, mirrors have consistently offered artists far more than simply a tool for reflection.

Whether a means of redirecting the viewer’s gaze, of drawing them into a painting or as part of an elaborate symbolic construction, some of the most memorable works of the last 600 or so years have mirrors to thank for their enduring appeal – and we are fortunate that many of the world’s most famous paintings featuring mirrors hang in London galleries.

The Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434 by Jan van Eyck and hanging in the National Gallery, is believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini at home with his wife.

On the back wall of the room a mirror can be seen, and in the mirror a pair of figures, barely discernible but definitely there.

The painting has been the subject of much scholarly debate, and the proposed identities of the figures in the mirror range from the painter himself to witnesses at a wedding (maybe one and the same thing, rendering the painting almost a legal document in capturing the witnessing of a formal ceremony) to us, the viewers, drawn into the space of the painting by our own reflection.

Also on display at the National Gallery, Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (painted two centuries later in 1647) also has a mirror at its heart, but rather that reflecting the viewer in this case it confronts them.

A traditional subject, Venus is depicted reclining but with her back to the viewer, and looking into a mirror in which we see her face, apparently looking out at us.

Velázquez has presented us with a nude figure, has likely escaped censure by the Spanish Inquisition because she faces away, but Venus (in this case a very domestic goddess, with none of the symbolic accoutrements usually featured in depictions of her, identified only by the presence of her son Cupid) still confronts our gaze, whether complicit in or challenging the voyeurism of the viewer.

Fast forward another two centuries to 1882 and impressionist forerunner Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (on display at the Courtauld Gallery, due to reopen in November after a major transformation project) places the viewer in conversation with an enigmatic barmaid, the viewer revealed in the mirror behind her as a dapper man in a top hat.

Reflected in the background, the feet of a trapeze artist hang at the top of the painting, giving us a glimpse of the performative nature of the bar.

Come now to the present day and mirrors are still captivating artists, though admittedly in a host of different ways.

At Tate Modern, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room installations (on show until June 2022) reflect lights hanging in darkness, taking a finite space and making it go on forever.

The smaller Chandelier of Grief, which seeks to create an endless space filled with rotating chandeliers, is presented alongside Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life, one of Kusama’s largest installations to date and
originally made for her 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern.

In a world where we are constantly looking at the tiny mirror screen of our phones and taking selfies, or over the past two years the mirror of the box on the zoom screen, perhaps it is inevitable that the joy of the mirrors in Kusama’s work lies not in their ability to capture and contain a reflection of us, but in their ability to explode the world around us and
locate us in an apparently never-ending space.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room _ Filled with the Brilliance of Life.