© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Self Portrait, B.C. Series,
September 26, 1990
In 1986 my sister Hannah Wilke was staying at my home, painting small watercolor portraits of her face in bright primary colors—very different from her early, abstract works on paper. When she showed them to me, I wondered why some looked skeletal and some resembled our father, gone twenty-five years; our mother, who had died two years earlier; and my own somber face as well as Hannah’s, as if we were all entwined within her. In 1987, when Hannah visited again, she showed me a lump in her neck that was soon diagnosed as lymphoma. Undaunted, she continued to paint the watercolor self-portraits in larger sizes, some monumental, and later, in the hospital, she drew her Intra Venus Faces and Hands. Hannah titled the watercolor self-portraits Before Cancer (B.C.) since they had emerged so presciently from within as intimations of approaching illness and her eventual death in 1993.
Marsie Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles
Information
September 26, 1990
North America, United States, New York, New York
1993-2021, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles; gifted by Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt, Hanne Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles to the Princeton University Art Museum, 2021.
