Reflections

About

Mirrors, water and glass let a picture show more than one view at once. Parmigianino painted Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c. 1524) on a curved panel, swelling his hand in the foreground as the glass did. The myth of Narcissus, who fell for his own image in a pool, gave painters a lesson in doubling, and Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) puts the whole crowded hall in the mirror behind a barmaid, at angles that refuse to add up.

Claude Monet spent his last decades painting his Giverny pond, where reflected sky and willows merge with floating lilies. In the 1960s Michelangelo Pistoletto fixed life-size figures to polished steel, so that viewers appear in the work beside them, and Lee Friedlander's street photographs catch his own shadow and reflection in shop windows. Look for doubled figures, hidden onlookers and spaces that open behind the picture's surface.