Self-Portraiture and Self Awareness, 1900-2000: Evidence from Museum Metadata and Visual Analytics

This article traces how twentieth-century self-portraiture reconfigured the representation of selfhood across changing media. We assemble a corpus of 394 self-portrait records (1900-2000) from open museum catalogs (Met Open Access, Tate Collections, MoMA), harmonize medium and keyword fields, and apply Python/MATLAB visual analytics (time series plots, thematic breakdowns, word frequency mapping, and media share trends). This combined approach links collection metadata to close visual reading, providing a reproducible, cross-media view of how artists mobilized painting, photography, installation, and video to construct identity. Results show: decadal production peaks that align with major crises and postwar reconfigurations; Expressionist self-portraits clustering around psychological anxiety and trauma; Surrealist self-portrait keywords concentrating on identity, mirror, body, pain, duality, and hybridity; and a late-century shift in which photography and installation outpace painting as primary vehicles for self-imaging. Treating artworks as visual resources embedded in institutional catalogues demonstrates how metadata-driven evidence can clarify long-term changes in subjectivity, media, and display. Data tables and code support replication and reuse.