Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 2, August 2007
_______________________________________________________________
Soussloff, Catherine M. The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern. Durham, Duke University Press, 2006. Xiii + 175 pages; ISBN 0-8223-3658-8, £ 60.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-8223-3670-7, £ 14.99 (paper)
Reviewed by
The University of North Carolina at Asheville
Catherine M. Soussloff 's The Subject in Art in many ways has all the open-ended and intransigent aspects that she claims the human subject has in contemporary visual art and theory. The book's aims include, among (many) others, critiquing an overly narrow picture of the discipline of art history, restoring an early twentieth century Viennese stance towards the subject to a central place in thought about the human subject, and highlighting the way that the historical genre of portraiture holds an essential and challenging spot when investigating the nature of the modern subject. Soussloff concludes that looking at the art and theory offered by members of early twentieth century Vienna offers the contemporary world a challenging idea of art as a social act, an act embedded in context and intersubjective in nature, and that - more ambitiously - such an understanding earned from a careful investigation of modernist portraiture might transform the way individuals, groups, and viewers envision interacting. Investigating early modernist options within the genre of the portrait, in her terms, "confirmed the power of art to offer a visual alternative to textual explanations of the human condition [4]."
First, Soussloff finds that the portrait makes two claims to truth - two claims that seem somewhat incompatible. The portrait is supposed to resemble the exterior appearance of the sitter, but it is also supposed to represent, or better present, the sitter's interiority. How this can be done through a visual medium seems somewhat obscure if one adopts an a-historical and individualistic view of artistic production, viewing. etc. On the other hand, if the act of creation is historicized, contextualized and viewed as an act in its social context then both the exterior resemblance and the representation of interiority can be explained as aspects of an ongoing social practice with shared understandings among artist, sitter(s) and viewer.
One way to make this explicit is through foregrounding the artist's place in the production of the portrait. Throughout the book, a key recurring painting is Kokoschka's portrait of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909). As opposed to earlier portraiture where the artist's presence is mostly invisible, this painting is a double portrait with very visible traces of the artist's hand shown in painterly effects such as foregrounded brushwork and extreme coloration. Further, the artist is present in what the portrait does not show. The figures are placed in a non-detailed space; they fit awkwardly in the space, with various areas pressing off the canvas. Painterly halos, and brushwork not grounded in naturalistic representation also highlight the artifice in the artwork. Such compositional and semiotic choices also highlight the social nature of artistic conventions; at the very least they directly address the viewer. All this is thought to show portraiture as and act of explicit social engagement. All of these artistic choices also read as expressing the interior subjectivity of the sitters. Because of the explicitly acknowledgement of a dialogue between artist, sitters and viewer, it becomes more understandable how a portrait can portray both the exterior appearance and interiority of the portrayed.
Soussloff situates Kokoschka's artistic production in relationship to the theoretical investigations of his contemporaries in art theory. She claims that as modernism was prospering in the visual arts, the Vienna School of Art History was developing a social history of art. Further, "a view of portraiture as a genre for sociality provided both a typology and a historical justification for an art criticism of the time [27]." Most important here were Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl. Burckhardt saw in portraiture the ability to document a "free subject." Here Kokoschka's work once again can be used as a helpful example. In the lack of specific physical context, and in the lack of culturally or ethnically specific elements, the subjects of the portrait appear to be free of tradition, unencumbered subjects. In opposition to this take on the portrait, Warburg and Riegl develop a historically situated theory of the portrait, and therefore of the portrayed. For them, instead of portraying the metaphysically free individual, to the contrary, a social history of the portrait "excluded a cult of the individual [35]." In fact, the lack of context, far from being a signifier of true universalism might be better thought of as signifying a historically specific desires situated in a specific social context. This is an example of what Soussloff identifies as a "signification based on a lack [63]." While the sitters are Jewish, there are no Jewish attributes shown in the painting. The nonfigurative background, truncated figures and lack of religious paraphernalia might be best read as a type of intentionally constructed Jewish cosmopolitanism attached to an strategy of assimilation through erasure.
Here, once again, Kokoschka's portraits serve as exemplary. First, as stated above, any specific aspects of "Jewishness" are avoided. This can be read as a conscious choice not only of the artist, but of the sitters as well. Second, as against the distanced empirical style of portrait popular at the time, Kokoschka's use of saturated color, truncated space, awkward staging and various other techniques successful at creating dissonance highlights the presence of painter, the individual subjects portrayed, and directly and explicitly addresses the viewer. The Vienna School's theory enables a social reading of the portrait that highlights its constructed and conversational representational strategies. Soussloff seems to find it somewhat ironic, and clearly unfortunate, that later theoretical understandings of socially engaged art move toward an "objective" idea (Neue Sachlichheit) that highlights and valorizes mechanical distance from "subjective" intervention, and therefore have more in common with the earlier distance shown in the imperial style. In this new objectivity stance the subjectivity of the artist, person or persons portrayed and viewer is less obvious, and yet more problematic at the same time because suppressed from explicit awareness. As opposed to the mechanized picture of objectivity that this "objective" strand of critical thought embraces, the Vienna School offers a historical stance that allows "a call to the individual without the attendant baggage of individualism [56]." Indeed, it seems strange to think that a truly objective picture of the world could eliminate the subject or the subjective and be truly accurate.
Dialogue between these two ideals of artistic "truth" can be most clearly seen in the conflicting strands in turn of the century photographic portraiture. German and Austrian art photography of the time tried to achieve painterly effects. Further, there was an emphasis upon knowledge of the history of art and reference to regional or national characteristics. As opposed to this, the professional portrait photographer, represented in the book by portraits produced by the Graf firm, purposely avoided any reference to national style or location. Once again the Vienna School of art theory and the pictorialist portrait accepts and consciously highlights the presence of the subject whereas later theories of photographic realism emphasize the truth of the impersonal mechanical process. Whereas after World War 1 attitudes changed and moved towards an ascendancy of "realistic" or social values, a move that saw mechanical realism as virtue - and was theoretically advocated and exemplified by the works of Benjamin and Bazin, the painterly or pictorialist photograph emphasized its own necessary intersubjectivity through various foregrounded stylistic choices. For example intersubjectivity might be emphasized through obscuring the faces of the figures in shadow or aiming for an overall effect of luminosity. Soussloff notes that unfortunately, because of the popularity of theories like Benjamin's and Bazin's, "Expressionism and expressionistic styles were forced into a hermeneutic that criticized it as unrealistic and apolitical [109]." Further, she rightfully argues that "There is no reason that a pictorialist photography, any more than a painterly technique, should necessarily be thought of as unsocial or apolitical. Yet, later critics and photographers, who actively promoted "realism" and social photography, could only consider as unrealistic the subjective practices and effects acknowledged by art photography itself [109]."
In The Subject in Art, Catharine Soussloff makes a compelling case for broadening the perspectives allowed in the discipline of art history, for the importance of early twentieth century Viennese art theory and constructs an interesting and creative case for the centrality of the visual portrait in an informed understanding of the modern subject. In her words; "Portraits, therefore, may be considered the art form in which the still image most clearly demonstrates this knowledge or action of viewing. The theory of portraiture first put forward by the Viennese artists and historians in the early twentieth century provided, then, and continues to provide even now, a way of understanding visual representation as dependent upon a multiplicity of points of view, as mutable depending on context, and as contingent depending upon viewer. This theory explained how portraits take us away from the passive statement "It is painted" to the complex action of "I see another [122]." The Subject in Art is a challenging book, and sometimes while reading it, it seems easy to get lost in the details, but the main points are rewarding, and they present in total an important addition to the modern theory of the subject. The book is a valuable read not just for art historians, but also for visual culture theorists and philosophers.