Challenging prevailing theories regarding the birth of the subject, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather in the theory and practice of portraiture in early-twentieth-century Vienna. Soussloff traces the development in Vienna of an ethics of representation that emphasized subjects as socially and historically constructed selves who could only be understood-and understand themselves-in relation to others, including the portrait painters and the viewers. In this beautifully illustrated book, she demonstrates both how portrait painters began to focus on the interior lives of their subjects and how the discipline of art history developed around the genre of portraiture.Soussloff combines a historically grounded examination of art and art historical thinking in Vienna with subsequent theories of portraiture and a careful historiography of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to human consciousness from Hegel to Sartre and from Freud to Lacan. She chronicles the emergence of a social theory of art among the art historians of the Vienna School, demonstrates how the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka depicted the Jewish subject, and explores the development of pictorialist photography. Reflecting on the implications of the visualized, modern subject for textual and linguistic analyses of subjectivity, Soussloff concludes that the Viennese art historians, photographers, and painters will henceforth have to be recognized as precursors to such better-known theorists of the subject as Sartre, Foucault, and Lacan.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Catherine M. Soussloff has managed, in her philosophical and art historical reflections on the portrait in modernity, to bring important insights to our understanding of the relation between the individual and history. The 'individual' is the great enigma of modernist history. In focusing on the 'subject' in the individual as revealed and hidden in modern portraiture, Soussloff exposes many of the open secrets of modernist historical consciousness as well."-Hayden White, Presidential Professor of Historical Studies, Emeritus, University of California and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University "[B]y tracing the genealogy of a way of seeing and a means of comprehending art, this is a valuable contribution to both art history and the history of Judaism. For writers on art, this book re-emphasises the importance of portraiture. For those who work on Jewish life and thought, it stresses the ways in which paintings were used to express identity. Resting on real research and deep thought, The Subject in Art forces us to look again at some familiar images and to think again about the ways in which we approach them. For that, it is sincerely to be welcomed." - William Whyte (Journal of Modern Jewish Studies)
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 237 mm
Breite: 162 mm
Dicke: 20 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8223-3658-7 (9780822336587)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Catherine M. Soussloff holds the University of California Presidential Chair in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept and the editor of Jewish Identity in Modern Art History.
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Subject in Art 1
1. A Genealogy of the Subject in the Portrait 5
2. The Birth of the Social History of Art 25
3. The Subject at Risk: Jewish Assimilation and Viennese Portraiture 57
4. Art Photography, Portraiture, and Modern Subjectivity 83
5. Regarding the Subject in Art History: An Epilogue 115
Notes 123
Bibliography 149
Illustration Credits 163
Index 167
