Overview

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.

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9780822336709

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Reviews

Catherine M. Sousloff 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, Sousloff 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

Author Information

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.

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