Modernist Verbal and Visual Portraiture: The Artistic Construction of the Portrait's Subject

• Published in: Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics Vol. 47; no. 2; pp. 113 - 124
• Main Author: Morzhenkova, Natalia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cuttack Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 22.06.2024
• Subjects: 20th century; Analysis; Criticism and interpretation; English literature; Identity; Intertextuality; Mimesis; Modern painting; Modernism; Modernism (Literature); Painting, Modern; Poetics; Portrait painting; Portraits; Pound, Ezra (1885-1972); Realism; Social aspects; Sociocultural factors; Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946); Text analysis; Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963); Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941); United States; Europe; France; United States > US; Virginia
• ISSN: 0252-8169

In the twentieth century the appearance of a great number of innovative verbal and visual portraits, created by modernist writers and painters, haunted by questions of identity and human representability, was determined by the tangible shift in sociocultural ideas about selfhood and the manners of its construction. Analyzing the poetics of literary and pictorial portraits created by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cezanne, this paper focuses on the intermedial flexibility of this genre and investigates the strategies of destruction and deformation of traditional referential portrait conventions through the juxtaposition of mimetic and non-mimetic elements, the "still life" approach to portraiture, intertextual scaffolding, activation of genre memory, and the parodization of the concept of resemblance. It demonstrates that the indexical tracing of the individual's particular identity as a traditional function of portraiture is replaced in modernist portraiture by the fluid process of identity construction and erosion. Keywords: modernist portraiture, literary portrait, non-mimetic representation, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound