Description
Book SynopsisArgues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather within early-twentieth-century Viennese portraiture.
Trade Review“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 *
Table of ContentsList 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
