Farewell to the Self: Between the Letter and the Self-Portrait

Farewell to the self: Between the letter and the self-portrait
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© 2015 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Life Writing on 25 Jun 2013, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/10.1080/14484528.2013.810242
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Farewell to the Self: Between the Letter and the Self-Portrait
Maria Tamboukou, University of East London, UK Abstract: In this paper I consider interfaces between visual and textual representations of the female self in art. I am looking in particular at Gwen John’s self-portraits and the letters re- volving around them. In this context, there are three thematic areas that I explore: a) ques- tions around portraiture in general and the self-portrait in particular, b) connections between visual images and textual narratives in life-writing research and c) genealogical lines in John’s self-representation through her paintings and letters. What I suggest is that John’s self-portraits become events for playing with different modalities of self- representation and experimenting with other ways of painting the self, while her letters be- come texts destabilizing and interrogating conventions of reading the visual. What I finally argue is that the visual turn in narrative research needs to consider carefully discourses and debates in the field of art histories, while the latter have to become more informed in the nuances of life narrative research. Key words: self-portraits, letters, life narratives, Gwen John, visual turn
How dreadful though that you should think that girl is sitting on the table and that she is me! … You are so right about that head, I tried to make it look like a vierge of Dürer, it was a very silly thing to do. I did it because I didn’t want to have my own face there. The picture I have done for Mr Quinn is the same pose and I have put my own face in and it is more fitting.1
In the above extract from a letter written on October 15th, 1911, Gwen John, an expatriate Welsh artist who mostly lived and worked in Paris2, has an epistolary conversation with her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt about her painting A Lady Reading.3 The picture depicts a young woman in her room, reading a book by the open window. She is wearing a dark burgundy blouse and a black skirt, while her right foot is elevated and rests on a wicker chair. The figure seems to be slightly leaning on a simple pine table and one might have thought that she was sitting on the edge of it, which is not the case as we know from the comment in John’s own letter above. There is little decoration in the room apart from the pine table and the wicker chair: a red-and-white checked curtain, a little bookshelf just above the table and three pictures hanging on the wall. Being frustrated and disappointed by the decision
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to depict the face of the figure as a Dürer’s Madonna, John painted a similar picture soon after: Girl Reading at the Window.4 These two pictures only differ in details: the figure in Girl Reading is wearing an all black dress and a black bow in her hair; there is a lace curtain and a second chair at the corner of the room; finally there is only one picture hanging on the wall behind the head of the standing figure, which is John’s face this time, as also mentioned in the letter above. We know for sure that this rather intellectual milieu with the pictures, the books, the inex- pensive art objects, the wicker chair and the lace curtains is the artists’ own room in Paris. Simple as they are, these two paintings have lent themselves to a number of interpretations and discussions. Writer Eva Figes has suggested that the bare room represents John’s pov- erty and the harsh conditions of her life as a single woman artist struggling to survive. (1993, 74) Art critic, Alicia Foster has made connections between John’s conversion to Ca- tholicism in 1913 and ‘the depictions of sacred figures and events in the work of Catholic artists.’ (1999, 52) The plainness of the room has also been discussed in the context of artistic trends and in- fluences upon John’s work. In Foster’s (43) analysis, the simplicity of the décor in John’s interiors and certain inexpensive objects, like the wicker chair or the pine table that recur in many of her paintings, are signs of the artistic bohemian imagery and lifestyle she was adhering to. It was also a style very close to painters of the Camden Town Group5. Foster has also pointed out the Symbolist influences upon John’s work, particularly the way do- mestic objects, like the lace curtain, would be represented as extraordinary or ‘sources of poetry and mystery in Symbolist art and literature.’ (47) Moreover, these two paintings alongside other interiors have become part of the discursive constitution of the artist as a woman who led an interior life and have fuelled feminist discussions and arguments around the possibility or rather the impossibility of the flâneuse, the wandering female fig- ure of the urban spaces of modernity. (Wolff, 1994) What is finally intriguing is that both pictures, the Lady and the Girl, have been described as ‘self-portraits.’ In her catalogue raisonné of John’s paintings, Cecily Langdale (1987, 141) notes that ‘A Lady Reading has always been called a self portrait’. Langdale (142) further re- fers to Quinn’s sale catalogue describing the Girl Reading as a self portrait. In disagreement with Langdale, Foster has argued that the artist’s face and the familiar surroundings ap- pearing in the pictures cannot make them self-portraits: ‘there are none of the composi- tional signs which indicate to the viewer that the painting [Girl reading at the Window] should be interpreted as a self-portrait.’ (1999, 55) As I have shown so far, John’s paintings have created a complex web of discussions, inter- pretations and arguments that span across disciplinary interests and fields; they thus form a matrix of concepts, ideas and discourses around the problem of how visual and textual im- ages can be brought together in a genealogical exploration of the female self in art. What I want to do in this paper is to unravel some of these interrelated lines of analysis, particu- larly focusing on interfaces between self-portraits and letters. The former cannot be simply
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used as illustrations of biographical details or theoretical arguments, while the latter cannot be reduced to captions or subtitles for paintings. My argument is that there is a need for more interdisciplinary discussions between narrative analyses, visual studies, art histories and biographical research. In this context, there are three thematic paths that I want to fol- low: a) explore questions around portraiture in general and the self-portrait in particular, b) make connections between visual images and textual narratives in life-writing research and c) trace genealogical lines in John’s self-representation through her paintings and letters.
Talking of Genres: the Self-Portrait
As Shearer West has noted, the self-portrait has one of the most fascinating and complex histories within the whole genre of portraiture. (2004, 163) This history goes back to the late fifteenth, early sixteenth centuries and to the Venetian invention of flat mirrors that created a turning point, an event in the self-representation of the artist. This was also the era of what Foucault (2000) has famously described as the invention of man as a knowing subject and an object of this knowledge. The turn of the sixteenth century was therefore a critical period of increasing self-consciousness and reflexivity in the history of though that created conditions of possibility for the proliferation of auto/biographical narratives and of all sorts of textual and visual representations of the self in quest. In this matrix of complex and often antagonistic discourses around the self and the possi- bilities and ethico-aesthetic values of knowing and representing it, artists in different pe- riods have used self-portraiture for different reasons: to gain a rite of passage in the artworld, to promote their artistic abilities, to attract commissions and patronages, to ex- periment with different techniques, methods and media, to ultimately emerge as sovereign individuals.6 Self-portraiture has also opened up possibilities for transcendence, pointing to the divine dimension of the artist, as in the art of Albrecht Dürer, who initiated the tradi- tion of the self-portrait as a visual psychograph. Self-portraiture is thus related to a life or a real person, the artist herself, but the way this life or this person has been represented varies according to the period, artistic conventions and trends, social and cultural expectations of the era, the artist’s talent and genius, and of course the patron’s or the market’s expectations and demands. Similarly self-portraits have been interpreted and analyzed from a variety of theoretical positions in philosophy and trends in art history. A critical question that has been raised is whether a self-portrait should be defined as such, by the act of recognition it mobilizes to the viewer or by the in- tention of the artist. In this context should John’s paintings, A Lady and the Girl Reading, be taken as self-portraits? This is a question I now want to rethink. Gali Weiss has noted that ‘the practice of portraiture relies heavily on representation—re- presenting a presence.’ (2009, 51) This presence has to be recognised, Woodall (1996) has argued, since ‘what is mobilized by the artist is the viewer’s act of recognition.’ (in Weiss, 2009, 51) In this light, Girl Reading can be conceived as a self-portrait since it has mobilized recognition in the mind of the artist’s brother as Langdale has suggested above. The prob-
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lem is more complicated however, should the intention of the artist be considered as more important. Richard Brilliant (1991) for instance has argued that ‘the viewer’s awareness of the artwork as a portrait is distinctly secondary … it is the artist who establishes the category ‘portrait.’ (in Weiss 2009, 35) Whether the portrait depends on the artist’s intention or the viewer’s interpretation, what is highly problematic in both views, according to Weiss, is the overall conception that ‘the function of the portrait is to fix the presence of its referent, and the success of the artist to do so lies in her capacity to recognise and ‘capture’ an essen- tialized form of that presence.’ (35) Moving away from the necessity to pin down the sub- ject, Ludmilla Jordanova (2005) has suggested that the study of self-portraiture is more important in offering insights in how artistic processes unfold and artistic identities are formed, rather than in capturing any kind of autobiographical truth about the subject of the artist. Interpreting the self -portrait thus requires much more than a juxtaposition of narratives, visual images and titles in exhibition catalogues; it calls for close attention to the historical, social and cultural contexts that condition the emergence of the work of art under con- sideration. The interpretation should therefore be particularly attentive to the processes of recontextualization: what happens to the work of art when it is placed in a different context of analysis and understanding and how this recontextualization can create new levels of meaning that are transdiciplinary rather than, naïve, reductionist or confusing. As Jorda- nova (2005, 45) aptly notes:
Interpreting self-portraits requires an elaborate historical sense. Such images are made in the artists’ here and now—necessarily a complex swirl of forces, including their aspirations and anxieties about competition, whether actual or imagined, strategies for creating and advancing a ‘reputation’, as well as their immediate domestic and social relationships, geographical location and economic needs. They are also produced out of artists’ senses of visual models to be emulated, revered forbears, influential teachers and masters. In other words, artists themselves often have a vivid awareness, that can be termed ‘historical’, of what has gone before, and in making it manifest, as many did in their self-portraits, they speak to contemporaries about their debts and their filiations and lay down deposits for future generations to examine.
Jordanova’s suggestions initiate lines of analysis that are more useful than the question of whether John’s paintings were ‘really’ self-portraits. Seen in the context of her overall work and particularly her later paintings, this question becomes indeed insignificant. John was never really interested in the identity of the sitter: in her later portraits we don’t even know who the sitter is. John’s models, including herself, were not treated as individuals but as ‘a set of pictorial problems requiring solution.’ (Langdale1987, 89) In the light of Jordanova’s suggestion above, John’s self-portraits were also opportunities for ‘visual models to be emu- lated’ and influential teachers and masters to be acknowledged. In her letters, John has in-
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deed shown awareness of her own historicity as an artist, by explicitly stating her debt to Dürer as in the letter cited above. In following a great master, who was also a leading figure in the history of the psychological portrait (Koerner 2005), John was inevitably influenced by Dürer’s own self-portraits as Christ, what commentators have called his ‘Christomorphism.’ Koerner has particularly pointed to an analogy identified between Christ as ‘God the artificer’ and Dürer as the ar- tist in his divinity, in modern commentaries on his work. (2005, 71) Interestingly enough in her notebooks, John has referred to herself as ‘God’s little artist’,7 a line much noted and discussed by commentators of her own work, always in relation to her religiosity and particularly her conversion to Catholicism. As Foster has explicitly put it: ‘Her spiritual involvement in Catholicism had its parallel in her work, a connection made in her description of herself as ‘God’s little artist’. (1999, 52) Relevant as such connections might be, what I think is more interesting about John’s well-noted entry is the way this phrase shows her adherence to a certain historical tendency in the constitution of the per- sona of the artist: a transcendental figure, rising beyond earthy concerns and attaining to the divine. Indeed, short and elliptical as it is, John’s notebook entry ‘God’s little artist: a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker’, is a sign of how she was consciously attempting to situate herself in Dürer’s divine universe. It is this trail in the his- tory of art that John was following in trying to make sense of herself as an artist and this was independent of the fact that she had become a Catholic. What I therefore argue is that John’s constitution as an artist, as revealed in her paintings, but also in her letters and notebooks, is related to her religious beliefs but is not determined by them. Moreover as a woman artist, John was grappling with the difficulties of adhering to the ge- neric conventions of a long male dominated tradition in self-portraiture. ‘Women artists producing self-portraits encountered a variety of masculine stereotypes with which they interacted in order to make work’, Marsha Meskimmon (1996, 10) has argued. In this light John’s decision to paint the face of the female figure in A Lady Reading as a Dürer’s Madonna could be seen as what I will call, Virginmorphism—a gender-bending of an old mas- ter’s idea and technique, rather than as a biographical sign of her conversion to Catholi- cism. John’s artistic experiments with seeing, knowing and representing the self should therefore not be conflated with biographical details or reduced to her religious beliefs or attitudes at the time. I have discussed elsewhere, how John is emerging as a nomadic subject, difficult and impossible to be pinned down as a coherent and fixed identity and I have also indi- cated the inherent error of creating linear causalities between what she wrote or painted and who she was. (Tamboukou 2008) In this sense John cannot be constrained within the identity position of a single woman on the verge of surviving (Figes 1993, 74) or that of a ‘Catholic artist.’ (Foster 1999, 53) It is in the same vein that she always evades subjectifica- tion as a talented Slade girl, a modernist artist, a bohemian, a recluse, a hysteric passionate lover or a spinster surrounded by cats. Of course John was moving in the vicinities of dif-
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ferent subject positions, but would never inhabit any of them permanently. Her self- portraits offer visual images of her nomadic passages but have to be considered alongside her letters, so that a cartography of her subjectivity can be charted. But what is the relation- ship between self-portraiture and auto/biographical documents such as letters? It is this question that I now want to take up, moving to the second thematic path of this paper as delineated above, the interface between the visual and the textual.
Portraiture as a Visual Form of Life Writing
Jens Brockmeier (2001, 255) has argued that ‘narrative should not be understood as a language entity, but in a more general sense as the ability or capacity to tell a story. A narrative text in this view is a text in which one or more agents tell a story in a particular medium’; in this sense all narratives are relational acts par excellence. The medium in Brockmeier’s analysis ‘can be language as well as imagery, sound, spatial construction or a combination thereof.’ (255) Brockmeier emphatically notes that in this light, ‘it is particularly revealing to look at portraiture as a visual form of life writing.’ (255) ‘But how can a life narrative become an iconic artefact?’ Brockmeier (255) has asked. In response to this question, he has put forward the argument that
… pictures and words, imagery and narrativity are interwoven in one and the same semiotic fabric of meaning. They are overlapping trajectories with the same symbolic space, a space of meaning in which our experience takes place and in which we try to make sense of the world. (255)
Brockmeier bases the argument above on the assertion that painting is primarily an iconic symbol system. Undoubtedly there is merit in this proposition. But what is the semiotic re- gime that Brockmeier’s analysis draws upon? Does it concern the Saussurean linear signi- fied-signifier relationship? The latter is neither self-evident nor unproblematic. Things become even more complicated, if we consider portraits on the plane of Peircian semiotics, in which case, Brockmeier’s assertion that ‘painting is an iconic symbol system’ needs to be further unravelled. It is particularly Charles Peirce’s triadic sign relation of the sign, the object and the interpretant as well as his tripartite classification of signs as icons, in- dices and symbols that has been followed in certain strands of the portrait literature.8 It is thus lines of Peircian semiotics that I now want to look into. Signs in Peirce’s theory constitute the world, thinking is sign and even human beings are signs. How does the sign relation function? Peirce introduces the role of the interpretant in the sign relation and in this sense a triadic relation is configured between the sign or repre- sentamen, the object, which is what is being represented and the interpretant. ‘A sign receives its meaning by being interpreted by a subsequent thought or action [and] it is only in rela- tion to a subsequent thought … the interpretant that the sign attains meaning.’ (Hoops
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1991, 7) Within the cycle of the triadic sign relation, Peirce further introduces a tripartite taxonomy of signs depending on the indispensability of the presence of the interpretant, and the object in the configuration of the relation:
A sign is either an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant even though its object had no existence; [...] An index is a sign, which would at once lose…