Subject in Art Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern

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. Rather It Was First Visualized 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 the Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Ap