Promotional Information

Study of the centrality of portraiture in the development of modern subjectivity.

Table of Contents

List 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

About the Author

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.

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