DescriptionI examine the social and historical context for the creation of object-portraits in American art in the decade following the First World War. Object-portraits are portraits in which the artist has replaced an image of the subject’s face or body with an object or a collection of objects. This phenomenon occurs specifically in the postwar moment when several actual and intellectual assault on selfhood – from the mechanization of the Great War, the effects of the Machine Age, developments in the field of psychology that challenged traditional notions of the self, and the burgeoning consumer culture and national advertising industry – caused artists to reassess the very nature of portraiture. What they were faced with was nothing less than the question of what it meant to be human in the modern age. Their answer to this problem, in the form of the object-portraits, redefined the boundaries between subject and object, human and thing.
There are three main avenues of interdisciplinary inquiry this study has taken in order to determine how the social history of the self is written upon the object-portrait. First, I examine how contemporary shifts in the growing field of psychology impacted the understanding of identity in such a way as to de-center the self away from both the body and from the concept of a unified stable core. Object-portraits responded to this de-tabilizing of identity by searching for other means of visualizing the subject. Second, I analyze the history of technology and specifically of the body-machine metaphor to consider the various ways the object-portraits evince both a fascination with, and anxiety about, the machine in its myriad forms. And finally, I examine the contemporary advertising industry and consumer culture ideology, fueled by the application of psychology to commerce, and its manipulation of the subject/object relationship. I argue that the object-portraits, particularly the ones that appropriate an advertising aesthetic, participated in and commented on this marketed discourse. Therefore, the object-portraits examined here appear at the intersection of several histories. They anchor a variety of threads, from psychology to technology to advertising, and elucidate the construction of the self in the interwar period.