Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing) 3031368983, 9783031368981

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years Teresa Bruś

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Series Editors Clare Brant, Department of English, King’s College London, London, UK Max Saunders, Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

This series features books that address key concepts and subjects in life writing, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials. The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect its academic, public, digital and international reach, and to continue and promote its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address global contexts beyond traditional territories, and which engage with diversity of race, gender and class. It welcomes volumes on topics of everyday life and culture with which life writing scholarship can engage in transformative and original ways; it also aims to further the political engagement of life writing in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, and the processes and effects of the Anthropocene, including environmental subjects and non-human lives. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject; and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing.

Teresa Bru´s

Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years

Teresa Bru´s Institute of English Studies Wroclaw University Wroclaw, Poland

ISSN 2730-9185 ISSN 2730-9193 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ISBN 978-3-031-36898-1 ISBN 978-3-031-36899-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz/Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolinskich ´ This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my love and joy, Bazgroł, Filip, and Carla

Preface

Our anxieties about the forces of deterioration threatening the face with defacement (de Man) and effacement, concerns about the wear and tear of the face (Rilke), its desacralization (Taussig), its profanation (Agamben), its de-semanticization (Fischer-Lichte), its fading (Nancy), its crisis (Belting), its withdrawal into the oblivion of faciality (Deleuze), and even its extinction (Beckett) express our sense of the precariousness of the face. Even as an image, the face escapes our control. And yet, the persistence of presentations and representations of the face is remarkable. The face fascinates. Creative acts of its interpretation reveal how ideas of ourselves and others are built around this small area of our body, an area designed to be seen. Questions concerning the self, our understanding of others, relatedness, expression, experience, and life coalesce in facial conversations. And our sharing of life and experience, empirical studies demonstrate, begins with the face. The imaging of the face brings together a wide range of attitudes towards its extraordinary force, both good and bad, and, of particular relevance to this study, the power and purpose of the portrait. This book addresses appearances and expositions of the face in lifewriting of the omnivorously photophilic periods in the cultural history of the interwar period, a time when the human face acquired a new significance. Although it was already familiar as technology, photography was then undergoing revolutionary innovation. The nexus of photography and life-writing at the point of other pivotal changes which were to be

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brought by the cinema exposes photography as a scopic tool for representations of the nature of new subjectivity. I propose a model of cultural rupture to allow an account of the changes in experiences of patterns of observation and visual self-presentation in life narratives and in forms distinct from narrating. By attending to how they reclaim the face as a “life form” (W. J. T. Mitchell), an absorptive image of continuous activity dependent on moods, impressions, and contexts, always in excess of what is visible, we can gain insights into complex aspects of exteriority upon which things are shaped and self-knowledge is sought. The major theme of this study is that of subjects in search of new forms of self-presentation and display. I frame the analysis within the twenties and the thirties. In the recent A History of 1930s British Literature (2019), Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton redescribe the period as transformational in the cultural and literary history of the twentieth century. This book shares this assumption but looks at media landscapes, exploring fresh ideas of photography, noticeably absent in Kohlmann and Taunton’s text, in order to stress the unusual strength and appeal of social self-presentation and display facilitated by the medium of photography. Articulations and visualisations of the face enmeshment in photography and in life-writing, including diverse forms of the autobiographical, introduce important issues also absent in Modernism and Autobiography (2014) and A History of English Autobiography (2016). I intend to reconstruct both visual and textual mechanisms of conceptualizing notions of subjecthood, against and with the visual practices of avant-gardists and artists belonging to a range of modernisms in transcultural settings, to pinpoint the degree to which the lived experience is shaped by media. I examine autobiographical image/texts as cultural practice where unbound, split into elements, splintered and transformed, the face emerges as a locus of value and a direct vehicle of revelation not always available in narrative self-presentation. In brief, my account proposes two emphases: the face as an autobiographical form and life-writing as a site of curation of objects of knowledge—fragmentary and split face forms. Far from being issues or achievements of the last half-century of postmodernism, fragmentation and distortion were flourishing in the earlier 1900s. Their earlier proponents and exponents lacking in none of the subsequent conceptual power associated by postmodernism with such strategies, carefully avoided the supposed implications—of relativism and nihilism and antihumanism—which have, wrongly and perhaps rather trivially, been taken

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as concomitants and conclusions of “modern” technology in the realm of facial self-representation. Whereas it is superficially possible to arrange ideas of face forms around an antithesis, between the supposed wholeness and actual distortion: in fact such an antithesis would be vulnerable to the charge of “lumping.” It would gather a confusing association, on one side of a false antithesis, of practices very different and incompatible; and more importantly, that approach would misrepresent the necessary fact, and the crucial degree, of “selfhood,” through rather than against, that the group of writers and artists I bring together strove towards self-consciousness, self-distortion, and self-regeneration. I discuss their life-writing as a finding place where issues evinced in portraying practices reveal important facts about social self-representation. The Polish and English writers, photographers, and writersphotographers whom I have brought together in this study were concerned about the lived experience as shaped and grounded in media; I have positioned them in relation to the persistence of their defence of the face against threats from modern life. Contemporaries sharing interests and modes of presentation of images—Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Virginia Woolf, Debora Vogel, Cecil Beaton, Władysław Theodor Benda, and Edward Gordon Craig—all committed to the reorganization of the face as a form. They recognized in the crisis of the face the importance of disintegration and undoing of its received forms, also as a necessary step in self-confrontation and self-writing. In the remaking of the face, they found ample resources for self-inquiry and self-knowledge as well as a promise of the outside—the visual and cultural projection (Agamben). By disintegrating the honorific integrity and autonomy of the face representation occasioned by the photographic understanding of the self, they devised reversible modes of its rejuvenation. Thus they came to reclaim the power of face forms as a privileged locus of meaning and value, forms in a sense of composite facial arrangements, shapes, the sensual pleasure created by them, and even the substantial essence of the face rather than its mere appearance. For these writers, the face used as a tool of revolt sustaining a countersphere opened up a new location of potential selfhood and also of community. The writers and artists I examine take possession of their faces. They engage in serialized attempts to recognize and know their faces. Witkiewicz’s performative face, for instance, happens each time in a social context and, despite his sense of the indelible lack and hollowness defining modern life, and his life, in particular being in the wrong face

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and out of face helped him organize his artistic endeavour and lessen his private agonies. His “face-work” (Goffman), actions aiming to save the face beyond visuality, acquired life-changing meaning and power. An involvement in the face allowed the authors I introduce in this study to re-open reflections on self-interest and self-determination. At the same time, acting against claims about the destitution and degradation of the ethical value of the face, and also against claims about the immoderate proliferation of images of the face, they set out to think through identity, to designate forms worth sustaining. The power of face forms was at the back of the minds of Benda and Craig puzzling over false faces, the masks they created. As an essential form of visual perception, a territory charged with energies of life and of being, the “face work” for these creators proved a fertile ground for the affirmation of mute faces, of silent false faces. In this study, the relatedness of authors’ life entanglements with face images reveals a shared conception of photography and life-writing—two synergistically operating habitats. Though these connections have been extensively, and admirably, explored by Timothy Dow Adams, François Brunet, Maggie Humm, Linda Haverty Rugg, Lynda Nead, and Lorraine Sim, what has not been considered is the intertextual ascendency of the photographic images and their constitutive role in constructions of self-identities in life-writing shaped and empowered by photographic knowledge, and spread across transcultural uses of photography. Also lifewriting as a space for reflection on various definitions of photography has escaped critical attention. Proposing a multimedia perspective, I will show not only how the authors relied on faces as potent figures of self-creation and self-knowledge, but also how their intermedial entanglement with the face was used to interrogate the meaning-value of the face as image in art. Like Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, Beaton’s, Benda’s, and Craig’s practices emerge as private, change their lives, and to them become eventually formed and recognized beliefs which can put pressure on social experiences and even change them. What for Beaton was an exercise of personal predilection, eventually evolved into an identifiable period style, a generalized everyday experience circulated across many different institutions of photography. The authors analysed in this study share photographic consciousness and their life-writing is invested with a new level of importance attached to photography as empowering life-experience. Framing their world with

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cameras, also borrowing from the versatile logic of photographic technologies, the life-writers discussed in this book engaged in experiments with the construction and adoption of face forms to test and craft new visions of subjectivity and life. Their hybrid forms of life-writing stand as a vivid part of the everyday formation of identity and of expanding ideas on what it means to pursue self-fulfilment in life. I show how these diverse authors, operating in diverse national spaces, bring together, often in unpredictable ways, a range of modern forms of self-understanding. What binds the authors selected for this study is their preoccupation with the modern experience of the scattered visual impact of a multitude of faces and face images and their inventive mechanisms of activation through the production of face images. Rather than advancing a single perspective, in each chapter I propose a reading of distinctive ways of approaching life and self in relation to the face. The chapters of the book articulate aspirations behind the excess of verbal and visual images of faces, the plenitude and self-presence circulating and metamorphosing in transnational contexts in media in the twenties and thirties. My wider aim is to renew the exploration of the face value and modes of undoing that minimum of selfhood—the face in the period of history when saving the face was both an aesthetic and a personal life challenge. Wroclaw, Poland

Teresa Bru´s

Contents

1

Commitment to Face 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Face in Its Cultural Context 1.3 The Culture of Face References

1 1 4 11 22

2

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: The Increase and Excess of Facial Expression 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Increase 2.3 Excess in the Close-Up 2.4 Resemblance and Difference References

25 25 30 43 50 74

3

Virginia Woolf and Debora Vogel: A Season of Fragments 3.1 Virginia Woolf: Splintering and Pullulating 3.2 Debora Vogel: Cross-Sectioning and Transforming References

79 79 102 122

4

False Faces of Władysław Theodor Benda and Edward Gordon Craig 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The Face on the Mask 4.3 Benda the Face Former 4.4 Craig the Face Re/former

127 127 130 137 149 xiii

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4.5 Ficta Facies References

163 164

5

Sir Cecil Beaton and the Art of Modern Façade 5.1 Faces as Forms of Allure 5.2 Dividual Face References

169 169 196 206

6

Massification of Faces in Lilliput and Picture Post 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Photography 6.3 Illusionism and Realism 6.4 Faces Re/framed References

211 211 216 226 238 243

7

Conclusions References

247 249

Index

251

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4

Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6

Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Self-Portrait (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ca. 1912. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak) Dr. Jekyll (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1938. Muzeum Narodowe [National Museum] in Warsaw) Mr. Hyde (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1938. Muzeum Narodowe [National Museum] in Warsaw) Portrait of Tadeusz Langier (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1912–1913. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak) Collapse by the Lamp (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. ca. 1913. Muzeum Tatrzanskie ´ in Zakopane) Artur Rubinstein (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Artur Rubinstein. 1913–1914. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak) Jadwiga Janczewska (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1913. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak) Multiple Self-Portrait in Mirrors. ca. 1916 (Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak) Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: from a series of twenty-one faces (Józef Głogowski. 1931. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak) Debora Vogel (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Lost painting. ca. 1929–1930) Heads (Henryk Streng [Marek Włodarski]. 1929. Muzeum Narodowe, Warszawa)

26 28 29

37 49

52 53 64

69 103 115

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

W. T. Benda in the company of masks (Photograph from The Greenwich Village Follies, 1920. Private ´ collection of Anna Rudek-Smiechowska) “Golden Goddess.” W. T. Benda. Mask, 1921, Ann Taylor ´ Collection, Redding (Photo. Anna Rudek-Smiechowska, 2009) A young and lovely actress as the X-ray camera sees her. Picture Post, Dec. 31, 1938, p. 54 Lovely actress as the portrait camera sees her. Picture Post. Dec. 31, 1938, p. 55

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CHAPTER 1

Commitment to Face

1.1

Introduction

Massive daily exposure to faces and our visual preference for faces explain the enduring fascination with the face. We rely on the face as a locus of information about human subjects. Changing forms of human representation result in new meanings we attribute to the face. Its roles as a visual experience, a source of social information, structure of expression, commodity, as an idea, an image, a symbol, metaphor, fetish, archetype, as the self, and as a sign of identity change values. Yet, despite shifting emphases, faces are here with us to stay. Philosophers and psychologists insist on the enduring special status of our faces. The key figure to acknowledge in contemporary psychology is Paul Ekman who embraces a neurocultural theory of the nature of emotions and facial expressions. In Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feeling to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (2003), Ekman problematizes the face as a surface displaying learned, culturally determined expressions as well as universal ones. In Emotion in the Human Face (2006), he emphasizes that the face is complex enough to “allow more than a thousand, different facial appearances,” and to show “more enduring moods, perhaps even stable personality characteristics and traits, and such slow progressive changes as age, or state of health, and such immutables as sex” (Ekman 2006, 1). The face is special also because it is a source of transient © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_1

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and enduring information which we are predisposed to misread (Ekman 2006, 1). Ekman, acknowledging Darwin as his true predecessor, relies on evidence from animal studies and photography to explore the role of facial nerves and muscles in human facial expressions. Like Darwin, Ekman embraces the claims that our facial expressions are universal but he goes further including deception which Darwin did not address in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). We are innately primed to seek and respond to faces though the routes to facial expressions are diverse. According to the affect theorist Silvan Tomkins, “the amount of information conveyed from and to the face exceeds that from and to any other ‘terminal’” and that is why the face is the central organ and “the most likely seat of ‘self’-consciousness” (Tomkins 2008, 115). More recently, the psychologist Alexander Todorov has argued that “we come to the world equipped to detect faces,” thanks to special processing modules conditioning our brains to read them (Todorov 2017, 226). He posits that “our brains automatically compute the social value of faces” (Todorov 2017, 6) and that their perception is “unlike perception of any other object” (Todorov 2017, 77). At the same time, extensive research which Todorov draws upon confirms that mastery in understanding others’ expressions is still impossible. The status of the face as a social value circulating in the cultural sphere has been intertwined with the changes in modes of social interactions. Erving Goffman suggests that the face is not lodged but “diffusely located in the flow of events,” understood when these events become read (Goffman 1967, 7). The English noun “a face” and the verb “to face” according to many researchers share the origin with the Latin faci¯es (form, figure, appearance, countenance), and fac˘ere (to make), or, according to others with the root fa (to appear, shine). OED states that the general sense of the face as “form, appearance” is in English apprehended as a “visage, countenance” (Oxford English Dictionary 1961, 4). “Facing” implies a sense of action—of meeting, attracting, shaping, and confronting. Deriving its impetus from time and space, closely connected with the history of the media and with social interactions reflected in their images, the face is an active agent, attracting attention, eliciting responses, and gathering relations with others. The face is capable of altering the direction of human communication. Individuating and relational or communicating roles of the face, as Gilles Deleuze aptly captures them, belong to well-recognized face values. While the socializing role

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shows our place in society, the individuating role, argues Deleuze, “distinguishes or characterizes each person,” and the relational one “ensures not only the communication between two people, but also, in a single person, the integral agreement between his character and his role” (Deleuze 2019, 110). The face as this face is a basis for self-identity. It ensures a possibility of self-relation, of being a face before becoming an “I.” Ruth Ozeki’s autobiographical essay Timecode of a Face (2022), a practice in mindfulness of the face performed in a three-hour experiment during the pandemic, illustrates a successful process of regaining acceptance of the unsettling singularity of one’s face. Changes in cultural modes of representation result in alternative species of visualization of the face. In our digitally connected age, the face as a post-photographic image bears an unstable status. The change brought about by new technologies has not only dematerialized the photograph, transformed it to “content without matter,” but also made it less trustworthy. The new qualitative appearance of composite digital images as units of morphing information possesses power able to subvert old ethical and aesthetic bases (Fontcuberta 2002, 10–11). Visualizations of subjects in DNA portraits, created through digital photographing and techniques of biological imaging, expose bits of illegible computing data with no recognizable object of representation and no markers of race, age, gender, or class. In the post-human environment, disavowing the necessity of the body, we witness how the integrity and singularity of the face dissolves into data patterns, emphasizing similarities between faces, and presenting ample opportunities for manipulation and enhancement. Artists respond to these new tendencies reflecting changes in the way we think about humans. For example, in Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher’s dystopian portrait “Maria,” the distinguishing constituents of the face have been erased and, in their place, grafts have been added with the help of Photoshop. Sandra Kemp worries that to look at such an aberrant face is to imagine the face in the future if we allow the “over-reliance on information technology and the internet” (Kemp 2004, 211). Erasure of defining facial features may also serve politically subversive purposes. Artists like Zach Blas working in contra-internet aesthetics erase faces not to annul them but to make them inaccessible to public scrutiny. In the Facial Weaponization Suit (2012) project, Blas uses plastic masks made from the digitally obtained features of the model. Such amorphous forms declare forcefully their uselessness for any biometric analyses.

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Yet, despite a prevailing sense of confusion as to our mastery of the morphing and also dissolving face, its making, dissemination, and interaction go hand in hand with testimonies of its volatile character and, interestingly, with arguments for the conservative character of the virtual inventions. In our “culture of use” (Bourriaud), things, however, no longer seem to “fall apart,” as modernists experienced some figures of their civilization but, J. T. W. Mitchell argues, things “come alive,” overly so. Not mass destruction but mass creation has become the aesthetic threat in the digital age (Mitchell 2003, 498). Most ubiquitous technical and synthetic faces, paradoxically, retain recognizable face features and sustain basic communicating functions. With global circulation, the cyberfaces, bodiless surfaces simulating life, reflect people’s not-so-new desires for artificial roles and for alternative bases for self-awareness. The selfie face, for that matter, looks consolidated and curated on the surface, is conventional in its frontal exposition and cooperation, and by now overfamiliar with its adherence to the netiquette. Apps like Selfie City (2014) confirm that we continue to validate such a face, no matter what form, as the trigger for contact. It is also most often a smiling face, one that is an inevitably social expression of the subjective singularity. Validating our self-presence in the selfie verse, we continue to rely on regulated consolidating images of face forms.

1.2

Face in Its Cultural Context

Photography altered the visual history of the face, if not by freezing expression, then by allowing multiplication, recording suffering bodies, and developing distinctive taxonomies (Courtine and Haroche 2007, 172). Yet, as Geoffrey Batchen in his essential study Negative/Positive reminds, the history of photography is also a history of “fractures.” We should bear in mind that the identity of the photograph, “neither singular nor static,” is “always in a state of becoming, always in the process of differing from itself, always in motion.” Impurity and potential for promiscuity, positive/negative polarization, inversions “inherent structural difference,” and the “forces external to itself” determine its essentially split identity (Batchen 2021, 258–259). Such an impure and divided medium offers ever new ways of crafting visions of subjectivity. External forces determine how photography is experienced. In her essayistic consideration of changes of viewing and seeing habits in the twenties and thirties, Virginia Woolf, patterning the specific cultural

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habitus (and its significance for gender relations), emphasizes that “society changes from decade to decade” (Woolf 1976, 80). That is why “the tools of one generation are useless for the next” (Woolf 1988, 431). The nature of changes concerning the photographic representation of subjects are incisively presented by Aleksandr Rodchenko. Highlighting the “now” as a moment of collision and change, the theorist announces the inevitable departure from conventions of synthetic painterly portraiture, the single and immutable “sum total of moments observed.” Rodchenko considers singular depictions as falsifying. A painted portrait, “a personal summary” of “the rich and powerful,” had its significance for people who lived “by encyclopaedias.” For those living “by newspapers, magazines, card catalogues, prospectuses, and directories,” fragmentation and multiplication open relevant points of entry to a person. Written in 1928, Rodchenko’s “Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot,” identifies not just a snapshot but a whole lot of snapshots “taken at different times and in different conditions,” as a new imperative. New media always differentiate themselves from older tools and forms (Rodchenko n.d.). Rodchenko defends files of snapshots also for their socially inclusive character; painted portraits missed all the intelligent people and “even men of science were not painted,” he observes. Indeed, in the twenties and the thirties, serialized faces of people as popular subjects in the medium took on new significations; reproduced widely, they gained greater visibility and proximity to the public. Rodchenko, clearly, salutes as “rejuvenating” the appearance of faces of thousands of scientists and their collaborators, of people, famous and ordinary (Rodchenko n.d.). Hornby argues that Rodchenko aimed above all to produce a series of images of the same person, over and over, “thus sharing the same axis of inquiry as Proust’s narrator” and the same anxiety over the questions of how to recognize and know another person (Hornby 2021, 80–81). The multiple takes and their repetition carried implications for portraiture. Hans Belting draws attention to what he identifies as a symptom of the crisis of the face. Echoing Benjamin’s idea of loss of aura and the philosopher’s inclination for physiognomy, Belting argues that by replacing the traditional en face with extreme close-ups, sharp focus, multifarious angles, and surface details, photographers like August Sander eliminated the identity of the face and of the portrait (Belting 2015, 198–202). Physiognomic galleries of Sander’s Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit ) photobook apply the highly influential physiognomic thinking in Weimar culture. Sander’s homogenous typologies of German citizens

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organized according to social orders and captured in boldly defined social habitus represent, as Benjamin identified them, a necessary “book of exercises” if not for the fact that “power shifts, such as we face, generally allow the education and sharpening of the physiognomic conception” (Benjamin 1980, 211). In Sander’s reframing files, we identify the critical shift in the perception of the state of the individual and the ensuing abandonment of traditional forms of portraiture not necessarily in the rejuvenating direction Rodchenko had in mind. This very acclaimed 1929 visual anthology shows a general notion of people; anchored in captions, they are evaluated not as themselves but as representatives of generic social identities. Often, the urge to create detached series motivates the choice of the same person under different guises. According to Wolfgang Brückle, in the faceless culture ushered by modernity, a type emerged as a “product of uncertainty” and its significance as a “link between history, the individual, and the group” defined the photographic practice in Germany (Brückle n.d.). I will show in the final chapter how the backbone of the most popular illustrated magazines in Britain in the thirties consisted of remarkable German photographers like Felix Mann, Erving Blumenfeld, and Bill Brandt who, having found their home in England, uncovered new and highly popular applications for their microphysiognomic typologies, away from, what Batchen identifies as the “economy of conformist individuality” (Batchen 2021, 189). Photography made it possible to see diverse ways of forming and reforming identity in and through the face. François Brunet shows that literature became fascinated with this seductive medium of expression and not only got involved with photographic images but also welcomed enthusiastically photographic aspects in literary productions. Collaborating with photographers, writers wrestled for revelatory identification and photographic portraits served the purpose of underscoring their professional identity. Already from the 1840s to the 1900s through photography (and engraving), writers experienced “sudden accession to visibility of their faces and bodies” (Brunet 2013, 115). In the twentieth century, the photographer Gisèle Freund, sharing her experiences of photographing writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, wrote: “once we have enjoyed the ideas expressed in a book, we want to see the face behind them” (Freund 1974, 7). Authors became visible photographic subjects, not only “lookers-on” but also looked-at authors, growing into the consciousness of viewers and, when photographed by famous photographers, discovering their changed social meanings. When entering the

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magazine Vogue’s “Hall of Fame” with the posed 1924 photograph by Maurice Beck and Helen MacGregor, Virginia Woolf not only entered the masculine territory and the magazine’s “hallway for the rich and famous”; she was also “trespassing the tight fences between high art and popular art” (Macedo 2003). Her appearance in Man Ray’s portrait in 1937 cover of Time asserted Woolf’s status of a cult figure, and as souvenirs with copies of this photograph in the National Portrait Gallery show, continues to do so. In the late nineteenth century, the status of the photographer became more defined not only as an “image maker but also a story teller and a writer, elevating photography to the status of art of eloquence” (Brunet 2013, 90). Exploring new ideas and practices in domestic photography, Maggie Humm emphasizes key shifts in its aesthetic meanings: “its practice allowed modernist women to blur distinctions between amateur and artist, and between art and the everyday” (Humm 2002, 18). Women as active photographers encouraged new creative forms of selfrepresentation, often also willing to comment on their work in writing. Testimonials, confessions, and comments, according to Brunet, mark the beginning of the understanding of photography as an autobiographical medium. Thus photography opened up to public and private experiences, featuring as a popular literary, social, and political medium of public discourse and, significantly, as the literature of photography and a new literature. Also, photographers’ self-portraits introduced “new forms usually involving multiple and or serial images, constituting varieties of photographic autobiographies” (Brunet 2013, 107). Collaborations of writers and photographers and involvement of writers in photography led to many exciting projects. Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, for instance, introduced photographs by Julia Cameron in her collection Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, foregrounding photography as a way of self-expression and self-realization. The influence of Cecil Beaton on the exploration and expansion of literary forms to promote both photography and life-writing has been prolific—auteurs like him illuminate the synergy of photography and literature that reached such remarkable expression in the interwar period. It is true that late nineteenth-century intoxication with images was possible thanks to mechanically reproduced photographic images. In “La Peinture Photogénique” Michel Foucault, a key figure of resistance to and critique of the visual, writes about the phenomenon as an unprecedented “new frenzy of images” which in the second half of the nineteenth

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century developed photography into a “great play space.” With the help of all sorts of arranging techniques including poetry, photography opened up space for the extraordinary scale and intensity of folly impossible to recreate since then. For Foucault, it was not even the presence of photographic images, nor their exposition as much as their almost shameless mobility, their circulation, their “migration et perversion” (Foucault 2012, 1575), their slipping and sliding, and trickery with the participation of painters that led to an unrestrained play, a type of play free from the “care of identity” (Foucault 2012, 1575). Gradually, transformed by new techniques of transposition, photographic images, free and fleeting, opened new vistas and new sights of pleasure and admiration available to all. The “photography effect,” as Jonathan Crary proposes, belongs to a new culture of image making in the nineteenth century and it should be considered as a major part of a “new cultural economy of value and exchange” (Crary 1992, 13). When the painterly portrait as a determining and anchoring mimetic representation was losing some of its identifying functions, new conditions for facial representations developed. Oliver W. Holmes identified peculiarities of the emerging photographic portraiture in “Doings of the Sunbeam” (Holmes 1863): We have learned many curious facts from photographic portraits which we were slow to learn from faces. One is the great number of aspects belonging to each countenance with which we are familiar. Sometimes, in looking at a portrait, it seems to us that this is just the face we know, and that it is always thus. But again another view shows us a wholly different aspect, and yet as absolutely characteristic as the first; and a third and a fourth convince us that our friend was not one, but many, in outward appearance, as in the mental and emotional shapes by which his inner nature made itself known to us.

For Holmes, new conditions of seeing a subject allowed new expressions and new forms of circulation of the face. His parallax trope alerts to new cognitive possibilities. They became developed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Significantly, mediated and remediated in multivalent shapes and forms, interests in face forms were brought to a pitch of intensification, thanks to the growing roles of periodicals. Increased mass visual literacy, ubiquity of images, and new types of image makers are important features of the period. Lynda Nead argues that by 1896 modern visual culture was already changed, “individuals and

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societies had become the subject of representational practices that were without precedent in their nature and scope” (Nead 2007, 108). In the first decades of the twentieth century, new forms of display of images and new ways of constituting audiences were developing. In her study Nead highlights another key aspect of transformation: velocity of the image, “from stasis to movement and the varieties and velocities of motion” which came to “possess all forms of media” (Nead 2007, 1). New photographic cameras certainly encouraged mobility of their users. With the introduction of the Box Brownie camera, lightweight Leica camera, produced commercially since 1924, the Ermanox camera, “notable because of an exceptionally fast lens which allowed indoor photography in normal electric light” (Jeffrey 1984, 180), and the “in your face” Kodak cameras, informal photographs could be taken by amateurs and new forms of more participatory engagement with photographic images were encouraged. More light sensitive film stock, roll film, launched by Kodak in the 1890s, and faster lenses contributed to the changes in practices of image-making. Maggie Humm, explaining the significance of snapshooting, notes that the popularity of mechanically taken images “fundamentally altered the ways in which people saw themselves and their worlds not through ‘automatic’ formations but by encouraging a more creative, active participation in the construction of memory” (Humm 2012, 23). Besides, quest of form in art photography and groundbreaking multimedia visual experiments of the European avant-garde in the twenties modified and modulated the image, departing from claims to its singularity and autonomy. Thanks to the culturally most potent inventions of photography and cinema in the interwar period, the full-blown society of the spectacle flourished. We witness an enormous mobilization on behalf of photography. Images in diverse media were beginning to form new relationships, and viewers were developing pro-active positions. The decades “gave rise to the first generation of people to consume images in a great number on a daily basis” (Campany 2008, 63), and to satisfy the growing crave for exposure, publicity, and entertainment. The large-scale mass printing presses led in the twenties and the thirties to the emergence of popular photo-graphic illustrated magazines. Innovations such as photo-essay and photo-story, first tested by the avant-garde artists, shifted the terms of interaction between the word and the image, privileging images and equipping them with great powers of appeal. In the interwar years, photography “became ubiquitous and held all of society in its sway:

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photomontage, photojournalism, and photobook are some of the new words coined to convey the ascendancy of the photographic in so many branches of art and communication” (Powell 2007, xxiii). Proliferation of print culture in these decades, especially of the mass-market popular press, like Lilliput and Picture Post created the most fertile environment for the proliferation of faces. The public were becoming habituated to looking at them. David Campany shows that rapid changes in page design enhanced presence and interruptions in presentation of disparate things with analogies in Surrealist poetry (Campany 2008, 62). Image organizers were introducing new strategies: “images were placed side by side to assert connections; prints were flipped left to right to aid graphic flow; dramatic crops and close-ups mobilized the page” (Campany 2008, 64). New reinventions of the page, “a kind of para-cinema” (Campany 2008, 65) led to the emergence of film-strip sequences in print to eventually become “a staple of everything from avant-garde manifestos and film journals to photo-novels and fan magazines” (Campany 2008, 66). Additionally, sophisticated advertising trends in the press showed a very strong influence of the cinema, especially in its fascination with close-ups. Probed in this book, British popular magazines such as Lilliput with its literary and visual juxtapositions and combination of galleries of faces and Picture Post with its photo-essays and photographic experiments enabled the expression of edited, reworked images of the face and asserted upon them new unforced connections and rhythms. W. J. T. Mitchell’s idea of the image as “an object that is potentially, virtually, or actually in motion” (Mitchell 2010, 39) holds true in the context of journals assimilating and reworking images of facial types. The illustrated magazines were promoting the fresh topos of a New Woman drawing on classical facial representations, exposing relations between selfhood and spectacle, between private faces and public places—defining issues for modernity. These new visual constructions of identifications were creatively pursued and orchestrated by many authors in their personal scrapbooks, overlooked visual forms of life-writing. In Cecil Beaton’s and Edward Gordon Craig’s scrapbooks and daybooks, for example, we find carefully orchestrated personal collections of face images assembled from magazines and later transferred and re-published in the press and also as separate books. New relations with multiple images reflected increased activity of the observer. Georg Simmel noted the “rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity of the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impression” (qtd. in Nead 2007, 108). Addressing

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Guy Debord’s estimate that the late twenties were a threshold of the society of spectacle, Crary speculates about another significant mental change—a strengthening discourse of attention: “the relation between stimulus and attention, problems of concentration, focalization, and distraction” (Crary 1989, 102). Crary identifies as “an effect of spectacle” a phenomenon of standardization of response. Alluding to the example of perception of the face by Deleuze and Guattari, he says the effect is characterized by redundancies and loss of vital “micromemory” connections (Crary 1989, 103). The new optical focus was associative, not linear, and triggered dynamic associative relationships and the new tempo.

1.3

The Culture of Face

Rosalind Krauss authoritatively posits the “incredible coherence of European photography” (Krauss 1981, 34) in the decades under discussion. Camera-seeing, a new vision revolutionizing all of human perception, as László Moholy-Nagy referred to it in Painting Photography Film, allowed viewers to see the world closer, faster, sharper, in unusual light, or penetrated with new rays. New visual articulations changed the object-viewer relations by triggering a state of increased activity in the observer, who—instead of meditating upon a static image and instead of immersing himself in it and only then becoming active—is forced almost to double his efforts immediately in order to be able simultaneously to comprehend and to participate in optical events. (Moholy-Nagy 1973, 24)

For the socially concerned Moholy-Nagy, photographic images delivered not accessible but complicated and engaging forms capable of stirring changes. One of the significant modifications introduced was a strategy of cutting the image—interrupting it with breaks, blanks, and gaps with spacing, as Dadaists, Cubists, and Surrealists did in their montages and photomontages, thus robbing the images of their illusion of presence. Krauss writes that photography’s vaunted capture of a moment in time has always been the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real. The photograph carries on one continuous surface

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trace or imprint of all that vision captures in one glance. The photographic image is not only a trophy of this reality, but a document of its unity as that-which-was-present-at-one-time (Krauss 1987, 23). Different forms of interaction between the public and the private facial images rendered visible the contingency of unity. Spacing orchestrated by portrait photographers revises the unity. In representations of the face, new angles and concatenations come to interfere with and disrupt the totalizing and fixing frontal and neutral presentation of the face. It opens itself to synecdochic arrangements altering the relation of singularity and substitution. In Paul Edmund Hahn’s photographs for Carl Schnebel’s “The Face as Landscape” (Das Gesicht als Landschaft ) (1929), for example, abstracted in extreme close-ups, the lines, traits, and layers of the faces metamorphose into discontinuous topographic surfaces. When spacing is applied both in still and in moving images, montages break the unity, collate the face in the image in multiple variants, and render its various expressions simultaneously, additionally juxtaposing its contrary states. Such non-identity strategies mark a change Belting names an escape from portraiture (Belting 2015, 199). In the interwar period, the practice of fracturing marks its transformations. The important Film und Foto Exhibition held in Stuttgart in 1929 was not only the first attempt to exhibit and curate new heterogeneous photographs, including art and non-art portraits in an exhibition setting, to promote and unify boundless visual possibilities of photography, but also to include the cinema together with photography “for mutual definition” (Campany 2008, 9). In the twenties and thirties, working across diverse forms and media, between photography and the cinema, between photography and literature, photographers attempted to challenge the static portrayal of the face and the medium’s powers to capture the soul or character of the subject. Experimenting with duplication and serialization, they not only cut it but also invited motion, as if letting the flow of time enter the image. In 1931, Helmar Leirski in Köpfe des Alltags (Everyday Heads ), photographed his sitters from a wide range of different angles and in different lighting conditions, drawing on his experience with chiaroscuro techniques he had introduced in Expressionist theatre and cinema in Germany. Employing multiple lamps and mirrors, he achieved striking effects. Campany, referring to Metamorphosis Through Light (1936) in which Leirski photographed his subject in 175 different ways, stresses the artist’s underlying belief that “human identity will always elude

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the single, static image” (Campany 2008, 32). “Pursuing the project,” observes Campany, “one becomes less and less sure what the man actually looks like and quite clueless as to who and what he ‘is.’” The result is “a cinematographic performance of a face, a mercurial façade beyond any knowable person” (Campany 2008, 32). Looking at Barbara KerSeymer’s adventurous sharp, exact images of models with their faces oiled and covered in whites, we are invited to scrutinize the surface of the skin, also unsure of the exact nature of its lifeless texture and its masklike quality. Such intentional confusion of faces and masks exposes both the striking effects of dispersal of facial surfaces and the inevitability and potent metamorphosing potential of photography. Surrealists, profoundly disturbed by the war, “emerged from it disgusted; henceforth they wanted nothing in common with a civilization that had lost its justification, and their radical nihilism extended not only to art but to all its manifestations” (qtd. in Jay 1994, 231). It did not extend to photography, though. Surrealists in fact placed diverse types of photographic forms at the heart of their projects. They were personally enamoured of photography; in “increasingly self-conscious and technically ambitious portraits” they were actively pursuing what Brunet calls “photographic stardom” (Brunet 2013, 125). Experimenting with photography, visual artists like Man Ray challenged the unitary condition of the subject’s presence in the image, mixing masks and faces and employing the techniques of doubling. In La Marquise Casati (1922), for example, he presents the face unidealized, disrupted with sets of eyes superimposed on one another. The resulting doubling effect prioritizes fissure, which renders the face highly ambiguous. Such a presentation of the face departs from transparency of meaning in a portrait, gesturing into a different (psychical) space. A jamais vu—a complement to déjà vu—to use a Bretonian proposition from Mad Love, provokes with a promise of a new realm. Krauss explains that this defining surrealist photographic manoeuvre “elicits the notion that to an original has been added a copy” and that “being seen in conjunction with the original, the double destroys the pure singularity of the first” (Krauss 1987, 25). Many Surrealists’ models are subjected to fissure and distortion. Women’s faces become effaced. Their figures lack identity; they are anonymous, incomplete, and unable to engage in social interactions. Expressed in Sex and Character, Otto Weininger’s theses about women as entities without names and without faces found illustration in many Surrealist novels and images.

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In his telling study, Giorgio Agamben observes that developments in visual culture, the use of the photographic camera, and the invention of cinematograph at the turn of centuries changed the status of the image by breaking the mythical rigidity of images and redeeming the pictorial dynamis (Agamben 2000, 54). Portraitists experimented with diverse motions. For Gertrude Stein, writing in 1926, portraiture required “the vitality of movement” (Stein 1975, 173). She emphasizes intensity and also the dynamis of the cinema as defining for the era: “our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and serious production” (Stein 1975, 177). Stein calls for identification of movement within the sitter and the maker, for listening and discovering. Portraiture, the truly modernist genre, is not about singular framing and resemblance but about employment of incantatory, sequential, cinema-like repetitions with a change. We observe also that when the kinetic shifts are activated, for example, by Alvin Langdon Coburn in taking Ezra Pound’s vortographs in 1916–1917, the motoricity of the face becomes compromised. Their mutated dynamis renders the face unsure of its contours. Moderate estimates suggest that in Britain, 18.5 million people visited the cinema every week in 1934, and that many of them saw films even three times a week (Low 1985, 1). The work of early film cannot be underestimated in the discussion of the values and functions of the face in the image in view of the use of similar techniques. Virginia Woolf’s sophisticated 1926 essay “The Cinema,” discussed in Chapter 3, deserves special attention not only because it highlights the potential of new transformative techniques like close-ups and the subversion of chronology in film (Humm 2002, 76) but also because, read along with its manuscript version, as Maggie Humm demonstrates, the essay reveals a “detailed, sophisticated response to cinema techniques” on the part of Woolf (Humm 2002, 187). Siegfried Kracauer, concentrating on the falsity of continuous presentations, saw hope in both photographic and cinematic images—the strange, what he called extraterritoriality. For the German critic, fragmenting and reconstructing montage arrangements produced by filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein, performed necessary revealing functions. By exposing things “differently composed,” things normally unseen, artists could discover interesting “blind spots of the mind,” as Didi-Huberman reads his theories. Kracauer saw in the image its capacity “to save the real from its cloak of invisibility” (Didi-Huberman 2012, 176–178). Fragmentation and reconstruction were, according to Kracauer, the most adequate means of sharpening our vision. Benjamin

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also connects the shock-like function of the emancipative possibilities of the cinema in configuration or reconfiguration of images. Such techniques as “lowerings and liftings […] interruptions and isolations […] extensions and accelerations […] enlargements and reductions” allowed penetration of the subject, revealing formations not seen before. However, in his estimate, though with film we gained “unconscious optics” (Benjamin 1969, 236–237), our haptic-optical experience of the image became impoverished, if not destroyed—and with it the aura that had surrounded the human face. In early film, to be seen the face had to stand out. Film was profoundly entangled with the star’s face and the Hollywood picture personality. It linked the attractive and fascinating face to a set of singularizing personality traits and to performance; the face became “an accrual rather than a natural essence” (Walter 2014, 137). Reflecting on the process of selection of essential faces, Robert Musil writes that out of many “kinds of countenance,” an age usually isolates one and makes it a prototype of happiness and beauty; other faces, also the ugly ones, try to “approximate” it only. He exempts from this tendency the exceptional ones, the beautiful noble faces of the gone times. These are lifeless, and like dead remains, circulate only in the empty love games (Musil 1969, 54). In the context of the larger visual culture of the interwar period, Greta Garbo’s face became such a dominant modern prototype erasing all others. Her “variability,” argues Patrick Keating, was a result of both her self-fashioning and the accrual of features applied by acclaimed photographers like Ruth Harriet Louise, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Edward Steichen, and Cecil Beaton. Cinematographers, in turn, often relied on the allure of their portraits to sustain the astounding fascination with Garbo. How glamour, “a new, hard-edged visual style,” visible, copiable, and modern, came to mark a type (Keating 2017, 106–107) and how such a type became assimilated in relation to the theatre into a personal mythology will be shown in the chapter on Beaton. Life-writers under consideration in this book turned to faces of popular actresses not to learn more about the expression of emotions, as did many artists influenced by Lavater’s work in the heyday of physiognomy, but in order to search for new vocabularies of facial displays. For example, Witkacy celebrates Irena Solska’s and Helena Modrzejewska’s faces; his father writes in an unpublished farewell poem that the striking face of Modrzejewska is what he would like to behold before dying. Virginia Woolf praises Edward Craig’s mother

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Ellen Terry. His memoirs in turn abound in memories of the impact Terry’s stunning face had on her contemporaries. The cinema has evolved because of the face. In the words of Bergman, cinema “begins with the human face” and rests on its form; “the possibility of drawing near to the human face is the primary originality and the distinctive quality of the cinema” (qtd. in Deleuze 2019, 110). Barthes agrees and adds that the cinematic close-up projected such a strong and persuasive sense of intimacy that it made people ecstatic (Barthes 1972, 56). Before the cinema, Fernand Léger suggests, we had no idea about the individuality of fragments. The cinema liberated the human figure; no longer attached to sentimental values, it became an aesthetic one (Léger 1965, 98). The camera could change the head of a woman into an oval object whose shape should be drawn out, whose hair could disappear, and whose lips or eyes could be foregrounded (Léger 1965, 89). The intervention of the camera resulted not only in the foregrounding of the features of the face; new techniques also occasioned changes in autonomy of facial parts. Close-up was one of the techniques responsible for attaching the new significance to the face. In the early stages of the development of the cinema, this “pause in the narrative flow, a stable image close to the halting stare of the photograph” (Campany 2008, 49) was developed based on conventions of the studio portraiture. Campany observes that, for example, the close-up of Greta Garbo’s face as Queen Christina staring out from a ship, one of the most celebrated images of the time, is the image that “echoes the countless publicity pictures that had already made Garbo’s face famous” (Campany 2008, 50). Gilles Deleuze, who like Bergman, connects the cinema with the face and the new conceptions of the close-up, develops further the idea of the refunctioning and questioning of the images of the face with the help of the cinematic camera. Disembodied and abstracted from the body, the face on the screen projected new values, “images-affects” disconnected from the subject equivalents of the face. The spectator’s illusion of the new type of “faceto-face” experience the camera introduced, the cinematic close-ups of the face—so uncommon before the moving picture—belonged entirely to the medium of illusion. In agreement with early theorists of the medium, Eisenstein and Bélazs, Deleuze believes that the close-up of the face “abstracts it from all spatio-temporal dimensions ” (Deleuze 2019, 106), losing fundamental functions and character, becoming an expression,

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a phantom (Deleuze 2019, 111). Deleuze recognizes such deterritorialization as suspending individuation, opening adventurous zones of facelessness. These new landscapes of the future were occasioned by new technologies developed in the interwar period of the twentieth century. Considering the face as a photographic image, we cannot forget that in the twenties and thirties, photography was not only a tool of experimentation. It was also used to record the disorienting and de-regulating visual experiences of World War I. Martin Jay addresses the hazardous generalizations about the crisis of visual primacy that its experience entailed. As it is well-documented, the trench warfare “created a bewildering landscape of indistinguishable, shadowy shapes, illuminated by lightning flashes of blinding intensity, and even obscured by phantasmagoric, often gasinduced haze” (Jay 1994, 212). Because “the wounded face was taboo” (qtd. in Henning 2017, 167), graphic close-ups of facescapes of those British soldiers who returned from the war with unmade faces were often concealed. In poetry, Wilfred Owen remembers a silent group of such soldiers with “half-known faces. All their eyes are ice” (Owen 1994, 72). In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he underscores the impotence of a victim with “the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin” (Owen 1994, 29). This subject lost the mastery of the destiny of his face and can no longer face us. For decades, the fifteen per cent of surviving soldiers who, like him, returned with undone faces remained invisible from the rest of society. Thanks to photography, we have been able to acknowledge the defacing consequences of World War I, the war which saw more facial casualties than any other before and since. So brutally exposing were these images that their stewards tried to keep them from public view. In Britain, “it was forbidden to photograph corpses or scenes of combat” (Dalgarno 2001, 169). In the pacifist album War Against War! published, despite government’s denouncement, in many languages and editions, Ernst Friedrich reproduces photographs documenting deformed faces of wounded soldiers. In a chapter dedicated to “Faces of War,” in one horrific photograph, we can discern only eyes on a soldier’s entirely mutilated face. This is “photography as shock therapy,” writes Susan Sontag (2003, 15). Another striking publication, Ernst Benkard’s 1927 book of death masks Undying Faces published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s The Hogarth Press, was not only an “‘aesthetic buffer’ against other, more violent images of war and death” but also, as Michelle Henning argues, connected with the European avant-garde’s interest in

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“dismembered and fragmented body, the savage ‘breaking of the human frame’ that repudiated the glorification of the war” (Henning 2017, 168). When they appeared, portrait masks of the wounded in the war exposed the ruination of faces and efforts to reconstruct them. Anna Coleman Ladd’s portrait masks, for example, were used to cover or replace the missing features of faces of the wounded. Lifelike, they were hugely helpful in the process of re-construction of social visibility of the injured (Henning 2017, 167–168). The twenty-first century exhibitions like Art and Surgery and Faces of Battle and the powerful Project Façade threw light on the faces of veterans in Sir Harold Gillies ward he set for his patients in Queen Mary’s hospital. Among graphic and progressive photographs of the paintings, the twenty-first century public could see the surgical pastel portraits of Henry Tonks. In the exhibitions, signs warning against the disturbing sights of mutilated faces were placed, anticipating the acute disquiet and unquestionably complicated assumptions about our own subjectivities. Tonk’s aesthetically sensitively rendered images expose alienated subjects, devastatingly wounded, silent, and inhuman-looking. Recorded only in medical archives, they show, in the Groebnerian term, die Ungestalt, the formless, and disgusting, those whose faces were violated. Ward Muir, a doctor treating one young patient, describes the degree of devastation of his face: “To talk to a lad who, six months ago, was probably a wholesome and pleasing specimen of English youth, and is now a gargoyle, and a broken gargoyle at that, the only broken features remaining being perhaps one eye one ear, and a shock of boyish hair” (qtd. in Chambers 2009, 594). In Tonk’s series of anti-portraits, works Chambers carefully situates between portraiture and medical record, we face front-on parts of the faces. Chambers documents how Tonks positioned his portraits as pastel “fragments,” images “conflating the damaged faces of his sitters with those of classical statuary” (Chambers 2009, 588). Suzannah Biernoff, on the other hand, recuperates them in her research as fragments of individuality staged by Tonks, the compassionate participant who used pastel colours in an attempt to add some gentle touches and who paid attention to clothing and posture of his patients, thus carefully attending to visible individual distinctions. Biernoff calls the images “Flesh Poems.” Tonks worked as a surgeon and artist, and he drew and photographed portraits of his patients. Depicting simultaneously the pure flesh of the interior and the exterior of the face, the wounds, disturbing the boundary between the visible and what stays hidden, his documents expose the extreme appearance of the face. In such

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an exposure Tonks created “barriers to interpreting the sitter’s subjectivity,” Chambers believes (Chambers 2009, 596). However, the recent Project Façade by the artist Patrick Ian Hartley (relying on photos of the victims, their post-surgery memories and surgical notes) shows that the tragic undoing of the faces actualized in Tonk’s portraits and life masks taken of the war-mutilated, though endless in the permanence of their exposition, can begin to be redressed through commemorative acts of restoration. Damaged faces resurface in literature in the interwar period. Virginia Woolf showed not only the trauma of World War I but also the trauma of the influenza pandemic. Unprocessed fragments and agency-deprived faces play a key part in memories of her characters. In Mrs Dallaway, Septimus worries Rezia’s face may decompose. This language of fear, Elizabeth Outka argues, connects “both delirium and traumatic flashback. His fears reflect the literal experiences of those who witnessed the war’s atrocities and the virus ravages. The war routinely deformed faces and left terrible marks, virus’s ravages” (Outka 2020, 137). In “On Being Ill” (1930), with care and unique perception, Woolf regards distortions of the faces by illness, the strange beauty and also the shapelessness “investing certain faces with divinity” and “wreathing the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health” (Woolf 1994, 318). Though “plain” faces are omnipresent, it is the presence of images of vulnerable and mutilated faces that distinguishes the cultural texts of the interwar period. In 1937, Picasso put to the test the suffering faces of women in collage. In Guernica (exhibited in Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1938), we confront them in proximity and, significantly, in profiles—unconventional non-central views. Rendered in noble black, white, and grey, the colours of a newspaper photograph, faces are given weight through flattening and multilayering of cubist surfaces. Among the dismembered and fragmented bodies, we see a trapped head of a suffering woman shouting in horror while behind her, there is a house on fire. In the twenty-four preparatory studies for the painting, documented in photographs by Dora Maar and published in Cahiers d’Art, we can trace the many ways Picasso used the female face. To reinforce expression, he experimented with the facial features, often drawing on medieval iconography. Joaquín Puente records that the original iris of the right eye became the diaphragm of a camera, reflecting the non-human gaze. In the following studies, the same

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face is upturned and horizontal. To this disequilibrium, Picasso added a sharp cone-shaped tongue, superimposing further the tears of blood, falling up and down, and a blush scribbled on the cheek. He turned the profile downwards, made the hair violently streaked and darkened; he also changed it into “ringed leeches.” He made the eyelashes look like a vegetable bouquet, he added tuberosities and streaks. The eyeballs were surrounded by eyelids like small balls and the neck was “in the form of the base of a jug or sculptorial bust” (Puente 2002, 123–154). Finally, the artist set on raging faces with prominent tears, disintegrated, broken, and interlocked in the chaos of barbarity, in Guernica. We are directed not to physical resemblance, for it is obliterated, but to vibrations of conjugated features and outlines of the face. Picasso’s emphasis on the physical complexity of the form, on the dislocated and distorted features, the “cutup-ness” (Griselda Pollock) of the face and the body, functions as a way of making the invisible and unpaintable dramatically visible and painfully meaningful. And in Cubist reductions and abstractions, in this powerful testimony to the horrors of war, Picasso does isolate the face form, finding in the preserved remnants of pre-modernist aesthetics, resources to actualize his protest. It is almost as if the recognition of possible demise of the face allowed the face to become significant again. Emily Dalgarno emphasizes that “among the many wars which were fought in Spain between 1936 and 1939 it is the image of the technological war machine against the human face which shaped public memory and reinforced a visual code for the perception of modern wars” (Dalgarno 2001, 169). By re-figuring face forms, artists and authors in the interwar years expose the fragility but also the regenerative potentiality of faces. In photography and in literature, floating faces, mixed parts of faces, traces of faces are amorphous markers of newness harnessed for purposes of selfdetermination. Attentive to the difficulty in reading and understanding faces in the modern world, Virginia Woolf suspected that “when all faces are changing and obscured, the only face one can see clearly is one’s own” (Woolf 2011, 273). As life-writing practices of the interwar period reveal, attention to and care for one’s face, paradoxically, can open up what Giorgio Agamben refers to as “an outside”: “And only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me” (Agamben 2000, 100). The quest for “an outside,” for an exterior upon which things may be shaped and subjecthood attained, begins with the face.

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In the decades in question, Mina Loy, guided by the amateur ethnographer’s impulse, was applying popular approaches of “participant observation.” Loy’s art foregrounds difficult relationality aiming at involvement of the observing subject with the observed. She calls for the mastery of the facial destiny in order to secure and stabilize the autonomous self. In the 1919 advertising pamphlet “Auto-Facial Construction,” she proposes reconfiguration of the facial integrity to reclaim a new understanding of personality and new practices of autoethnography. Her method of fashioning the “Film-Face,” as she calls it in a poem dedicated to the actress Marie Dressler, though meant to attract customers, remains elusive but symptomatic. Sensing new “interests and new activities” of modern life, she calls for a manipulation in the face regime, loosening of muscular attachments of the face to recuperate youthfulness, or “the original form of the face” (Loy n.d., 165). Loy would like to release ways of being-a-self through a denial of the natural “facial integrity,” or ageing, paradoxically in exchange for its “original form,” a process which could consolidate and project personality (Loy n.d., 165). She confidently asserts that her competence as an artist, and therefore a physiognomist, makes her a specialist ready to help others in facial “conservation, and when necessary, its reconstruction” (Loy n.d., 165). Christina Walter shows the method as unstable, if not impossible to achieve, yet in Loy’s aim: “to unite an essential, autonomous personality, the impersonal forces of culture and materiality, and a (facial) image that fluctuates but mustn’t seem to do so,” she sees attractive proposition to the public (Walter 2014, 136). Mastery of facial destiny as an imperative was to be made possible mediated by the artist fully aware of the tricks of beauty culture or complexion culture. The body and its obvious limitations, though, often stood in the way of such ameliorating projects. Loy expresses interest in developing personalized systems of curating the embodied but liberated from constraints of gender-fresh personality. Her appeals to intensive immersion in new faces for new times and new purposes reflect what Walter identifies as the face management of a star system or a “‘renascence’” of facial image in modernism (Walter 2014, 138). At the same time, Loy’s poetic snapshots in “Film-Face” of the reproduced image of Dressler’s “enduring face” atop a garbage heap, point in a different direction. In other words, creating like many interwar writers in a context marked by the interaction of diverse media, Loy both recognizes the threatening forces of consumer culture, its emerging yet already very efficient ways of recycling and dispensing with consumerist options, and entertains the

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illusion that we can be put together and refashioned out of materials of culture.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Batchen, Geoffrey. Negative/Positive: A History of Photography. Routledge: London, 2021. Belting, Hans. Faces. Historia twarzy [in Polish]. Translated by Tadeusz Zatorski. Gdansk: ´ Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 199–216. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Biernoff, Suzannah. “Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery.” Visual Culture in Britain 11, no. 1 (2010): 25–47. Accessed 5 June 2019. https:/ /www.academia.edu/607012/Flesh_Poems_Henry_Tonks_and_the_Art_of_ Surgery. Brückle, Wolfgang. “Face-Off in Weimer Culture: The Physiognomic Paradigm, Competing Portrait Anthologies, and August Sander’s Face of Our Time.” Tate Papers 13 (Spring 2013). Accessed 11 November 2020. https://www. tate.org.uk. Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Campany, David. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Chambers, Emma. “Fragmented Identities: Reading Subjectivity in Henry Tonks’ Surgical Portraits.” Art History 32, no. 3 (2009): 597–607. Courtine, Jean-Jacques, and Claudine Haroche. Historia twarzy. Wyrazanie ˙ i ukrywanie emocji od XIV do poczatku ˛ XIX wieku [in Polish]. Gdansk: ´ Słowo/ obraz terytoria, 2007. Crary, Jonathan. “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory.” October 50 (1989): 96–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/778858. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Deleuze. Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement Image. London: The Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

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Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Ekman, Paul. Emotion in the Human Face. Los Altos: Malor Books, 2006. Fontcuberta, Joan. “Revisiting the Histories of Photography.” In Photography: Crisis of History, edited by Joan Fontcuberta and Hubertus von Amelunxen, 7–17. Barcelona: Actar, 2002. Foucault, Michel. “La Peinture photogenique.” In Dits et Écrits: 1954–1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. Freund, Gisèle. Photography and Society. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974. Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1967. Henning, Michelle. “The Floating Face: Garbo, Photography and Death Masks.” Photographies 10, no. 2 (2017): 157–178. Holmes, Wendell Oliver. “Doings of the Sunbeam.” Atlantic Monthly XII, no. 69 (1863). Hornby, Louise. Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Humm, Maggie. “Cinema and Photography.” In Virginia Woolf in Context, edited by Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, 291–302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in the Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Jeffrey, Ian. Photography: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1984. Keating, Patrick. “Artifice and Atmosphere: The Visual Culture of Hollywood Glamour Photography, 1930–1935.” Film History 29, no. 3 (2017): 105– 135. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.29.3.05. Kemp, Sandra. Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation. London: Profile Books, 2004. Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October 19 (1981): 3–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/778652. Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Léger, Fernand. Funkcje malarstwa [in Polish]. Translated by Joanna Guze. Warszawa: PIW, 1965. Low, Rachael. The History of The British Film: 1929–1939. Film Making in 1930s Britain. London: Routledge, 1985. Loy, Mina. “Auto-Facial-Construction.” Accessed 5 September 2019. www.Mon oskop.org/images/8/8c/The_Lost_Lunar_Baedeker_Poems_of_Mina_Loy_ 1996.

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Macedo, Ana Gabriela. “Virginia Woolf: Visual Poetics and the Politics of Visibility.” Cadem os de Literatura Comparada 8/9 (2003): 121–138. Mitchell, Thomas W. J. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 481–500. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/mod.2003.0067. Mitchell, Thomas W. J. “Image.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Thomas W. J. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 35–48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Moholy-Nagy, László. Painting, Photography, Film. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973/c. 1973. Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1969. Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Owen, Wilfred. The War Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Powell, Earl A. Foto. Modernity in Central Europe: 1918–1945. New York: National Gallery of Art and Matthew S. Witkovski, 2007. Puente, Joaquín de la. Guernica: The Making of a Painting. Madrid: Silex, 2002. Rodchenko, Aleksandr. “Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot.” Accessed 21 August 2022. www.teoria.art.zoo.com/against-the-syntheticpor trait-for-the snapshot. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Todorov, Alexander. Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Tomkins, Silvan. “Affect, Imagery, Consciousness.” 2008. Accessed 10 August 2022. http://www.library.lol/main/94EC7F991882A32453AFF7F9 EF55C254. Walter, Christina. Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1919–1924. Vol. 3, edited by Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1928. Vol. 4, edited by Andrew McNeillie. Orlando: Harvest Origins, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1933–1941. Vol. 6, edited by Stuart N. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt, 1976.

CHAPTER 2

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: The Increase and Excess of Facial Expression

2.1

Introduction

The proto-modernist artist and philosopher Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) (1885–1939) created a “new ‘gravitational field’” in photography (Czartoryska 1980, 61). Forever disturbed by the sense of dissonance between the “I” and the world, between his face and the “smirking nitwits” (Gerould 1993, 326) all around him, he responded in his literary and artistic productions with novel and transgressive visual and verbal forms of self-expression. A master trope and an “insatiable” form, for Witkiewicz the face is front and centre (Fig. 2.1). In this chapter, I propose to consider transitional portraits by Witkiewicz as forms which dramatize through proximity and serialization something pioneering about the facial expression, about the interface of portrait photographs and other forms of expression like portrait painting and verbal portrayal, about meanings of composite and serialized ensembles of expressive facial details. Witkiewicz’s astute expositions of the face produced between 1905 and 1939 provoke speculation on meanings of facial visibility, of the role of the face as a field of resistance in which its individuating, socializing, and communicating functions become destroyed, of its foregrounding of the author’s obsessive premonition against defacement and identity disintegration. I also acknowledge Witkiewicz’s role in raising questions about the contiguity of the “I” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_2

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Fig. 2.1 Self-Portrait (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ca. 1912. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak)1

and the image, and the self-fashioning and masking at a crucial point of change in practices of portrayal. Witkiewicz, traumatized and pained by personal tragedies and afflictions like the suicide of his fiancée for which he never stopped blaming himself, his bouts of depression, his financial difficulties, never managed to consolidate versions of his identity. Daniel Gerould captures succinctly Witkiewicz’s desperate position when he says that the artist was

1 Stefan Okołowicz, the eminent photography critic and owner of a collection of Witkiewicz’s photographs, explains that this self-portrait, “perhaps the most suggestive self-portrait in the history of Polish photography,” was produced from a negative the artist shattered, thus incorporating technology other than photographic in the process of making a portrait (Okołowicz 2006, 153). Lit from below, the fractured face of the artist is suspended in the vast darkness in the background. Of interest may be the fact that, like Margaret Cameron (who also made positive photographs from broken glass negatives), Witkiewicz was willing to share his experiments with friends.

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a doubly marginal figure, in an oppressed culture and non-existent nation (Poland then being partitioned among Russia, Prussia and AustroHungary) that was itself peripheral to the main currents of European civilization. Such extreme marginality left Witkacy in an existential limbo that accorded well with his ontological views of man’s position in the universe, heightened his consciousness of cultural dislocation and impending disaster, and sharpened his susceptibility to the absurd. (Gerould 1989, 22)

Witkiewicz himself tried to identify tensions in his divided positions: “I am forced by fate to fight at two fronts: an extremely right-wing one and extremely leftist, revolutionary, one. At the same time, I am not accepted 2014, 54). Two self-portraits Dr. Jekyll by the center” (qtd. in Bochenski ´ and Mr. Hyde illustrate the dual versions of his face (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). Having fought to defend his country during World War I, having followed the Russian February and October Revolutions after he joined the Tsarist army in 1916 to fight against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Witkiewicz became more and more vulnerable. His masks highlight his torments in a world that demanded clear identifications. The variety of names he used to mark his authorship gives another sense of refusal to verbalize his identity beyond extravagant possibilities and excessive changes. He signed his important works with the name “Witkacy”2 which “served as a mask, alternating tragic and humorous, sinister and playful, handsome and grotesque” (Gerould, 1989, 17). The pseudonym was an amalgam of his second and last name devised to avoid confusion with his father Stanisław Witkiewicz. He also used many other signatures such as Witkas, Witkrejus, St. Witkacy à la fourchette, de St. Vitecasse, Witkaze, Vitcatius, Witko´s, and Mahatma Witkac. Stefan Okołowicz lists as many as fifty most common ones (Okołowicz 2000, 192). Pierre Bourdieu, by way of de Kripke, speaks of the first name as what establishes our social identity, and what is responsible for prescribing totalizing and unifying identities, guaranteeing agency in all our life histories. Of course, the name as a “rigid designator” (Bourdieu 1986, 70), as a “fixed point in the moving world” (in Bourdieu 1986, 70), and as a “formidable abstraction” can never encompass the individual’s composite and disparate character in its entirety as the designated individual (Bourdieu 1986, 71). Supporting the official acts and the official presentation of the self, the proper name 2 In this chapter, I will be using both “Witkiewicz” and “Witkacy” interchangeably.

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Fig. 2.2 Dr. Jekyll (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1938. Muzeum Narodowe [National Museum] in Warsaw)

controls production of the self. It consolidates and it reifies. By signing his portraits with made-up names and circulating them in wider circles, Witkiewicz subverts this sterile form of social awareness and exchange. Navigating through what Bourdieu called “la surface sociale” (Bourdieu 1986, 72), Witkiewicz asserted his will to polyphony by an expanding economy of his names. His interest in Doppelgangerei appears in plurality of identifications, in his play of masks and poses, visual projections and incarnations. Additionally, he acknowledged his special creative interest in portraits, using made-up portmanteau words like “the facedesigner,”

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Fig. 2.3 Mr. Hyde (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1938. Muzeum Narodowe [National Museum] in Warsaw)

“mugmodeller,” “spiritual facesampler,” and “psychological portraitist”.3 Towards the end of his life Witkiewicz developed a habit of calling himself “the old portrait prostitute” (Gerould 1993, 24), acknowledging thus his feverish vision, excess and spending.4

3 The original Polish terms are “twarzowzorca,” “g˛ebowzorca,” “duchowy miniarz,” “portrecista psychologiczny.” 4 Always in dire straits, Witkiewicz would also paint portraits of those he owed money, mostly dentists and doctors.

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2.2

Increase

Intoxication as “strong excitement” and also as a medical condition is not only central to our understanding of modernity, but is also, as Anna Clej has noted, significant as a “purveyor of both excitement and anesthesia, pleasure and pain” (Clej 1995, x). Intoxication, literal and figurative, describes the suffering artist’s aesthetic condition, a source of self-difference buttressing his/her authorial projects. Acknowledging Thomas De Quincey’s role in originating European modernism, Clej persuasively identifies a “new type of ‘self-fashioning’ based on excess and hyperstimulation” (Clej 1995, 11) as an emerging model of subjectivity championed by De Quincey. His economies of the self reach new dimensions of “overfullness” aided by his skilful use of capitalist techniques and maintained by his “delinquent” models of transgression (Clej 1995, 63). As mechanisms of self-fashioning, “existential as well as verbal” excess and transgression allow De Quincey to “exceed and lose” himself (Clej 1995, 11), to multiply and decentre his selves. Clej refers to Benjamin in showing that work contexts demanding accelerated productivity proved challenging for writers and fuelled what she calls “alienated productivity” (Clej 1995, x). She proposes to see intoxication as a defining feature of modernity, both a “transgressive practice” and “a form of imaginary accommodation with the alienating conditions of modern society” (xi). The nature of strategies used by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, especially in his realizations concerning the metaphoric drug of face, is marked with the interplay of drugs and art. Either ingested by him or exploited as a theme, drugs enhanced Witkiewicz’s predilection for experimentation. They result in treasured metaphysical feelings, or in pleasurable elevation, as De Quincey described intoxication, distinguishing it from modes of nervous excitement (De Quincey 1922, 199), and the increase in the creative state of the eye resulting from this elevation. Operating in the domain of intoxication, like De Quincey addicted to confessing, Witkiewicz wins energies to bring to light dissolving personal identity. Pharmacological and sociological developments of the late nineteenth century were changing the identity of intoxicants and stimulants like opium. No longer naively taken for ordinary household remedies, they emerged as “means for the expansion and dissolution of the self” and, thus, means for potentially endangering the fabric of society (Schivelbusch 1992, 210). When Witkiewicz draws, paints, photographs, and writes the face, he documents the exposition of the face often under the influence of

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perilous stimulants. Witkiewicz exercises a remarkable capacity for absorption of the face. His feverish vision extends it and makes the face infinitely divisible; acting on its exposition, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, he brings its “sub-jectivity, its being-under-itself, its being-within- and so its being-outside-, behind-or before-itself” (Nancy 2018, 14). At stake here will be the sense and value of the category of insatiability. In this chapter, I will show how intoxication, elevation, and excess, as Foucauldian “technologies of the self,”5 are used by Witkiewicz as a potent autobiographical strategy with far-reaching consequences. His transgressive economies, his intoxicating proto-performative productions, his riot of imaging, his language of intoxication, and also his reliance on intoxicating substances provide the self with antecedent trajectories mapped in De Quincey’s Confessions and with significant coordinates for modernist subjectivities beyond his native Poland. Witkiewicz’s aesthetic operations on images of his own face and on the faces of people he knew, his excessive preoccupations with the face in diverse imaginative self-commentaries and autobiographical writings embody what Michel Foucault describes as emergence,6 a context in which various discursive practices and historical factors come together. Witkiewicz felt profoundly disturbed by “the excessive acceleration of life,” growing “anti-intellectualism” (Witkiewicz 1992a, 325), and increasing presence of the crowd phenomenon—“the gray mob,” the “pulpy mass” (Witkiewicz 1992b, 109), and its “self-puffery” (Witkiewicz 1992a, 326). In “New Forms of Painting and the Misunderstandings Arising Therefrom” (1917–1918), he laments “the monstrous boredom of mechanical soulless life,” the superabundance of quasi-artistic forms, “crooked, bizarre, upsetting, and nightmarish” (Witkiewicz 1992b, 115). Impermanence of all identities and entities in all spheres of culture constantly threatened what, despite failures, he considered most precious and most fragile—the unique and particular experience of the individual.

5 Clej, analysing diverse aspects of De Quincey’s intoxication and confession practices, applies Foucault’s understanding of technologies of the self as techniques that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and soul, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality” (Clej 1995, 13). 6 I am indebted to Clej for highlighting this essential reference (Clej 1995, 2).

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Changes in forms of autobiographical narratives are another vital component of the “emergence.” Personal practices, as Raymond Williams argues, are terms for the assertion of “the specificity of present being, the inalienably physical” (Williams 1977, 128). It is the incidental personal styles which “exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action” (Williams 1977, 132). Williams charges such experienced and lived structures of feeling with the power to change the present (Williams 1977, 132). Tense and complex as they are, these structures “define a social experience still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating” (Williams 1977, 132), and eventually developing beyond the hypothesis stage into fixed, formed, and recognized beliefs. I place Witkiewicz at the juncture of emerging formations of visual experiences and consider his structures critical for understanding twentieth-century culture. Witkiewicz’s facial portraiture is at its most provoking in photography. He considered photography a “non-essential,” intoxicating personal activity. Without searching for the essence of this new modern medium, he embraced the entertainment and commercial value of photographic activities, their impurity, and their technical nonchalance. As a young artist and theorist of art, however, he maintained a sharp distinction between the art of painting driven by the metaphysical sense of being, its power to consolidate even the most contradictory multiplicity in unity—his principle of the organization of internal life—and the practice of photography defined by realist elements and the needs of its users. Yet, despite its changing status in Witkiewicz’s assessments and uses, photography was part of his creative and philosophical development throughout his life, first as a hobby, then as an imitation of painting, a tool for self-discovery and self-consolidation, a commercial project, and a collaborative practice. He grew up in a family where photography was practised systematically.7 Witkiewicz used the camera to approximate and expose inner vibrations of his troubled adolescent selves, to multiply and open them up to the effects of difference. They developed in the vain of the intense personal experiments that came to define the climate of “folie” and “insolent liberté” that Michel Foucault identified with the nineteenth-century spirit of play with images following the birth of photography (Foucault 2012, 7 Urszula Czartoryska writes that photography was popular among circles of educated families in Witkiewicz’s native town of Zakopane (Czartoryska 1980, 99).

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1576). Its users, Foucault writes, exercised that “désir de image partout, et par tous les moyens, plaisir de l’image” (Foucault 2012, 1578)—that desire for the image and pleasure of the image at all cost and by all means. The quality and intensity of Witkiewicz’s pursuit of photography throughout his life, his photophilia, provide an example of such “folie,” such incomparable intoxication. Witkiewicz linked photography to experience, to event, to literary pursuits, and to his obsessive concerns with identity and the conditions of modern civilization. The fascination with the new mode of “particular” portraiture, photographic portraiture, resurfaced after World War I to enliven his public images. It followed a formative, aesthetically diverse period between 1910 and 1914,8 when most of his portraits of friends and family members were created.9 Witkiewicz gathered together many talented professional and amateur photographers from Warsaw, Lviv, and Zakopane. He collaborated with the photographic studios of Janina K˛epinska, ´ Henryk Schabenbeck, and Włodzimierz Kirchner (Lenartowicz 1998, 19), and stirred many gatherings with his photographic activities. For an artist who found it harder and harder to function within an increasingly technical culture, photography answered the need to establish and cultivate sociality10 to help him sustain familial and social relationships. Having developed the myth of the independent genius artist, in the thirties he produced commercial painted portraits, and made and modelled for photographic portraits mostly of his own face with the participation of accomplished amateur photographers like Józef Głogowski, 8 We have many more extant photographs from this period than from the later period 1914–1939 (Franczak and Okołowicz, 1986 13). This period, though, is very important. Czartoryska says that the body of these photographs constitutes a “model of his relationship to people and to the medium” (Czartoryska 1980, 57) [Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine]. After 1914, Witkiewicz turned away from the photographic portraiture to spontaneous drawing, to his Portraiture Firm, and to his play with faces. 9 Okołowicz argues that Witkiewicz photographed only the people he knew and appreciated and whose portraits he desired to register (Okołowicz 2010, 222). Likewise, Antonik suggests that Witkiewicz was interested in branding himself as an author but he was “performing” mostly in front of a familiar public. Like Gombrowicz, Witkiewicz was erasing the difference between literature as spectacle and literature as self-promotion (Antonik 2014, 139). 10 On the point of Witkacy’s views of civilization, and especially on the position of individual in Witkiewicz’s estimates see Kamila Rudzinska: ´ “Kultura i sprawiedliwo´sc´ społeczna: Witkacy i Peiper wobec przemian cywilizacyjnych” in Nowe media w komunikacji społecznej w XX w. ed. Maryla Hopfinger, pp. 547–562.

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Władysław Jan Grabski, Emanuel Str˛azy ˙ nski, ´ and Tadeusz Langier.11 In their staged performances, arranged improvisations, “mini-actions”12 redolent of Dada theatre and Marcel Duchamp’s work, Witkiewicz’s face was captured from diverse points of view and degrees of proximity— exposed, exploited, and overloaded with confusing expressions. Such “blagues” (Witkiewicz 192-, 1), as he called them, were both active and passive personal workings, in the words of Derrida—“the auto-affective experience of pass activity” (Derrida 2010, 67), driven by a desire to stage a theatre of faces, a desire to mark time with his expressions of psychic times and also to overrule time and space. Looking for parallel developments in Poland, art critics note Witkiewicz’s unique protomodern dark absurdist characteristics, strikingly different from the earnest and socially engaged Polish avant-garde projects.13 Urszula Czartoryska, one of his most devout expositors, defends their radically fresh anticipations of European experiments in photographic portraiture. In a 2005 exhibition in the Zach˛eta National Gallery in Warsaw dedicated to contemporary images of artists, Witkiewicz claimed the status of a “first performer” and “demonic photographer.” His series of photographs “Seans fotograficzny” opens the catalogue of this exhibition under the telling title Egocentric, Immoral, Old-fashioned. In the 2022 retrospective exhibition, The National Museum in Warsaw presented Witkiewicz in the context of avant-garde theoretical contexts as The Seismograph of the Acceleration Age.

11 Langier taught Witkiewicz chromate-based techniques as well as taking photographs of him (Szymanowicz 2014, 4). Langier, says Szymanowicz, was producing self-portraits and psychological portraits which up till now had not been collected. Langier can be seen as Witkacy’s most important influence (Szymanowicz 2014, 9). It is very important to follow Stefan Okołowicz’s warning and not assume that every portrait with Witkacy’s face was authored by him, as some organizers of exhibition have done. The impulse to erase the role of these photographers to highlight Witkiewicz’s authorship leads to violation of property laws and false claims (Okołowicz 2010). 12 Musiał writes that “mini-actions,” “mini-scenes,” and “mini-publications” Witkiewicz engaged in are strong parallels with Dada practices (Musiał 1980). 13 In the twenties and thirties, René Magritte was experimenting with improvised

compositions, doubles, and reflections to challenge the portrait as an object of art and as expression of likeness. His Surrealist projects do not centre on the face, which is my focal point. True, Magritte’s “Flirtatiousness” from 1929 invites comparison with Witkiewicz’s “blagues” as do some images by Marcel Duchamp. These affinities have been noted by Urszula Czartoryska in her studies of Witkiewicz’s photographic work.

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Clearly, his photography resonates. It urges cultural contests over meanings and uses of the human body and the face. His photographic practice reveals early modernist dispositions of creative subjects towards self-fashioning and the exploration of a multiplicity of conflicting internal states and the different degrees of psychological disintegration of models. He evinces a modernist interest in momentary expression, challenging a physiognomy concerned with permanent features of a character, to focus on the temporary effects of emotions, even those undecisive ones. He feels all the time he responds with photography as a form of production rather than art, what Clej identifies as “an essentially ‘unnatural’ activity connected by imaginary ties to the capitalist sphere of production and consumption” (Clej 1995, x). An economy of increase and excess informs the most fascinating of the extant photographs by Witkiewicz.14 They concentrate on the mystery and horror of the human face presented in the early period not in singular takes but in a threefold way: in front view, side view, and frontal close-up. His photographic images are important for several reasons. Challenging the traditional painted portrait, Witkiewicz experiments with a new medium to “space”15 the face and offer it up for novel readings. He elementalizes the face to test its conflicting dynamics, and especially for symptoms of its impending collapse. Countenances remain forever troubled and elusive for Witkiewicz. His experimental spirit, his attention to the effects of complex lightning, and his interest in deconstructing, in staging the theatre of the face, bring his photographic practice very close to transitional modernist photography.16 His defamiliarized and deformed faces—“cut” heads (of Michał Choromanski), ´ faces cut into

14 There are about 1500 surviving photographs. Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak own a large collection of his portraits, while the Muzeum Tatrzanskie ´ in Zakopane holds the photography archives of the early period 1899–1914. Muzeum ´ Pomorza Srodkowego in Słupsk houses the largest collection of Witkacy’s portraits. Two photographic portraits by Witkiewicz—“Helena Czerwijowska” (c.1912) and “Anna Oderfeld” (1911–1912)—are at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 15 A term used by Derrida to announce not some exteriority, but rather to signal a precondition for meanings which are generated once an image is produced and therefore taken out of its “real” context. Spacing makes this removal clear (Derrida 1976, 18). On this point see also Krauss (1987, 106). 16 For its identifications see S. P. Rosenblum: “the choice of unconventional themes, a preference of close-ups and other unusual angles, attention to effects of light, and experimentation with media” (in Humm 2002, 6).

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parts (of Zofia Krzepkowska), his very tightly framed faces without contours (of Nena Stachurska)—presage later metamorphosing realizations in photographic portraiture. Lifting the “burden of frontality,”17 the traditional en face takes, he experiments with extreme close-up to open the face up to an alternative order of visibility beyond resemblance and beyond functionality. Facial structures, often disintegrating combinations, sample expressions abound. Forms of action,18 they are caught in stopmotion. We know, though, that these expressions were in motion, that they were caught as motion. Surrealists like André Breton saw convulsive beauty in such “expiration of movement”: we could become seduced by the object which has been taken away from “the continuum of its natural existence,” which has become a representation (Krauss 1987, 112). Speaking of Surrealist photographers’ portraits like “La Marquise Casati” (1922) by Man Ray, Krauss notes that duplication “opens the original to the effect of difference, of deferral, of one-thing-after-another, or within another: of multiples burgeoning with the same” (Krauss 1987, 109). Witkiewicz anticipates the Surrealist practice of what Krauss calls “transmutation […] into succession” (Krauss 1987, 110). Witkiewicz’s photographic work precedes work done by Man Ray, and also by professional photographers like Helmar Lerski, László MoholyNagy, and Alexander Rodchenko, who manipulated photographic techniques to eccentric effects. In Moholy-Nagy’s elementalist images, for instance, the skin of the face fills the entire frame and the eyes of the subject are set and lit in a way to concentrate on the detail. Attending to the face, Witkiewicz entertains its gradations and modalities enabled by the intrinsic parameters of the photographic medium. In caricatural images, which grow more intense and numerous towards the end of his life, he applies structural loosening and deformation. In his well-known portrait of Tadeusz Langier (1912–1913), a striking effect is produced through blurring and the reflection of the sitter (Fig. 2.4).

17 John Tagg’s phrase from his The Burden of Representation. In his attack on traditional synthesizing portraiture and its privileging of frontal positioning, Alexander Rodchenko went as far as to shoot his subjects from angles too high or low to be adopted by a natural observer, an effect which many critics found excessively distorting. Hans Belting sees Tagg’s position as the most radical in his criticism of objectivity in portraiture (Tagg 1993, 197). 18 Darwin identified expression as prompted by different actions in Expression of Emotions (Darwin 1965, 27–49).

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Fig. 2.4 Portrait of Tadeusz Langier (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1912–1913. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak)

In projects involving masks and grimaces—forms separating the face from the body—identity does not emerge as a stable concept rooted in external attributes, but as a distant multiplicity, as a dispersal. Like many modernists, Witkiewicz was drawn to liminal situations and oscillated between a very strong desire for integrity and a sense of identity merely as either preliminary or artificial. Krzysztof Pomian sees these two vectors as critical: Witkiewicz embracing the primacy of wholeness, defender of metaphysics and the personal being, and Witkiewicz speaking of the multiplicity of elements, qualities, and beings. Critically, these perspectives coexist with “no mediation” (Pomian 1972, 31). Struggling with the tensions and conflicts between autonomy and coherence, multiplicity and dispersal, trauma and play, essence and mask, Witkiewicz focused on seeking ways of resisting antagonistic forces within him and around him. He desired unity but, as Bochenski ´ shows, even his concept of “internal feelings” coming from our body, cancelled claims to cohesion: “there is a constant abdication from unity, there is the unity of hypostasis,

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there is a false promise of eternity, a vision of the body being purged of 2014, 56). Yet, despite a sense of its contemptible history” (Bochenski ´ uprootedness from the continuity of cultural tradition, despite dispersing forces acting on his selves, in Witkacy we feel an underlying awareness that unity may be not only necessary but possible.19 Hence his obsessive engagement with the face. In the first decades of the twentieth century, says Rosalind Krauss, “camera-seeing was exalted as a special form of vision” (Krauss 1987, 115). In the early stages of the development of photography, one of the most important reasons for its popularity was that it “appeared to provide a foolproof means of conveying likeness. The conception that a photograph reveals truth initially seemed to offer the model of mimesis required for portraiture” (West 2004, 189). Likeness, conceived as a “copy or duplication of external features” (West 2004, 21) lost its appeal over time and with the help of emerging photographic technologies became hidden rather than displayed. Witkiewicz’s probing orchestrations of experimental exposures are radical contributions to the story of the evolution of photographic portraiture. Witkiewicz concentrated on maximizing personal and public exposure of the face, considering its facets, its intelligibility, falsity, stresses, dissonance, and disappearance in the closeup. Like Julia Cameron, whom his father the acclaimed painter and art critic Stanisław Witkiewicz20 admired, Witkiewicz recognized the potential of the mechanical apparatus to intervene in the act of creation. He also tested the capacity of the photographic camera to get closer to the “metaphysical feeling” which, as Piotrowski explains, Witkiewicz felt was “the feeling of the subject of its identity, the singularity of existence in the context of the multiplicity of human beings” (Piotrowski 1989, 18). He tried to test this sense of singularity in multiplicity in movements of the face. Acknowledging highly psychological portraits by Julia Cameron, like her he desired to capture the “very smallest tremor of the soul,” to feel “changes in facial expression” (Czartoryska 2002, 61). Like

19 Bochenski ´ presents Witkacy as an “artist of unity” (Bochenski ´ 2014, 55). He argues that Witkiewicz’s work differs from the work of the Surrealists “in the awareness that unity is possible, that is, that an artist can dominate over nonsense” (Bochenski ´ 2014, 54). 20 For the impressive presentation of his contribution to the Zakopane Style, the first national style of architecture and design, see the latest album Young Poland: The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement 1890–1918 edited by Julia Griffin and Andrzej Szczerski.

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Benjamin and Baudelaire, he felt that with the disappearance of metaphysical feelings in European culture, painting was losing its centrality21 and that photography was replacing it, becoming a legitimate form of expression potent enough to champion alternative visions. Witkiewicz’s father, whose influence on his son was immense, did not share this diagnosis but he did defend photography both as art and as a cognitive medium. Writing in 1903, he described the camera as a perfect medium that merged with the nervous system and the consciousness of its user, a liberating apparatus. Stanisław Witkiewicz, without an attempt to theorize photography, praised its service to art, its contribution to freedom of composition, its multiplication of potential points of view, its diversification of arrangements, its help in the discovery and realization of motion, and its expression of the essence of light phenomena (Witkiewicz 2002, 41–43). In his letters, in which photography occupies an important place, he encouraged his son to use the camera he bought for him.22 Seeking the approval of his father, young Witkiewicz tried to experiment with light to capture the mysterious auras surrounding his subjects and the appeal of their inner dramas. Like Cameron, he was not discouraged by technical deficiencies, despite his father’s complaints about his imperfect skills. Blurring, redolent of Cameron’s signature soft focus, visualized for him mystery of existence. The soft focus was a marker of affinity with Cameron’s photography but also an affinity with its applications in pictorial conventions. In the late nineteenth century, explains Louise Hornby, fuzziness and blur were associated with a sense of “ideality and art” and, as in Francis Galton’s composite portraits, they were “bringing opacity to the surface of the photographic image as a marker of medium and shrouded identity” (Hornby 2021, 76). In his photographic career, Witkiewicz applied the strategies, elevating them to a level of a major effect helping him redefine portraiture. Photographic portraits by Witkiewicz evoke the figurative possibilities of the human face, its tensions and potentials in abundant spurious poses, humorous grimaces, and pain-burdened twitches. They evoke 21 He abandoned “Painting” in 1924 (but continued “painting” for commercial purposes until his death). 22 Czartoryska writes that in the letters dated about 1911–1912, Stanisław Witkiewicz on the one hand accessed his son’s photographs as images and on the other looked for their emotional equivalents. It is from these letters that we know about Stanisław Witkiewicz’s knowledge of noble photographic techniques (Czartoryska 1984, 242).

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also the extraordinary heterogeneity of the exteriority of the face as a creative terrain, a theatrical mask, a camouflage, and a perversion. Faces in Witkiewicz’s work manifest not only intimations of the “particular Existence,” nomads inspired by Leibniz’s philosophical writings. They are also fuelled with what Roman Ingarden, his partner in “essential conversations” (Ingarden 1957, 171), sensed was defining about his extraordinary portraiture: weirdness and horror, traits reflecting qualities plaguing his entire life (Ingarden 1957, 176). His pursuit of faces was marked by intense pleasure which was always steeped in an immense sense of nightmare. The vehicular idea of in-toxic-ation captures the nature of Witkacy’s experiences of the face. The idea “entails self-contradiction: elation it affords, but while its subject is in elation, its poison is in him. The experience can seem one of pure elation, but to appreciate this elation is at once to apprehend its precariousness” (Cooke 1974, 27). The source and the object of the idea for Witkacy are autobiographical; the portrait is always a psychological game of extreme vitality and inadequacy.23 Witkiewicz scholars maintain that his aesthetics possesses attenuated connections to the contemporary context of European art. Little known, Witkiewicz was “swerving from his time” (Kott 2000, 4) and also from modernist critical theory rejecting the portrait. Polish modernisms share with western modernisms major concerns of the art work as pure and autonomous, as well as an interest in theoretical assumptions behind noninstrumental practices with their adversarial stance against mass culture, a rejection of mimeticism, a treatment of the work of art as organized, complete, and free-governing (Bolecki 2014, 17). Likewise, connections between literature and the visual arts loom large in Polish modernist works. It is also true that Polish modernisms are distinctive because of their external determinants, coordinates that are non-literary in character, like the very troubled history which defined processes of modernization (Bolecki 2014, 20). Bolecki emphasizes also the specifically Polish explorations of meanings and forms of subjectivity or identity handled as an eternally threatened object of twentieth-century systems of colonization and repression (Bolecki 2014, 23). In the “topography of dispersal,” as the Polish topography was, the biography of the artist, argues Andrzej

23 In such conjoining, critics identify Witkiewicz’s role as the precursor in portraiture of the avant-garde psychedelic art of the 1960s. See Timothy O. Benson’s Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910–1980.

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Turowski, “was a disintegrated biography” (Turowski 2002, 364). Its facets will be further expanded. Possessed as he was by a “crisis” imagination,24 like the high modernists, Witkiewicz followed his own path. In this respect he was completely unlike his Polish contemporaries, the Pictorial photographers in the interwar period who pursued patriotic themes.25 According to Danek-Wojnowska, he both sustained and modified the modernist conception of the creator. His aesthetics was orientated individualistically (Danek-Wojnowska 1976, 121). Prompted by it, he formulated the roles of such figures as the artist-pretender, the artist as subversive agent in society, and the artist apprehending imminent catastrophes. Developing his own conceptions of the artist inspired by encounters with modern creators whose work he saw in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, he nevertheless evinces a modernist interest in subjectivity and its rootedness in art, its realization in momentary expressions and the immediacy of being. His complex, frequently misunderstood, idealistic aesthetics of Pure Form, a structure identical to ever-mysterious existence, any life phenomena, opposed any kind of limitations. Liberated of the task of describing reality, Pure Form, Witkiewicz hoped, could reach and pierce the core of reality. Attempting to extend the frame in painting, to which the theory initially applied, Witkiewicz proposed the principle of “internal necessity”26 which would intensify the pure unified expression of the painting. For Debora Vogel, his friend and critic, Pure Form was a revealing and “orientating” category, radical in the sense of breaking with the old and used-up meanings of “form” in aesthetics. It was boldly, though confusingly, naming a new thing: two kinds of content, two kinds of the real (of life and art, for which the former was only a material) (Vogel 1994, 215). The “Pure Form,” Vogel writes, was

24 Gerould argues that Witkiewicz “cultivated a ‘crisis’ imagination, thereby exacerbating a natural proneness to foreboding anxiety and inciting hysteria” (Gerould 1993, 6). 25 Szymanowicz uses an example of The Polish Landscape photographic exhibition held in Warsaw in 1912. Witkiewicz’s father was among the artists whose work was presented there (Szymanowicz 2014, 2). 26 We can suggest parallels not only with Kandinsky’s notion of “inner necessity” as central to the essence of art but also with John Ruskin’s utopian visions. They have been studied by Kiebuzinska (1993, 65).

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a misunderstood category of its time, naked and concise (Vogel 1994, 216–218). Another idea, she explains, that of insatiable form, developed around a movement in the direction of the most essential and positive value encompassing wildness, exaggeration, and restlessness, towards new permutations (Vogel 1994, 217). Driven by impetus to infinity, the artist as a person constructing the form realized necessary processes of deformation and defamiliarization, mutability and dissonance. Formistic paintings, though, found no approving audience and Witkiewicz, discouraged, abandoned his theory. Witkiewicz’s major interests in exploring the antinomies of the individual and the species, of life and work are marked by the strong sense of personal determinants and personal stance. His growing sense of pessimism and vehement disdain, spurred on by a deeply felt sense of the disappearance of the metaphysical spirit in culture, especially in various modes of the avant-garde art, was one of the reasons for his heightened anxiety and despair. Adopting a parodic stance in a daily pamphlet “Papierek lakmusowy” [Litmus Paper] published in 1921, Witkiewicz, writing as Marceli Duchanski-Blaga, ´ stresses the need to distance himself from all “isms,” especially Dadaism27 : “all these novelties are nothing” (Witkiewicz 192-), he says. Negating the possibility of sincerity in art, he continued searching for other modes of expression, some “in many ways comparable to Marcel Duchamp’s “abandonment of art for a program of irony and destruction” (Kiebuzinska 1993, 69), comparable also to his linguistic games, sarcasm, mockery, and camouflage. Studies of his own face were marked by an agonizing fear of the degradation of identity to a social role, a fear of the inevitable victory of the masses and their affirmation of ready-made identifications, of their wide range of masks. Living the first 33 years of his life in a “nonexistent” Poland—partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary,28 traumatized and pained by personal tragedies and inflictions, he struggled to consolidate the different versions of his threatened identity. The tension arising from this condition has often been presented as an irreducible factor leading to his death by suicide.29 27 His solution was not to abandon art, but rather to redouble his artistic efforts in the face of forces of modernization that would seek to liquidate it. 28 Poland finally gained independence in 1918. 29 Clej notes that Benjamin saw suicide as one of the “‘passions’ of modernity” (Clej

1995, x).

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Yet we can allow a different perspective and discern in his tense navigation between these identity models, a strong agent. Its strength manifests itself in projects evolving facial expressions. By locating and exposing Witkiewicz’s kinetic shifts in staging his theatre of faces as expressions of his unique and heightened sense of the consciousness of the visage, we come closer to understanding his sense of liberating dynamism of the face in the twentieth century. A maker and sequencer of portraits, Witkiewicz, as I have stressed, subjected the body to ostentatious scrutiny, not in singular perspectives but rather in the complex sociality of visages. Witkiewicz believed that in the face he had found a resource that could lead to the production of self-knowledge and self-assertion. It is significant that his attention to faces occurred mostly in intimate contexts, validating epistemological references to particular faces.

2.3

Excess in the Close-Up

The close-up, this very visible medium in photography and cinema, unsettled photography viewers and cinema audiences. It “embodies the pure fact of presentation, of manifestation, of showing—a ‘here it is’” (Doane 2003, 90–91). The fragmentation of the body and the reassertion of the “here it is” of the face in this figure, since it is the most frequently used object of the photographic and cinematic closeup, bring to light numerous contradictions and suggestions. Mary Ann Doane, following key film theorists, identifies them not only in cultural differences, denoting either distance (as in French gros plan) or proximity (as in English close-up), but also in the way the close-up relates to the scale of its content, “simultaneously posing as both microcosm and macrocosm, detail and whole” (Doane 2003, 93). Additionally, the view of the close-up “as both detail of a larger scene and totality in its own right— a spectacle of scale with its own integrity” reflects the modern desire and need for wholeness in face of disintegration of social unities (Doane 2003, 93). A figure of fragmentation and magnification, cognition and re-cognition, the close-up promises the delivery of the knowledge of the subject and early photographic and cinematic accounts of close-up show how much desire for the revelatory true image was invested in this effect. Louise Hornby, following Jean Epstein’s propositions, draws attention to the face in the close-up as a “repository of emotion—a landscape that shifts and fades, its surface contours registering the slightest of changes” (Hornby 2021, 101). In other words, under the pretense of arrest and

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magnification, the close-up unsettles the face. It renders not the problem of legibility of the subject but that of resistance to unravelling of the acutely visible subject. Scrutiny has been the mode of photographic quest since its beginning and close-up has been harnessed to perform the work of intense attention. The Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs in his important essay “Visible Man” from 1924, welcoming new scientific and aesthetic discoveries made possible by the camera, locates the significance of changes in the first decades of the twentieth century in a cultural transformation away from the books, responsible for developing conceptual and over-intellectualized forms of human communication, and moving instead towards a radically new proposition in visual culture.30 The cinematograph (invented in 1892) was the instrument responsible for the momentous shift towards the long-forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions. Culture dominated by words had “usurped the soul leaving behind the body” and reified the face. For centuries, it functioned as a “clumsy little semaphore of the soul, sticking up in the air and signaling as best may” (Balázs 2010, 10). New visual culture spoke the language of physiognomy, and turned to gestures and facial expressions as a more individual, more personal, and, at the same time, more international language than the standardized and conventionalized syntax of verbal communication. Film, which accorded central attention to this gestural language, responded to the cultural desire for proximity and enhanced sentient embodiment. In his view, the close-up images of the face, epitomizing the expressive image, call for a retraining of our skills of deciphering faces not as written texts, as books, but as an autonomous experience of the flow of aesthetic effect and affect. Close-up in this account is an art form capable of revelation. For Balázs, the face is not only the whole thing but also the “most subjective and individual of human manifestations” (Balázs 1927, 60). Balázs emphasizes that the camera compromises intimacy to render an isolable imaginary face, a world of “wordless lyrics of expression” (Balázs 1927, 72). Defamiliarized and disorientating, such a face can become legible for the spectator prepared to interpret it in new formations. When Walter Benjamin addressed the emergent visual worlds in “A Short History of 30 In 1928, the topographer Johannes Molzahn published an essay “Stop Reading! Look!” in which he grants visuality the new importance. For a discussion of photographic books, see Pepper Stettler’s Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book.

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Photography,” from 1931, he, too, prepared the viewers of photographic close-ups and the spectators of cinematic close-ups for the entry of new visual details with their secrets touched by the fantastic and bizarre. In contrast, for Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) but also for Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964), whom Witkiewicz admired, the structure of the face was a guide to inner characteristics of a person, their moral and cultural standing. Removing the body from their concerns, they used face physiognomy as a tool in the study of the characterology of the individual, the study of “what a man is in general,” as Lavater said (Lavater 2009, 12). For Lavater, “each human face comprised a particular kind of semiotic code with a message that would take an almost infinite analysis to unfold” (Freeland 2010, 126). It is significant to recognize though that Lavater concentrated not on the facial expression (der Ausdruck) but on the physical feature (die Züge) as a guide to inner structures. To approximate them, Lavater followed projections of the face’s shadows, not the frontal surface of the facial features. His intuitive physiognomic descriptions, as Victor I. Stoichita masterfully explains, are based on the black contour of the shadow and on the line of the profile of the face believed to be the external soul of the man. The man was truly “himself” in such shadow projections (Stoichita 2001, 155). This early static approach was modified by Balázs who, as Noa Steimatsky explains, drew on Goethe’s vision “of physical appearance and expression grasped not as a static, fixed system, but as bound up with process and change” (Steimatsky 2017, 29). In Balázs’s physiognomic system, we find fluidity and ambiguity. Polyphonic features of the face, synthesized contradictions and unveiled details beyond our voluntary control, what he calls the “new world of microphysiognomy” (Balázs 1927, 65),31 open access to “that cell-life of 31 Georg Lichtenberg in his polemical essay about physiognomy and against physiognomists from Observationes: Die Lateinischen Schrifen warns against the potential consequences of Lavater’s theories and tendencies to read everything in everything. He stresses the significance of pathognomy—embracing the semiotics of affects and movements detectable in the face, an interest in flexible—not solid parts of the face which he understood as a language of the face. His very guarded assumptions about the values of information we obtain from our reading of the surface of the face are strikingly modern. Lichtenberg stresses our biases and illusions subverting any objective conclusions. What we see in the surface of the face are contours and colours, no more (Lichtenberg 2005, 354). “To physionomize” is to exercise an unavoidable attraction of reading the face, of becoming a “prophet at least once a day” and to entertain the enjoyment of studying the fascinating structure of the face. Lichtenberg’s take on microphysiognomy is that we are never able to embrace the whole face so we produce an extract from the face we

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the vital issues in which all great events are ultimately conceived” (Balázs 1927, 55), to faces behind the face which have “already hardened into anatomy” (Balázs 1927, 84), to a base where the soul may reside (Balázs 1927, 63), where new cognition (denied to language) may occur. The lyrical charm of the close-up offers not just insight but illumination: “a gentle bending over the intimacies of life-in-the-miniature, a warm sensibility” (Balázs 1927, 56). Balázs’ formulation underwrites the fascination with the close-up as the bearer of the immediate and the particular in the anthropomorphic features. It reaffirms the face as a variable locus of openness and “the last remnant and salvaging anchor of a transverbal expressivity” (Steimatsky 2017, 32). Interested in literature’s “threatening rival” and “the all-powerful cinema” (Witkiewicz 1992b, 115), and applying filmic techniques in his novels and drama, Witkiewicz explored physiognomy and expression. He dismissed false aspirations of the cinema to satisfy the desires of the masses by means of special effects.32 Instead, Witkiewicz turned to photographic aesthetics of expression which allowed more individual control and in his portrait work. This aspect was of pivotal importance. Witkiewicz was an obsessive physiognomist and his unprecedented use of the close-up, predating Balázs’s theoretical formulations on its power to expand and deepen our perception and vision of life, anticipates these identifications. Inspired by Ernst Kretschmer’s explorations of connections between the human physiognomy and inclinations towards mental illnesses,33 Witkiewicz, like Kretschmer,34 created collections of portraits, are boldly reading and this extract always contains our value systems (Lichtenberg 2005, 364). 32 German Expressionist cinema pioneered a new visual language dependent on the use of light for the creation of enlarged faces, and also on experiments with photography. It was inspired, for instance, by Ivan Gall who was familiar to Witkiewicz. 33 Jan Błonski ´ says that Witkiewicz’s narrative use of Kretschmer’s typology, his classification of human beings into distinctive sub-species as in the animal world, and his concentration on schizoid types and their exclusive sense of metaphysical call, provides a clue to his narrator and his strategies of reading types. If anything, Kretschmer provided an “alibi” for Witkacy’s obsessions (Błonski ´ 1971, 33). 34 Witkiewicz recommended Kretschmer’s approach as an indispensable tool for puri-

fying the “unwashed souls” of modern men and as an educational kit for the public. Like Freud, Kretschmer in his estimation was a visionary providing a panacea for misunderstandings and oppressions. Kretschmer was able to create a very simple and workable classification of constitutional human types necessary for our reading of fellow humans. Witkiewicz found that his theory expounded in Körperbau und Character (1920) in its

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many of them representing types and modalities of types. In studies by Ernst Mach and in the traditional psychology examining the “I” in connection with events provided by experience, Witkiewicz also tried to study morpho-psychological typologies. These pseudo-scientific interests resonate in some early critical assessments of Witkiewicz’s portraiture. Stefan Szuman, lecturer in psychology at the Jagiellonian University, whose texts about Witkiewicz are among the few remaining records of important art conversations with the artist, in a 1929 catalogue for an exhibition of Witkiewicz’s portraits, described the portraitist as a clinician able to extract from the body tumours and growths, to open up abscesses, and to observe frail or inflamed cells of the ego. Witkiewicz, Szuman writes, captured centres of energy, currents, and movements, but also the dregs and scum behind the smooth surface of the human face (Szuman 1989, 151). Szuman stressed the psychological intuitions of Witkacy as well as his departures from the bounds of the individual portraits in the direction of supra-individual masks. The work of the portraitist in this view involves seeing through the model’s personality. His experiments with Kretschmer’s maps of a morpho-psychological typology of the human being inscribed representations in a game of revelation and concealment and overall proved disappointing. Witkiewicz gradually lost confidence in being able to discover ways to probe and expose the psyche of the model. He departed from the nineteenth-century “science” of physiognomy to concentrate on what Balázs and influential psychologists like Alexander Todorov in the twenty-first century identify as the “new” physiognomy—the study of the recognition of emotional expressions. The transition from an interest in Lavaterian-style studied images of the visible symptoms of mental illnesses and the inclinations of character into an interest in expression, in temporary effects of strong emotions and affects, marks a change in the development of the nature of Witkiewicz’s facial perception. His formal struggles as a twentiethcentury artist are reflected, not in general representations of the face, but rather in extreme facial close-ups—what he called “psychological” or “soul” portraits. They magnify the face and their transforming optical enlargement in his portraits reveals and magnifies altered substance.

simplicity and precision was also a guide to the boundless diversity of humans and a key to the constraints of reality in perpetual chaos (“spl˛atowisko”) (Witkiewicz 1992a, 662) preventing us from being who we want to be.

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Witkiewicz achieved intensive macro-photographic takes of the human face by experimenting with the technical dimensions of his camera. From about 1912, he devised an original technique of shortening the focal length by using a ring made of a water tube,35 liberating the image of the face from its contours. Morphed and undefined, it is a defamiliarized face. Czartoryska makes a large claim that this original “tight-crop” setting of the eyes, eliminating background and depth, clothes, ears, and hair was to be used later in macro-photographic frames in film and on TV. Experimenting with the “tight-crop” shot in 1910–1914, Witkiewicz created a groundbreaking innovation, preceding French surrealists’ and American modernists’ explorations of portraiture, anticipating revolutionary solutions in portraiture by Alexander Rodchenko and Edward Weston (Czartoryska 1984, 242–243). Witkiewicz never theorized these experiments but expressed satisfaction with the “wonderful” effect they produced (Witkiewicz 1971, 29). He linked the shifts in scale to their significance in prompting recognition and eliciting intense attention to surface shifts and extravagant transformations. In particular portraits of friends and family, Witkiewicz aims to capture a sitter in the moment of experiencing their identity, accessing its disturbing modes through the face. Isolating the face from the rest of the body, Witkiewicz poses it for examination. The act of decapitation symbolizes the inevitable compression. Once contained, the face in the extreme close-up becomes the locus of life in excess, an autonomous entity. Such containment invites loosening, even disintegration. Subjected further to the operations of the micromovements and fantastic gestures, the liminal space between life and death, such a face prevents intimacy (Fig. 2.5). In “Collapse by the Lamp” (1913), Witkiewicz is twenty-eight years old. He is young and self-accounting, introducing new portraiture conventions, experimenting with tight frames, blurring effects, and eliminating the surrounding milieu. In a letter to Witkacy, his father comments on the self-portrait, calling it a “collapse” as it coincides with a tense moment in his son’s life—Witkacy’s psychological collapse at the time

35 He wrote about the experiment in a letter to Helena Czerwijowska (see Listy Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza do Heleny Czerwijowskiej edited by Bozena ˙ DanekWojnowska). Among twelve remaining photographs produced with this technique are portraits of Polish luminaries like Tadeusz Micinski, ´ Bronisław Malinowski, Leon Chwistek, and Artur Rubinstein.

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Fig. 2.5 Collapse by the Lamp (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. ca. 1913. Muzeum Tatrzanskie ´ in Zakopane)

of his unhappy and turbulent relationship with the famous actress Irena Solska, resented by his father, and the writing of his autobiographical novel The 622 Falls of Bungo; or The Demonic Woman in which the femme fatale is the demonic Solska. The caption, the short and rich with meaning “kolaps” connotes falling, slipping, and failing in both physical and mental sense. In Polish, this rarely used noun rhymes with the cinematic “klaps,” the “slate” of the clapper board, a connection with motion and narrative flow which is not entirely out of place. The clear declarative caption invades the opaque visual space of a still image of a decline, arrested with fuzzy projections. Abstracted from the world outside, the close-up of the face achieved with the technique dependent on the use of a lens of a long length, brings the right side of the face forward while softening the edges of the frame and the left side of the face with diffuse play of light and shadow. The facial projection is obtained through pairing with the lamp which is lit, solid, and in focus. Yet, rather than illuminating and approximating the

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texture and surface of the face, the lamp produces a self-shadow. Without any fill-light mitigating the chiarascuro effect, the identification of the face is undermined. In the anxious configuration of this small, a 179 mm by 240 mm image, we confront a living shadow of a face, perceptible but fuzzy, both mysterious and menacing. The self and the shadow self, the immaterial soul or a spiritual double, an exposed self and the dark alter ego carry both emotional and aesthetic appeal and leave us to struggle with their demands.

2.4

Resemblance and Difference

In portraiture, Witkiewicz relies on deformation to enable an extension of compositional possibilities, to transform the subject into a condition, but also a consequence, of the coherence of the image and, by suspending the subject, to precipitate its subjectivity. Transfiguration may flow from the psychology of the artist, from the de/forming character of the medium, and from the strategies chosen. Deformation entails also re-formation of the existing conventions of viewing and of the perception of the subject. The 1930 autobiographical essay “Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine, Ether, and Appendix” was written by an artist who regrets having smoked for 28 years, who sets out to reveal a partial truth about his past with intoxicants for the benefit of others, as well as a defence against those of his contemporaries who would try to damage his career by spreading accusatory rumours about him. Witkiewicz writes this essay, this “nobly shameless confession” (Witkiewicz 2018, 152), as an addict, as someone who gained access to the world from the other side, from the falling, stupefying, and dejecting side, but also as an artist who needs to justify his own existence to himself in yet another period of paralyzing, tobacco-induced stupor. He writes to warn the public against aristocratic intoxicants, but also those which are ordinary, democratic toxins available to all. He writes to show the power of minor “mental shifts” (Witkiewicz 2018, 16) responsible for providing a change in personality, a spiritual and intellectual deformation of the forces ensuring personal development. Induced by intoxicants, aesthetic deformation results from the perception of senses. Deforming lines, breaks, and miscoordinations, also missed proportions are products of his experiences with drugs. Under the influence of peyote, for example, he could produce eyelids bursting open and revealing eyeballs the size of chicken eggs, noses lifting up, and lips widening. These deformations led to productions of grotesque and

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live carnivalesque masks as faces. Drug-induced visions contained miniature faces, but also enlarged ones, and moving faces as in a portrait of his wife smiling at him while moving her eyes (Witkiewicz 2018, 49–55). By appropriating a certain “otherness” such demonic portraits, a separate category of deformation, diffuse the subject beyond recognition. Multiple takes of the subject also alert the viewer to potentiality of the unexpected emergence of new expressions. We learn in letters from his friends that Witkiewicz “[…] studied systematically human faces, enlarging the photographs to paranormal sizes […]. Often, such an enlarged likeness revealed characteristic, funny, caricature-like details” (qtd. in Krzysztofowicz-Kozakowska 1989, 44). The challenge such images presented had to do with the uncanny relations capable of introducing dynamic fields of poiesis, of both symbolic transformations but also of disturbing distortion. Shearer West notes that “before the twentieth century, examples of extreme facial expressions in portraits are rare” and it is with the German and Austrian Expressionists in the twentieth century that exaggerated facial expression “as a means of tapping the spirit, souls, or psychology of their subjects” (West 2004, 34–35) emerged. Witkiewicz assigns a potent force to this liberating exploration. Probing deformation as an opportunity to enable the radical extension of compositional possibilities, he alters ways of viewing the subject. The eyes, the most active indices of emotional states, are the piercing focal points of the face, central to many of Witkiewicz’s portraits. Szymanowicz observes that in portraits, for example that of Artur Rubinstein from 1913, the eyes “dictate the width of the frame, with the result that the lower edge of the picture cuts off the face in the middle of the chin, excising nearly all evidence of spatial depth” (Szymanowicz 2014, 6). Though not consistently deployed, such compositional schemas reveal a confidence in this method of approaching the subject very closely, of taking us down a path metamorphosing impressions of a celebrity almost to a point of withdrawal (Fig. 2.6). Witkiewicz’s model of portraiture certainly enhances eyes. They tend to be wide open, even enlarged. Natural window lighting often glides the face, exposing their powerful hypnotic appeal. In photographic portraiture, a reliance on natural light as an illuminant is expected to contribute to the subtlety and broadness of tones. In Witkiewicz’s portraits, the gliding diffused light de-emphasizes facial lines, accentuating the visual effect of depth created by the resulting softness of the natural light. In a portrait of his fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska (ca.1913), one of over forty

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Fig. 2.6 Artur Rubinstein (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Artur Rubinstein. 1913–1914. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak)

portraits of her, such softly graded illumination lights one side of the face, filling it with softer toning, with more modelling and more gradation between the light side and the shadow side. As a result, the entire face becomes strangely three-dimensional. Clearly, lighting used in this way reinforces expression, though Janczewska’s eyes do not look at the viewer, do not focus or move (Fig. 2.7). They do not seek contact; nothing animates them. Her face is denied clarity. In other portraits, Witkiewicz got so close to the eyes of his sitters that he could not focus his camera. A result of an “aesthetics of error” (Szymanowicz 2014, 5), such blurry eyes, redolent of Cameron’s soft-focused details but also the fuzziness of the mirage-like “opiated landscapes” of Baudelaire,36 make the subject appear farther away. The effects of haze obliterate and abstract facial contours of his subjects, lighting causes their eyes to morph into strange foggy stains with merely a feeble relationship to their identity. 36 On the point of optical illusions in opium visions, see Clej (1995, 157–158).

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Fig. 2.7 Jadwiga Janczewska (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1913. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak)

For Walter Benjamin, after 1880 “fuzzy-graphs,” as the nineteenthcentury critics referred to blurry images, no longer captured the singular configurations of the authentic aura but its substitution—the artificially created one (Benjamin 1980, 81). Witkacy probes creative forms of imprecision as a way of avoiding the aggression of maximum sharpness. His gradations of blur do not only imply movement, they also involve the viewer by forcing questions about the efforts looking entails. Blurs, not all of the same origin, become a symbol alluding to the mystery of the face. In the portrait of his friend Tadeusz Langier, extreme proximity to the eyes and the characteristic chiaroscuro render intriguing effects. We are drawn to the lively, watery eyes which the shining light turns into “white specks” which look like “white tracks” (Boxer 1998). Portraying friends and family members, Witkacy and his close models aim to expose and analyse not masks but the hidden life behind the faces, what he

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called “particular Existence.” In portraits of his ill father from Lovran,37 Witkiewicz cropped the face yet more tightly to achieve the effect of concentration and connection with the model. Like a dozen or so portraits produced at the time, they isolate the face from its context to expose the psychological aspect of the person which is only partly a result of a passive disposition of a viewer. Witkacy gets to the subject gradually, seeing his head in profile, then en face, and finally in the extreme vibrating close-up. This system of the three shots confirms the attraction of the diversity of approximating gestures to draw out emotion and introspection.38 Not always does proximity guarantee knowledge. The face of his mother in three distinctive takes appears less composed. The closer we get, the less we are sure of her impression of being. She appears “frazzled, as if she might cry. Her lips are cracked […] her face and neck are bleached out, she looks psychotic with hair like straw. Closer up, her freckles appear completely out of control, a pox on her face” (Boxer 1998). In such “soul portraits,” observes Boxer, “the closer you get, the crazier people seem” (Boxer 1998). Viewed in a series, the face dissolves to become washed away like faces in memory. These photographs depict the disappearance of traces of autonomy, of life, of subjectivity. Thus close-up work, paradoxically, both compresses and loosens up the face. Temple-to-temple capture eliminates peripheral noise, rendering the face less, not more, legible. Witkiewicz was fascinated by such results and continued to configure his subjects’ gaze as a source of confusing information about appearance and withdrawal.39 37 Stanisław Witkiewicz was in Lovran from October 21, 1904 till May 8, 1905 and from November 4, 1908 till his death on September 5, 1915 (see Tomasz Bochenski ´ “Witkiewiczowie w Lovranie” [Two Witkiewiczes in Lovran] in Przestrzenie Teorii 14, Poznan´ 2010, 203–213). During his first visit there, Stanisław Witkiewicz also photographed the waves and old buildings while painting landscapes. His second visit was marked by his growing sense of nothingness, encompassing him and dominating all activities. 38 On the many uses of blur in history of photography, see Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History (Marien 2014, 444–450). 39 Katarzyna Taras comments that Witkiewicz’s rich and varied use of light is inspired

by films he saw and that it is filmic. He knew how to build atmosphere, shape character, or animate figures with lighting. Clearly, German Expressionist filmmakers drew on the ideas of Max Reinhardt, the master of decorative and symbolic use of light. Reinhardt had experimented with it in theatre in the years 1914–1918, when sets were hard to obtain. He multiplied light, blurred it, hiding its sources, making it appear suddenly to

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Always on the look-out for striking faces, for “the mugs of unlaundered poseurs” (Gerould 1993, 324), and aware of the contours of the cultural facial expression of his native Poland, the caricatural forms, he read culture in faces and sought redemption in self-knowledge through the extreme exposition of countenances. He studied obsessively his own face, with its pronounced marks of emotional and intellectual agonies torturing his vulnerable artistic self. His photographic self-portraits created from 1905 up to the mid-thirties, in his words, the “autoWitkacies,” are of a radically imaginary character. They are determined not only by their highly troubled model, understandable in relation to images of innumerable familial faces, but also in their historical context, as experimental artwork produced in response to an “‘insatiable craving’ for novelty” in twentieth-century art (Gerould 1993, 10). In A New History of Photography, Frizot argues that “between the wars, the portrait of the artist took on an importance that was due, in part at least, to the integration of photographs into literary and artistic circles” (Frizot 1998, 504). Witkiewicz always moved in coteries. He found that a way to wonder was not sincerity, always impossible in art, but role-playing, punks and jokes, autoironic humour—pure “blague.” It is crucial to distinguish his blague from Dada’s ludic play negating under agonizing masks aesthetic qualities and artists. Witkiewicz, unlike the Dadaists, puts on a mask, not to seek the trivial and accidental for the future, but to attempt a stay of execution of the artist and Art in mechanized, anti-humanist society. Art, he believes, is a supreme form, its drug he elevates to the rank of the sacred. The production of self-wonder, make-believe, and pretence can free the subject from the wretched “identity of personality” and from the intolerable boredom of “always being oneself” (Witkiewicz 192-, 2). In his self-portraiture, we can identify early modernist dispositions

transform the scene, creating “pale faces” (Taras 2005, 47). Side light, diffused light, and light used from above were common in German films of the period, e.g. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), which Witkiewicz had seen and appreciated (Taras 2005, 49). In The 622 Downfalls of Bungo, we follow characters through operations of light. For example, observing his friend, Bungo notes: “Nevermore’s mouth was half open, and colored scarlet by the reflection from the sun, while his eyes and part of his nose remained engulfed in the shadows. The impression made was of an innocent little boy wearing a mask. With a speed that was frightful to Bingo, the ray of sunshine rapidly disclosed more and more of Edgar’s face. Finally, it touched his eyes. The Duke suddenly awakened and stretched on the bedding. His face, all squinted up because of the light, now resembled that of a prematurely born embryo” (Gerould 1993, 67).

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towards multiple self-staging and acts expressing the “chaos of the wildest contradiction” (Witkiewicz 192-, 2). Witkiewicz tested a rich range of faces, employing his natural talent for acting, his dramatic experiences, his powerful sense of humour, and his fearfully creative mind. He treated his own face as flexible material for stretching expressions and the illusions facial forms produced. As soon as he fashioned a role, he changed it into another. As soon as he made a face, he rejected it to make another. His large collections of self-portraits offer easily identifiable expressions of emotions, faces resembling well-known figures from history, faces recycled from the leftovers of high and popular culture. These self-images are tinted with both a sense of tragedy and comedy. Thus, in a curious way, as Danek-Wojnowska notices, he was integrating and preserving what he came to subvert and what he was reacting against (Danek-Wojnowska 1971, 203). Summoning and rehearsing those other faces as a reaction to the tyranny of his own pained face,40 his unbearable self-consciousness and its limitations, helped him sustain illusions of the availability of opposing identities. He approached the ontological tension between unity and multiplicity, one of his main problems, with both mocking and sceptical awareness. There was nothing singularly defining about his projects, though, his serial idiom, in practices of serialization and multiplication of images of the face, anticipates the multiple self-portraits and self-dramatizations by Edvard Munch, Raoul Hausmann, Marcel Duchamp, and such contemporary body art artists as Cindy Sherman, and Bruce Nauman. Serialization and multiplication run counter to the revelatory and celebratory traditions of portraiture, counter to what Rosalind Krauss identifies as the artistic principle of absolute innovation and originality embraced by modernist artists (Krauss 1987, 162). An artist with a keen eye for the invention of personae, Witkiewicz exploited serialization as a tool for the expansion of the integral role of plural images in staging the self, in testing points of metamorphosis and disintegration of identity.41

40 Baudelaire writes in “At One O’clock in the Morning” about “the tyranny of the human face” (Baudelaire n.d.). 41 One of the potent influences here is Leon Chwistek’s theory of multiplicity of reality and its non-homogeneous character activated in the creative process. Chwistek attributes to his types of reality a certain style in art. On this point, see the bilingual: Leon Chwistek. Nowe kierunki w sztuce. New Trends in Art. (Ed. Karol Chrobak, Kraków, 2018).

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Photography, “a sequential, grammatical art” (Smith 2017, 10), has contributed to the disparagement of the singularity and the completeness of the portrait. It has also expanded the potential of new significations of the plurality of images, new ways of addressing the problem of the “notional inexhaustibility of the series” (Smith 2017, 28). Disabling, in Kracauer’s words, the “notion of completeness,” photography “tends to suggest endlessness”: “One photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others” (Sontag 1964, 166). Serializing works with different stresses and different forms of departure from a likeness. The image-toimage continuities, thematizing and classifying the face in a particular moment range in Witkiewicz’s photographic oeuvre from sequences adapting recognizable conventions in rendering painted faces for his Portraiture Firm, to assemblies and manifestations informed by his explicit interests in exploring the teratological in every face. In aggregate, they constitute a unique atlas of physiognomy. Photographic series have been explored in typologies of human types. Lavater does not use photographs but supports his studies of physiognomic signs, illustrating them extensively with silhouettes and classifying them according to distinguishing features. His series tend to be informed by his generous spirit. Tracing the origins of photography as a serial phenomenon, Joel Smith suggests that Victorian camera portraitists, responding to the desire for likeness, worked with a very defined set of conventions producing portraits within what can be understood as “a serial genre”: “an identity licence that confirmed that its subject numbered among the admissible variants within his or her class” (Smith 2017, 14). In the early twentieth-century, popular systemic enterprises represented social types as in August Sander’s 1929 Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time), in 1930 Erich Retzlaff’s Antlitz des Alters (Faces of the Age), and in 1932 Erna Lendvai Dircksen’s Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (Faces of the German People) presented a vast taxonomy of faces to support a defined point of view and intricate social agendas. In challenging times, Benjamin believed such books of exercises presented opportunities to sharpen viewers’ physiognomic awareness (Benjamin 1980, 211). Combined, Witkacy’s images form complex portrait-constellations expressing something powerful about not just the artist’s life but about the condition of culture defined by the production of the series itself. As a composite of the culture’s elusive portrayal and self-portrayal practices, these portraits are directed at the intelligibility of the human face

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and the adequacy of its existing forms of representation.42 Serialized psychological portraits of his father, fiancée, friends, and acquaintances illustrate Witkiewicz’s key principle that only very many photographs can approximate some idea of a person. The principle of multiplication and serialization of photographic portraits made up of many views of the same subject, taken at intervals and from diverse points of view, and in diverse conditions “entirely engage the viewer’s perceptive apparatus” (Musiał 1980). Sequences aim to expose diverse layers of the psychological make-up of a subject. Often these are contrasted with other subjects, as in the case of double photographs capturing two similar-looking people.43 The Lovran portraits with Witkiewicz’s father from 1913, for instance, work to test the value of the rhythm of resemblance and difference. Inspired by the success of his photographic practice, Witkiewicz serialized not only photo-based images but also pastel and charcoal portraits. Collating photographic, painterly, and verbal portraits in interconnected arrangements, Witkiewicz was showing the conflict between the subject and their magical representation. This novel solution infuses the image with fantastic qualities which demonize, deform, and parody the human face, to emphasize its contours, its unbridled and unserious lines and to create a sense of the artistic vision of portraiture oscillating between a desire to capture the truth and to create spaces for facial configurations of fission, of interval or spacing. Many of his photographic portraits of friends but also self-portraits were taken against the background of his multiple pastel portraits and drawings.44 In these kinetic assemblages, the sitter’s face becomes a vehicle signalling changing motivations behind his face values and changing practices of display. Photographs which include sitters as well as their painted portraits, or other painted images, hanging on the walls of domestic interiors, undermine the static, mimetic qualities of portraiture. The attention of viewers is directed not to the monumental precision of 42 For an exploration of this genre, see Max Saunders’s Self-Impression (Saunders 2010,

232–252). 43 Though it is August Sander who invented the method of the doubles. 44 In 1908 in Stein’s salon in Paris, Witkiewicz saw Picasso’s paintings. He visited

museums and familiarized himself with avant-garde art. Szymanowicz says that Stein was important in “inspiring him to search for new directions for his art and to go beyond the principles of realism inculcated in him by his father” (Szymanowicz 2014, 4).

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focus or the mastery of received codes, but rather, as in a 1913 photograph captioned “Jadwiga Janczewska in Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Room,” we are confronted with a site of the (re)production of conflicting personal explorations. Arrangements of this kind—a form which would become a paradigmatic modernist assemblage—served as a personal space of face-writing and face-collecting. In the intense practice of accumulating portraiture-within-portraiture, we can also sense that integration for Witkiewicz becomes an attempt to rescue. Witkiewicz was primarily a painter and it was that experience that taught him how to approach photography creatively. To understand his composite practices of portraiture, it is necessary to consider his large Portrait-Painting Firm, Witkiewicz’s famous “large mug-modelling firm” which operated between 1925 and 1939—the period when he started becoming more interested in self-staging. Many critics suggest that the conception for the parodic-grotesque character of the firm was possibly inspired by Roman Jaworski, for whose book A History of Maniacs (1910) Witkiewicz had illustrated. In a short story “Third Hour” [Trzecia godzina] Jaworski had created a disturbed character, Pan Pichon, ´ who found a way to control his town by running a funeral parlour with welldefined categories of services and typologies of clients, without himself participating in the ceremonies. Like Pan Pichon, ´ Witkiewicz was inclined to treat his role as portrait artist45 as both commercial and entertaining. Ryszard Nycz stresses yet another dimension of this influence. Jaworski operated in the domain of potentiality. His split characters reflect the author’s fascination with deformation and ambiguity characterizing his peculiar brand of the ugly. A History of Maniacs, writes Nycz, is his unique literary project. Its grotesque, cabaret-like form found its full development in Witkiewicz’s realizations (Nycz 2002, 248–251). In the realm of twentieth-century visual art, Witkiewicz’s PortraitPainting Firm had no equivalents46 (Okołowicz 2000, 154). The portraits produced by the Firm amounted to a unique gallery of people, types, and figures of the interwar Poland, though also included unknown men and women who were visiting Zakopane and wanted to share in the thrill 45 Urszula Czartoryska detects here a mediumic role of the photographer Witkiewicz exercised (Czartoryska, 1972, 103). 46 In England, Walter Sickert, who always considered himself a very literary painter, also attempted to create a portraiture firm but he found no clients. I am grateful for this comment to Darragh O’Donoghue.

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of the portraiture experience. In his native resort town, a firm of this standing was one of the major attractions. Roman Ingarden recalls that Witkiewicz could produce them “in bulk,” even five an hour (Ingarden 1957, 169). The Actress Nena Stachurska, for example, could claim almost a hundred portraits. Witkiewicz recognized the potential that portraiture held to blur the distinctions between intimate and public, truthful and spurious, and both financial and social gain. With clearly defined goals and services, customized yet controlled by a well-defined system that established rules of communication between the artist and the non-artist client, the firm ran a very successful operation. Generally, the firm’s portraits were painted in pastels47 as well as charcoal, pencil, and crayon, relying on detail, emphasizing telling details, grimaces, closeups, blurry enlargement, to give a combined effect of troubled lives. Jan Kott discerns in these faces tensions and anxiety, even a tragic absence documenting “the narcotic journey” (Kott 2000, 5) of the artist. Their psychological aura brings to mind the psychedelic posters which, at the time, were starting to be highly sought after as collectors’ items (Kott 2000, 5). The portrait firm clearly had literary and artistic aspirations. The Firm’s MANIFESTO in two almost identical versions from 1925 and 1932 was its most essential document. Apart from this contract, there were also cards, descriptions of clients, and comments on the paintings, also satirical poems in Polish and French.48 According to Andrzej Kostołowski, the little Litmus Paper composed in 1921 (adjacent to it) in its ironic and destructive mode, underlines the role of Marcel Duchamp and Dada inspirations (Kostołowski 1980). What has not been emphasized enough, however, is how this antiaesthetic project, operating for over a decade, with a few thousand portraits to its credit and attracting the attention of so many paying customers, contributed to the development of a novel way of rendering, marketing, and distributing portraits as purchasable, reproducible, and exchangeable commodities. Portraits produced by this firm engaged with 47 Pastels, says Kostołowski, were popularized by modernists like Wyspianski. ´ The technique made it possible to obtain “ready products” relatively straightforwardly and without delay (Kostołowski 1980). 48 Micinska ´ collected them in Poza rzeczywisto´scia. ˛ A poem in French, for instance, goes like this: “Quel sale métiergue la peinture / Quel sale, metier / On paint chaque guela sans murmure / Pour avoir un peu de la monnaie” (Micinska ´ and Kenar 1977).

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the artistic tradition but, as Jakimowicz argues, they were also like fields of dialogue between the artist and the model, and by extension between the artist and society (Jakimowicz 1990, 63), or perhaps micro-society. In non-conventional portraiture Witkiewicz, the sole owner of the firm, highlighted the importance of the customer’s decision in the choice of the “type” of portrait desired.49 The motto of the firm proclaimed that “The customer must be satisfied. Misunderstandings are ruled out.” If the portrait did not suit the customer because of “the degree of likeness” or any other reason, it could be rejected (Witkiewicz 1992c, 239–240). The portraitist’s chief focus was faces: “In general, the firm does not pay much attention to the rendering of clothing and accessories” (Witkiewicz 1992c, 240). Special arrangements were necessary for full-length portraits, and prices went significantly up if a customer wished to have his hands painted: “every hand costs one third of the price” (Witkiewicz 1992c, 240). Indeed, the corporate rules set out by Witkiewicz “sound like a fantastic mockery of bureaucracy over2014, 56). Affordable for the average riding inventiveness” (Bochenski ´ customer, though a third more expensive for women, the portraits were made according to terms and regulations published in the Manifesto. They were signed with the name Witkiewicz for “straightforward portraits,” and Witkacy for his “deformed work” (Gerould 1993, 17). Profiling the Firm, Witkiewicz referred also to his imaginary partners as all versions of his theatrical self. Initially, customers could choose five types of portraits, though Witkiewicz allowed mixing and diversification of the types. The firm sought to bring out the character, the type, the shared features, and the shared iconographic motifs, like heads captured to resemble statues. But while he was operating a commercial enterprise, Witkacy managed to find a role for himself that was not solely subject to orders from customers but gave him freedom to practise his Pure Form. Hence the carefully conceived inventory of types of portraits customers could order. The types ranged from the most objective representations to the most caricatured. Labelled as types A, B (including the most conventional and the most expensive portraits); C, D, and E (reserved for a wide circle of friends, oneiric and mystical, expected one day to become rarities), the portraits were defined and made meaningful in relation to other portraits. Type C was isolated as a special category with artistic qualities. It 49 The final decision of the client was aided with a sample of albums produced by the

firm.

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constituted almost a half of all the images created by the firm. Witkiewicz allowed complex combinations like C + Co, C + H, C + Co + Et. These specifications were meant to clarify the characteristics of a sitter but also the conditions of the production. Jadwiga Roguska-Cybulska notes that no type A portraits have been preserved. Witkiewicz so cleverly defined the “banal” type that no clients wanted to order these meagre representations. In this way, he freed himself from the necessity of producing them (Roguska-Cybulska 1957, 327). Witkacy while painting was thus subjecting himself to auto-analysis and to what Jakimowicz identifies as an unveiling of sensitivities unsuspected by the model (Jakimowicz 1990, 70). Also, because Witkiewicz knew many of the models intimately, he could animate them to detect both the essential and the typical expression. When he liked a face, he produced a series of diverse takes within the range of the specified types. He could also schedule multiple sittings, producing multiple versions of the portrayed model in varying moods and with the application of diverse stimulants. The experiments with substances like peyote and heroin released radically altered expressions, a tendency which is particularly noticeable in the representation of women’s eyes (images of women dominated in the firm). Under the influence of these substances, Witkiewicz repainted the faces rendering them as dark, heavy, and deformed. The influence of narcotics helped him to achieve changes of character, new shades of colours, provoking highly grotesque and playful configurations. The further he departed from the A types, the closer he got to caricature, to exaggerated and ugly faces, accentuated by bizarre costumes. He also improvised by inserting his own profiles and images within the portrait. The portrait of the head of Bronisława Włodarska presented against his own head can serve as a good example of this strategy. Additionally, Witkiewicz inserted commentaries next to his signature on portraits painted for the firm which allow a reconstruction of the condition of the artist’s body and soul. We learn how long he worked on a portrait, how much he drank, whether he smoked or not, and whether there were ˙ any other parties present. Zakiewicz observes that these records constitute a rare diary chronicling months, even years of the varying states and ˙ 2002, 176), a diary testifying to sharp ideas of the painter (Zakiewicz changes in the identity of the artist inscribed in the work, and relating to both himself and his subject. Boldly, Witkiewicz the perpetual transgressor attends not only to faces of his models but also his changing impulses and degrees of excess and hyperstimulation. Like De Quincey, addicted to

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confessing, he wants to be painted with his stimulants; portraying others, he is self-accounting. As Czartoryska observes, even as far back as 1905 the photographic portrait had played for Witkiewicz a double role as a “model of human relationships (between the observed and the observing, in which he detected a particularly interesting situation especially when he was both) and a model for the definition of man” (Czartoryska 1980, 56–57). The “I” in these portraits is never presented in full body, a finished character, something to be simply understood. The subject is always a fragmented, even decomposed personality, often a lunatic, an unstable partial somebody with a pronounced grimace of disgust and horror, “unfinishable” and unknowing as he is in a familiar multiple image (dated 1915–1917 and taken in St. Petersburg)50 (Fig. 2.8). Not strictly a portrait but an example of multi-photography, this well-known and highly popular image teases out questions about the experience of identity, about subjectivity, and the experience of the self. The image continues to fascinate because of its form. Looking at the self reflected in multiple takes, viewers no doubt confront some mystery concerning the subject. They also confront uncertainty as to exact identity of the photograph and also the photographer. Its optical parcelling effect suggests montage; its real basis though is one negative only. The existence of such “singular plural” images must have snagged Witkiewicz’s notice when looking at family albums with multiple self-portraits photography produced by his uncle Ignacy Witkiewicz. Suggesting features of two types of self-portrait photography: an established mirror-type and a “radically imaginary” one (Czartoryska 2002, 65), this quintuple, Cubist-like photograph shows us five images of Witkiewicz dressed in a military uniform of the renown Pavlovsky Regiment. He voluntarily joined the Imperial Army in St. Petersburg in 1914: “There I spent the war in the guards regiment (by chance!),” he wrote to a friend, “and observed the course of the revolution from a short distance, which was a wonderful spectacle as my Pavlovsky regiment was the first 1987, 21). to start the revolution” (qtd. in Krzyzanowska-Hojdukiewicz ˙ We cannot fail to notice the irony that the military uniform produces. Its multiplication brings to mind the crisis of totality that World War I made 50 This type of “portrait” was very popular across Europe for many years. Examples from different photographic firms show them as “almost identical” (Okołowicz 2006, 180).

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Fig. 2.8 Multiple Self-Portrait in Mirrors. ca. 1916 (Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak)

apparent. Connecting the subject of this image to a larger cultural and historical context by “trick” photography, it ceases to become a locus of systems of discipline and instead marks some fascinating dissolution. Witkiewicz’s indulgent mocking uncovers and releases the strangeness, the alterity, or even the auto-destruction of the “I” into “we.” In doing so, the image appropriates an “otherness” that in the end reflects or even diffuses the subject. As I will show, his role-playing thematizing, parodying, and mocking modes of portraiture frequently uncover and release such strangeness or alterity of the “I” as “we.” We see the same face, but thanks to mirror reflections every face is different, the face en trio quarts, front and back. Janusz Degler interprets these faces as autobiographical explorations of Witkiewicz’s multiple selves: the self of the artist, the painter, the self of the philosopher, the self of the writer, and the self of the photographer (Degler 2009, 8). Whether the image itself alludes to these selves is debatable (the photographer seems absent); what is not, however, is the absence of any abiding self. The full face of the sitter is

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not exposed; we can only sense its presence concealed somewhere there at the juncture of all these selves, or reflections. Sufficiently playful and theatrical, it seems to gesture beyond the urge of self-representation and likeness, beyond the particular identity of the artist.51 In narrative portraits, unity and intimacy appear also problematic, if at times impossible to achieve. Narrative portraiture is “always a form of prosopopoeia, of ‘giving face’ to words” believed to be “‘literal’” (Wallen 1995, 55). His early autobiographical novel The 622 Downfalls of Bungo; or, the Demonic Woman (1910–11)52 can be read as a self-portrait with a collection of masks.53 Witkiewicz as Bungo looks at himself, rehearses his multiple masks, as if he were being watched and recorded by someone other than himself, exposing a process of the dissociation and consequent degradation of a young aspiring artist aiming to create universally appealing art, an artist who in pursuit of all the experience necessary for the creation of such art, makes every possible mistake. He becomes addicted to demonic education, to homosexual and heterosexual erotic experiences which prove stronger than his other activities. His most intense and long-lasting relationship with Ackme, the demonic femme fatale welcoming Bungo always with a different face, a symbol of modern civilization, redefines his life. Their affair from their first contact depends entirely on growing doses of poisonous erotic stimulation. Confessing to a journey of artistic, physical, social, and moral downfall, Bungo attempts to compose his life and invent himself as a construction—experimenting with multiple forms of expression: loose self-assertions, dialogues, formal statements, poetry, drama, camp role-playing, and also the diary—to authenticate the last stages of his agony before he loses one eye and dies by suicide. In the preface, which he signs “Genezyp Kapen,” Witkiewicz anticipates the narrative will have some entertainment value for a bored reader on the train. This probably should not be taken too seriously. As a piecemeal confession driven by excess and increase, multiple Doppelgängers and observers which are impossible to synchronize, the narrative

51 Degler also suggests that the image is most often treated as an expression of Witkiewicz’s fascination with motifs of the Doppelgänger (Degler 2009, 8). 52 The novel remained for many years in typescript and was first published only in 1972. 53 Stefan Okołowicz compares this impossible rehearsal of masks by the maturing Bungo to mask displays in paintings by James Ensor and Wojciech Weiss (Okołowicz 2010, 220).

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ends with abdication, a buffoonish vision of the life of an artist in a devastated world. Witkiewicz fashions his confessing subject, his lover, on the great actress Irena Solska, with whom, as mentioned, he had an affair; his friends and partners are depicted as characters “falling” in changing stages of narcotic trance and withdrawal. His characters plunge to narcotic realms where the face exists not to denote any “real” being but only for temptation (Witkiewicz 1985, 19). Wide-open eyes and lips, especially lower lips, the locus of verbal power, are the most active agents in the theatre of seduction. Similarly, the well-defined faces of perversely pornographic figures that the desirous and falling Bungo draws in-between his exercises of “erotology” reflect his physical and mental sense of “jellolike doubleness,” his sense of rupture between his artistic Doppelgänger and his real-like self (Witkiewicz 1992d, 63). Observing his friends, he concentrates on their degenerate faces: “I never exploit them […] I really keep silent about them. I take them artistically, and that’s as deep as it gets” (Witkiewicz 1992d, 82). Brummel, for example, walks with eyes bloodshot and as if hanging on stalks, with enlarged face and lips shrivelled like a piece of dead orange (Witkiewicz 1992d, 71). Edgar’s waking face resembles the features of a foetus (Witkiewicz 1992d, 83). The face of Duke disturbs Bungo: The Duke’s face was frankly atrocious. His parched lips were half-open in an imbecilic smile, his eyes, without his glasses, were hazy and had a confused look of criminal desire, mute supplication, and repulsive sorrow. For a split second Bungo looked at him with artistic satisfaction. That face, almost alien to him at that moment, resembled the demonic figures in his drawings. But at almost the same moment he saw everything and something so hideous gripped him that he was suddenly paralyzed with fear. (Gerould 1993, 65)

Nevermore’s eye sockets glow with phosphorous light (Witkiewicz 1985, 297). Bungo scrutinizes the dynamically changing surfaces of the face of his lover, the demonic Akme, to check for any signs of truth in them. Her pale face, blood-red lips, and indecipherable smirks provoke in him a neurotic train of thought. It is when her face looks most serpentine and false that he desires her uncontrollably. When she appears after spending a night with someone else, with swollen black eyes, an almost green pallor and creased, red, shapeless, and scarred lips, with her chin powdered carelessly, he receives her with the utmost excitement (Witkiewicz 1985, 204).

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Her face reflecting all the demonic powers residing within her (Witkiewicz 1985, 207) is at its most irresistible. In pursuit of an ever more heightened sense of “experience,” he feels himself undergoing major changes. And such a condition, he feels, calls for the wearing of a face (Witkiewicz 1985, 129). His friends, looking at him, detect new features, recognize that, indeed, Bungo is changing. The changes are so radical that in planning to conquer Akme, he reinvents and estranges himself to accommodate allusiveness in poses, masks, and camouflage. Witkiewicz suggests that the tendency to reflect faces and to classify them with regard to potential aberration is a deeply rooted social practice in Poland. Amateur classification of features in an interlocutor is what immediately leads an average Pole to distrust his or her interlocutor and spread general disrespect (Gerould 1993, 741). Writing, he himself finds physiognomic forays irresistible, though he realizes that focusing on facial characteristics alone is inadequate to probe the psyche of the model. Gradually, his interest in shots of impromptu and unserious states replaced studied images of the visible symptoms of mental illness and the development of character. While writing the novel, Witkiewicz was painting portraits of his friends which bore fictional names as captions. Also to illustrate the characters, Witkiewicz was relying on photography to give his father an idea of their appearance. Such a process of translation was a strategy of self-exploration which he used throughout his work. It proves that for Witkiewicz, the connections between writing and photography were indissoluble. It also shows that the “perverse pornography” of the theatre of degenerate faces staged what his friend Debora Vogel called “composed events.” In these events, narrative characters construct happenings and anticipate reactions which they subsequently illustrate through masks as models of human relations. At stake is the emergence of a new significance of people as actors performing roles. To avoid automation, Witkacy shows, life can be treated as a construction out of materials provided by actual events. The “accidents” arranged by Witkacy have the power to introduce the irrational and transgressive into life. Vogel observes that his transgressive characters are ciphers reflecting two distinctive tendencies: one which manifests a hypertrophy of consciousness and sophistication in culture, “the last coloring before the total arrest,” and the other, which Vogel considers more constructive and welcome, a pull towards life seen as construction. Vogel voices her disappointment that Witkiewicz did not pursue this other tendency further (Vogel 1994, 218). Yet he did push

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the eventive theme enough to create “accidents” suggesting anarchic derailment of life from mechanical existence. Witkiewicz realized the category of “eventness” in staged situations. In the early thirties, in his beloved Zakopane, Witkiewicz met a photographer who was already widely recognized as a portraitist. Józef Głogowski’s technical abilities and freshness of outlook fascinated Witkiewicz. Their friendship produced a collaborative project called the “theatre of faces.” In 1931 and from 1934 to 1935, they created a series of photographs titled “Seans fotograficzny” (The Photographic Performance).54 The project was a complex undertaking, not least given the stylistic differences of the two artists. Witkiewicz staged the photographs while Głogowski followed instructions and operated his flexible Leica, somehow finding a way to adjust his natural pictorial style and soft focus to Witkiewicz’s desire to capture the rapidly changing expressions of his creative face. The result was a series of kinetic takes with sometimes blurred features and compensated depth of field (Lenartowicz 1998). It is helpful to notice that Witkiewicz had a photogenic “face of an actor” always already made before a photographer had a chance to articulate their vision (Okołowicz 2010, 228) (Fig. 2.9). In the 1931 series of twenty-one images of faces, Witkiewicz is wearing a white suit, his favourite Panama hat, and glasses. He is sitting in the same brightly lit room, against a dark background, soaking up the sunlight, making faces, taking off his thick horn-rimmed spectacles, putting on a pair of thin wire spectacles, adjusting his hat, and clapping and moving his hands in a variety of gestures. The series has been registered on a single roll of 24 × 36 mm film containing 37 pictures and on this roll, it is followed by images of another performance involving Witkiewicz in the same outfit but accompanied by Janina Bykowiakówna. The series of twenty-one faces resists any clear readings. Serial portraiture, as noted earlier, creates fission: it dissipates the strong subject position while increasing and intensifying expressive movements. Every image in a series is equal in importance to every other image. The sequence, however, simulates movement, adds a stream of time absent in a single portrait, and comes close to motion-picture frames where we follow a figure and try to mark changes and transformations, try to guess the

54 The series belongs to Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak’s collection of portraits.

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Fig. 2.9 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: from a series of twenty-one faces (Józef Głogowski. 1931. Collection of Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak)

breaking point of the morphing process. The faces enact phases of expressions, new “optical events,” and, what is significant, unlike masks are extemporary. The first image presents a relaxed subject with a cigarette, the last one shows the subject displaying signs of confusion; his stretched hands gesturing some defeat. The surfaces of the faces alter sharply and display changes in the intensity of lighting. The series of looks, of reflexes, mimic inventions, and facial semblances, multiply variants of his faces, intensifying the expressive potential. We can see how images of the same face can be strikingly different and there is much more in each image that we are not able to see. Participating in this optical event, we cannot decide what these extended facial features, awkward grimaces, bizarre takes, paroxysms, and paratheatrical settings mean. Though the faces mimic intense forms of communication, intense movements that seem to direct towards some kind of transmission of the self, they do not actualize particular expressions. Like what Deleuze identified as the concise and fluent intensive sequences in Eisenstein’s films, they go beyond the duality of private and public, arriving at not individuation but “dividuation” (Deleuze 2019, 101). Coming at us in rapid successions, like some

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destabilizing force, the faces seem to approximate collapse which does not happen but, by the time we get to the last frame, the “dividuation” feels more like some new quality of the strangeness of being. As phases of expressions, the intense faces in Witkiewicz’s series possess a spectral quality and demand that we “seize instantly upon new moments of vital insight,” as Moholy-Nagy explained such new reflections. Viewers need to “simultaneously comprehend and to participate in the optical events” (Moholy-Nagy 1973, 24). Clearly, Witkacy is interested in a different relationship to seriousness than the one promoted by his earlier self-portraiture. In the series of “faces” produced with Głogowski, we trace qualities of expressions in which the loss of difference becomes apparent. To try to make known things reappear and to produce them over again makes apparent some fiction tempting with some renewal. No ultimate gesture or face can be expected. Witkacy exercises the freedom to both expose and confound. In Susan Sontag’s words, productions meant to “de-throne the seriousness” (Sontag 1964, 288) of high culture, camp productions, are forms of resistance to culture, to its uniform, drab, and institutionalizing creations. Extravagant, irrepressible, and uncontrollable in their grotesqueness, the stances Witkiewicz orchestrates bring to mind playful scenes produced by René Magritte and also in the photographer Aleksander Krzywobłocki.55 In what Clej refers to as paideia, playful cultivation of the self to extremes, of exercising passionate assertive defences, face events do not assert the original but are used to appropriate a proliferation of protective images against the forces threatening to commodify and engulf them in the market economy. Displacing the original face and de-regulating it by overemphasis or lack of alignment, positions courting fissions, Witkiewicz becomes a creator experiencing his face “essentially” and staying undefined. Coming in series, the images of faces make visible the loss of resemblances and differences. To try to make known things reappear and to produce them over again is to exercise resistance. Witkiewicz and Józef Głogowski deliberately refuse to make the truth apparent. It becomes clear that there is no definitive version of the ultimate gesture or face, that the face is resisted reality. Likewise, the effect of the subject’s gestures thwarts meaning. Gestures occupy a space of anteriority where language

55 A connection illuminated by Czartoryska (1984, 250).

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does not operate. Their collapse becomes obvious at points of transition between the frames. Moving from one image to another, we recognize we have not accumulated any original meanings. Rather, these gestures are evasions, happening, in Agamben’s terms, when “nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported” (Agamben 2000, 57). We endure the degradation and support that the “exhibition of a mediality […] the process of making a means visible as such” communicates “communicability” (Agamben 2000, 58–59), without claims to final versions. Thus the serialized faces both resist and invite invention; as pure potentiality they call attention to the identity of repetition, of redundancy, the identity of repeated elements, affirmed repeated acts of communication, of gestures. This repetition creates an autonomous field incompatible with the social system, a reprieve from alienation, and a source of incompleteness and self-difference. We can see them as instances of paideia. Jacques Derrida speaking about toxicomanie moderne, reminds about the ancient distinction between good and bad repetition. The legendary pharmakon, which referred to writing, though also to a drug and carried both positive and negative connotations, does not serve good memory but rather is an irresponsible parasite that can easily and necessarily cling to good memory from without and within (Derrida n.d.). The intoxicating repetition of the face in Witkiewicz’s projects feeds on the repetition of the parasitical and irresponsible writing of the face not to ensure anamnesis but to exercise the intoxicating hypomnésis —bad memory related to forgetting. The framed faces, like “flashes,”56 belong to that sensibility. They are like his other portraits deemed essential. The decentred, “nomadic,” and dissociating self from “The Atmosphere of Cities,”57 published in 1936 in Unwashed Souls articulates a sense of disgust at the proliferating horror of the huge wash of faces he sees in the city of Warsaw. Witkiewicz writes as a Kretschmer type of “leptosomeschizoid,” a figure, he says, “wrapped up in myself (or rather in the artificial transparent ball of my aristocratic-artistic worldview).” Yet, though self-centred, he remains interested in his surroundings:

56 In an interview with Derrida “Rhetorique de la Drogue” from 1989, J. M. Hervieu reminds us that drug users have appropriated the photographic term “flash” to highlight the link between addiction, its repeated actions, and modernity (Derrida, 2018). 57 Published also in the literary magazine Skawa in 1939 under the same title.

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… I noticed that walking through the streets of Warsaw exhausted me in a strange way. I would leave the house hale and hearty and fairly satisfied with what I had accomplished, I would go where I felt like going and where nothing bad could befall me, but I would reach my destination peevish, discouraged, and out of sorts, as though I had a slight hangover or had become depressed or even physically reduced. As the proprietor of a large “mugs-made-to order” firm, or in other words, being a psychological portrait painter, I have the foible of being uncommonly interested in the human mug. Simply walking down the street, I have always had to record every face I saw: ingurgitate it, digest it quickly, define it “intuitively,” and spit it out; “every face” is an exaggeration, but certainly every second or third, and our country does abound in mugs: profoundly mendacious, intriguingly masked and bizarre, complicated and ravaged by life—one must give Poland credit for that. After a quarter of an hour of such strenuous walking I was done for: all my joy in life and nonchalance would leave me, the mugs had poisoned me with their clearly and not so clearly expressed contempt. I also observed how these people looked at one another—it was the same story: looks of contempt that were taciturn, muzzled, venomous, or insolent, overweening, “lewd,” arrogant, blustering, pugnacious (nice expressions, eh?), and obscene—always obscene and malodorous. Then I stopped observing faces and—“Lo and behold” (as the poet said)—my fatigue vanished, my carefree attitude and feeling of satisfaction suffered no interruption in the street, and I took along with me wherever I wished my sense of well-being unimpaired. I had discovered the mystery of cities; the mal occhio is no joke—people do drain and suck one another with their looks, just as they can inspire one another with energy and courage…. (Witkiewicz 1992a, 324–325)

For this peripatetic urban proprietor of a portraiture firm, a short, dynamic walk to familiar places in his city is a poisoning experience. Like a narcotic fix, it starts with a sense of control and after injection, digestion, and vomiting, leads to physically and mentally debilitating symptoms. Face watching, a “foible,” is effectively fed by the profuse availability in Poland of diverse categories of poison—the “mugs” of his countrymen. Regarding these faces, ingesting their qualified grimaces in an intoxicating fashion, is a perilous habit for in the face of the other he finds not the beauty of emotion but pain and threat. To avoid submitting to the strong drug of faces, he decides not to consume the degenerate forms, not to look at the face of the other. The discovery of this saving solution justifies his ensuing dissociation.

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Imaginative self-commentaries like this one engage the metaphoric use of drugs. For the detoxicating mind, what is agonizing are the drugged faces of the crowd. He does not interact with the crowd the way De Quincey does on his opiated walks in London, or the way Walter Benjamin does on his walks in Marseille on hashish, or like Baudelaire who praises the salutary crowd.58 Clej observes that for these flâneurs drugs unify and naturalize the disunified, they stimulate and anaesthetize. For the opiated De Quincey, “the unhappy crowd” in a state of “patience, hope, and tranquility” (Clej 1995, 171) is full of philosophic wisdom and hope, especially when there are poor people among it. For Witkiewicz, the way to some amelioration is a rejection of the delusional crowd and the dissolution of inherited structures. Yet, although De Quincey embraces the spectacle of the city with a sympathy that he qualifies as “entire” (De Quincey 1922, 206), he pays a heavy price for the exposure. He confesses: “the human face tyrannized over my dreams” (De Quincey 1922, 208). The face multiplied into endless repetitions, visited his dreams and reveries, unfolding with great power and producing lasting agitation. The “tyranny of the human face” (Baudelaire n.d.) heightened by the search in the fluctuating crowd for one beloved face resulted in such disturbing visions: “now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to reveal itself; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing; faces that surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations” (De Quincey 1922, 262–263). Rambling in London, he consumed what de-regulated his various selves. Witkiewicz, a century later, confessed to a similar anguish. During the first half of the twentieth century, visual artists distanced themselves from familiarizing images of the face. What sets Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz apart in the interwar decades marked by the crisis of unity is the intoxicating burst of a presence the face triggers in his work. As I have tried to show, his portraits tend to both likeness and strangeness, they foreground selves and they distance them. In their forceful strangeness, the face often goes astray. When it does, transformations occur which exacerbate new relations towards self-knowledge. Witkiewicz mobilizes photography to carry the face as a personal resource 58 Clej refers to these authors and their state of urban reverie on pp. 170–171. Sameness, typicality, and degeneration visible in the chaos of faces identified with urban life is present in Karl Jaspers Die geistige Situation der Zeit from 1931.

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not only against the intolerable boredom of self-sameness but also against the old vocabulary of facial expressions and revelations, intuiting that The Face is “what exists beyond the frame” (Witkiewicz 1985, 62).

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Czartoryska, Urszula. “O fotografiach Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza.” In Co robi´c po kubizmie? [in Polish], edited by Jerzy Malinowski, 239–255. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984. Czartoryska, Urszula. “Portret fotograficzny: duchowno´sc´ i cielesno´sc´ .” In Nowe media w komunikacji społecznej w XX w [in Polish], edited by Maryla Hopfinger, 59–68. Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, 2002. Czartoryska, Urszula. “Witkacy w zwierciadle fotografii” [in Polish]. Fotografia 5, no. 20 (1972): 99–104. Danek-Wojnowska, Bozena. ˙ Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz a modernizm. Kształtowanie idei katastroficznych [in Polish].Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1976. Danek-Wojnowska, Bozena, ˙ ed. “Listy Ignacego Witkiewicza do Heleny Czerwijowskiej” [in Polish]. Twórczo´sc´ 27, no 9 (1971): 13–60. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an Opium-Eater. Berlin: Internationale Bibliothek, 1922. Degler, Janusz. Witkacego portret zwielokrotniony. Szkic i materiały do biografii (1918–1939) [in Polish]. Warszawa: PIW, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement Image. London: The Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Derrida, Jacques. Athens, Still Remains. Translated by Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida, Jacques. “Rhetorique de la drogue.” Accessed 18 September 2018. http://redaprenderycambiar.com.ar/derrida/frances/derrida_drogue.htm. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 89–111. Foucault, Michel. Dits et Écrits 1954–1988. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. Franczak, Ewa, and Stanisław Okołowicz. Przeciw nico´sci. Fotografie Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1986. Freeland, Cynthia. Portraits and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Frizot, Michel, ed. A New History of Photography. Köln: Könemann, 1998. Gerould, Daniel. “Witkacy’s Doubles.” In S. I. Witkiewicz: Photographs 1899– 1939, 17–23. Glasgow: Third Eye Center, 1989. Gerould, Daniel, ed. The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated by Daniel Gerould. London: Quartet Books, 1993. Hornby, Louise. Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

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Ingarden, Roman. “Wspomnienie o Stanisławie Ignacym Witkiewiczu.” In Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Człowiek i twórca [in Polish], edited by Tadeusz Kotarbinski ´ and Jerzy Eugeniusz Płomienski, ´ 169–177. Warszawa: PIW, 1957. Jakimowicz, Irena. “O wielorakiej funkcji portretu. Kilka uwag w zwi˛azku z Firm˛a Portretow˛a S. I. Witkiewicza.” In Portret: Funkcja. Forma. Symbol [in Polish], Materiały Sesji Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki, 49–66. Warszawa: PWN, 1990. Kiebuzinska, Christine. “Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty.” South Atlantic Review 58, no. 4 (1993): 59–83. Kostołowski, Andrzej. “Firma portretowa ‘S.I. Witkiewicz’ – próba interpretacji.” In Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz 1885–1939 [in Polish], edited by Zofia Gołubiewowa, Ewa Zawadzka. Łód´z, Kraków: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1980. Kott, Jan. “Witkacy Prekursor” [in Polish]. Dziennik polski i dziennik zołnierza ˙ 200 (2000): 4–5. Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Krzysztofowicz-Kozakowska, Stefania. Firma portretowa Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza [in Polish]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1989. Krzyzanowska-Hojdukiewicz, ˙ Anna. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz-1885–1939. Warszawa: Zakład Wydawnictw Sztuka Polska, 1987. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009. PDF Ebook. ´ Lenartowicz, Swiatosław. Witkacy-Głogowski. Portrety wzajemne [in Polish]. Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe, 1998. Lichtenberg, Christoph Georg. Pochwała watpienia. ˛ Bruliony i inne pisma [in Polish]. Edited by Tadeusz Zatorski. Gdansk: ´ Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2005. Marien, Warner Mary. Photography: A Cultural History. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014. Micinska, ´ Anna, and Urszula Kenar, eds. Poza Rzeczy-wisto´scia. ˛ Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza wiersze i rysunki [in Polish]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977. Moholy-Nagy, László. Painting, Photography, Film. Cambridge: MIT Press: 1973/c. 1973. Musiał, Grzegorz. “Twórczo´sc´ fotograficzna Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza.” In Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz 1885–1939 [in Polish], edited by Zofia Gołubiewowa, Ewa Zawadzka. Łód´z, Kraków: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1980. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Portrait. Translated by Sarah Clift and Simon Sparks. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

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Nycz, Ryszard. J˛ezyk modernizmu. Prolegomena historycznoliterackie [in Polish]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2002. Okołowicz, Stefan. “Metafizyczna dziwno´sc´ istnienia w fotografiach S. I. Witkiewicza.” Rocznik Historii Sztuki 31 (2006): 173–186. https://doi.org/ 10.11588/diglit.14575. Okołowicz, Stefan. “‘Musz˛e mie´c mask˛e, w´sciekł˛a mask˛e’: Polemika z Mari˛a Ann˛a Potock˛a” [in Polish]. Przestrzenie teorii 14 (2010): 217–233. Okołowicz, Stefan. “Portrety metafizyczne.” Konteksty 1–4 (2000): 183–197. Piotrowski, Piotr. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz [in Polish]. Warszawa: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1989. Pomian, Krzysztof. “Powie´sc´ jako wypowied´z filozoficzna.” In Studia o Stanisławie Ignacym Witkiewiczu [in Polish7], edited by Michał Głowinski ´ and Janusz Sławinski, ´ 9–31. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1972. Roguska-Cybulska, Jadwiga. “Witkacy w oczach Zakopanego.” In Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Człowiek i twórca [in Polish], edited by Tadeusz Kotarbinski ´ and Jerzy Eugeniusz Płomienski, ´ 319–339. Warszawa: PIW, 1957. Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Smith, Joel. “More Than One: Sources of Serialism.” Record of the Art Museum 67 (2017): 8–29. Princeton University. Accessed 14 July 2020. http://www. jstor.org/stable/20442634.24.11.2017. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. Steimatsky, Noa. The Face on Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Stoichita, Victor I. Krótka historia cienia [in Polish]. Translated by Piotr Nowakowski. Kraków: Universitas, 2001. Szuman, Stefan. ”Wst˛ep do Katalogu Wystawy Witkacego w Poznaniu, 1929.” In Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, edited by Piotr Piotrowski, 150–151. Warszawa: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1989. Szymanowicz, Maciej. ”In the Private Sphere: The Photographic Work of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.” Translated by Klara Kemp-Welch. In Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walter Collection 1909–1949, edited by Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg. An Online Project of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed 7 December 2014. http://www.Moma.org/interacti ves/objectphoto/assets/essays/Szymanowicz.pdf. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Taras, Katarzyna. Witkacy i film. Warszawa: Oficyna Wydawnicza Errata, 2005. Turowski, Andrzej. “The Phenomenon of Blurring.” Translated by Wanda KempWelch. In Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation

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1910–1980, edited by Timothy O. Benson, 362–373. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Vogel, Debora. “Pozycja Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza we współczesnej kulturze polskiej” [in Polish]. Ogród 7, no. 1 (17) (Spring 1994): 213–218. Wallen, Jeffrey. “Between Text and Image: The Literary Portrait.” ab: Auto/ biography Studies 10, no. 1 (1995): 50–65. West, Shearer. Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Witkiewicz, S.I. “Fotografia i malarstwo.” In Nowe media w komunikacji społecznej w XX w, edited by Maryla Hopfinger, 41–43. Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, 2002. Witkiewicz, S.I. “Listy Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza do Heleny Czerwijowskiej.” Edited by Bozena ˙ Danek-Wojnowska. Twórczo´sc´ 27, no. 9 (314) (1971): 13–60. Witkiewicz, S.I. Narcotics. Translated by Soren A. Gauger. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2018. Wiktiewicz, S.I. “New Forms in Painting and the Misunderstandings Arising Therefrom” [1919]. In The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated by Daniel Gerould, 107–117. London: Quartet Books, 1992b. Witkiewicz, S.I. “Papierek lakmusowy.” 192-. Accessed 25 September 2017. http://polona.pl/item/319858/0/. Witkiewicz, S.I. “Rules of the S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait-Painting Firm (1928).” In The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated by Daniel Gerould, 239–243. London: Quartet Books, 1992c. Witkiewicz, S.I. “622 Downfalls of Bungo; or, The Demonic Woman [1910–11].” In The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated by Daniel Gerould, 52–75. London: Quartet Books, 1992d. Witkiewicz, S.I. “Unwashed Souls” [1936]. In The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated by Daniel Gerould, 310–327. London: Quartet Books, 1992a. Witkiewicz, S.I. 622 Upadki Bunga czyli demoniczna kobieta. Warszawa: PIW, 1985. ˙ Zakiewicz, Anna. “J˛ezyk obrazów i rysunków Witkacego” [in Polish]. Pami˛etnik literacki XCIII, z. 4 (2002): 173–181.

CHAPTER 3

Virginia Woolf and Debora Vogel: A Season of Fragments

3.1

Virginia Woolf: Splintering and Pullulating

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was imbued with a sense of change by the age she lived in. She took in so much that was stimulating that we can risk repeating her own words about a fellow life writer and say that “she was helped, not thwarted. Nothing baffled or contracted or withered her” (Woolf 1994, 500).1 Despite the most diverse range of problems rehearsed in the essays published by Woolf in the twenties and the thirties, we can note one controlling principle that she values above others: “some fierce attachment to an idea” (Woolf 1994, 224). I argue that this idea is the affirmation of change—its sfumato effects2 pervade and blend the fibre of her essays. In this chapter, I propose to consider splintering and pullulating as forces subordinate to the affirmation which Virginia Woolf finds in the excess of urban experience and which she makes use of in order to embrace new frames of life narratives. By foregrounding the self, in acts

1 In these words, Woolf is describing Madame de Sévigné—her amazing talents and her letters “radiant and glowing” (Woolf 2011, 501). 2 A phrase used by the Polish writer and philosopher Tadeusz Micinski ´ in his attempts to define the essay as a form (Micinski ´ 1970, 197). In portraiture, sfumato technique leaves the key features of the face “indistinct” (Bate 2016, 104).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_3

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of harnessing associations, images, and metaphors, Woolf introduces a difficult alliance of the essay with poetry. Her associative, fragmenting strategies approach an idea, “something […] seen with precision and thus compelling words to its shape” (Woolf 1994, 224), indirectly—by trying out words to create a profile, by devising some possibilities within movement and duration, and by indulging in spontaneous thought-processes. These tactics fail to resolve the essayed object but—dislimning it—they form the sfumato view of the face of the essaying subject. They also highlight her concerns with face forms. Applying Woolf’s frequent strategy of contrast, always maintaining the validity of contrary possibilities, I will examine the idea of change in essayistic projects and montages by her contemporary Debora Vogel (1902–1942), a Polish writer whose oeuvre is little known, but remarkable nonetheless. While Woolf traces the understanding of change that is based on splinters of surfaces and transitional states, of forms out of which I will isolate that of the face and its fragments, Vogel applies strategies of cutting and holding still a series of discrete units as means of intensifying her excess of objectivity as an ordering response to the modern “quantity of speed and movement” (Vogel 2017a, 394). This comparison will bring out shared experimental attitudes and the shared quality of essayistic observation steeped in resistance to the habitual and authoritative. Vogel and Woolf, engaged in processes of changing, moving on, and applying partial and mobile vision, import developments from the visual arts to lend the validity to writing life. Change is of profound interest to Woolf. In her essays, she never stops discussing it. The word “change” surfaces on pages of all her essays. Equipped with the essayist’s license to err and to meander, Woolf observes change as a prevailing force in rare and deceptive guises and moments; intense and full of life, change allows her to be looked at and, unexpectedly, becomes a standing resource, an entire subject. We read about “The chops and changes of time” (Woolf 2011, 93), changes in fashions, conceptions of beauty, the changing meanings of words and changes of words, “changing shapes of language” (Woolf 2011, 563); changes in society, from decade to decade; generations, conventions, vision, attitudes, old decorums, class distinctions, ways of life, “a sudden slip of masses” (Woolf 1988, 357), and changes in human nature, of course. There are definite changes in human character, “in or about December, 1910” (Woolf 1967a, 320); human relations, changes of focus on the “‘we’ of public bodies” (Woolf 1994, 223), changes in standards, “great

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changes in psychology […] and great changes in material culture” (Woolf 2010, 383), changes of opinions, as the times change, and changes in personalities. For example, she writes about George Gissing who because he “was always thinking, he was always changing” (Woolf 2010, 537). Imperatively, “moment and change are the essence of our being” (Woolf 1994, 75). As an agent for the reconfiguration of the self, internal change is what turns the self into a multiple singularity, a being singulier pluriel.3 Recursive and habitual practices are also conceived as sites of potential change. Their modalities point to the inevitability and tremendous powers of changes. When rating things and figures constituting a history of the subject or object, we need to bear in mind the subtleties of the change essayed as a movement, as transformation, reconfiguration, and resumption of multiplicity.4 In her essays, Woolf, always “careful of our pleasure” (Woolf 1994, 219), uses material of her culture, but also cultures of the past to profess modern literature at its point of a radical change5 resulting, for instance, in “the destruction of a great deal of dead matter still obscuring the true features of the human face” (Woolf 2011, 186). The exciting idea of remaking literature, but also the lives of those who read it, rests on the recognition and affirmation of “contradictory versions of the same face” (Woolf 2011, 186). Writing in 1939, she noted that technology was changing and “when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle” (Woolf 2011, 186), significant extrinsic and intrinsic changes would follow. Writers and readers alike will at some point vindicate and validate them. Woolf’s quick change theory as a work habit is a notable example6 : “a good idea; talking in many changing scenes: it changes 3 To use Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase from his work Being Singular Plural (Nancy 2000).

Such a person can be understood as both singular and plural, a dividual rather than individual. 4 In Weatherland, Alexandra Harris adds that in Orlando Woolf’s point is that “as cultural preoccupations change we find affinities with different kinds of weather. We find conditions to suit us, or from which we need to defend ourselves.” Woolf’s “sensitivity to cultural change over time,” writes Harris, “came from astonishingly wide and deep reading, and in that reading she detected shifting meteorological emphases” (Harris 2016, 16–17). 5 “We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English Literature,” she asserts (Woolf 1967a, 337). 6 On Woolf’s use of the same notebook for genres like fiction and criticism, see Helen Wussow’s “A Masterpiece in Purple Ink.”

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topics & moods” (Woolf 1984b, 301). We should add that for Woolf, eudemonia (or happiness) comes with recognition and acceptance of life changes: “For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living” (Woolf 2011, 227). An expansive hybrid form, the essay proves most adequate at times of changing conditions: “The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more” (Woolf 1994, 222). Elena Gualtieri acutely observes that “part sketch and part epiphany, the essay participated in and perhaps even initiated for Woolf a momentous change in the history of literature, when prose took the place of poetry as the dominant literary form and the cult of the author marked the end of impersonal literature” with implications “for the whole question of the relation between art and life, literature and experience” (Gualtieri 2000, 56). Mapping splintering processes in the modern culture, while relying on her ambulatory self, Woolf orchestrates what she believes the essay should offer: a salutary “trance which is […] an intensification of life” (Woolf 1994, 216). Within the modern bounds of the essay, genre “designed to seek out, identify, and convey knowledge of the world as it relates to the self” (Brown 1997, 91), she develops her ideas of stirring changes. And so mapping her present moment, Woolf, noting everywhere confusion, makes an effort to detect and grasp determinants of new developments, to sketch dimensions of their patterns, both the naked and the fertile facts, with personal configurations. “Extraordinarily photological,”7 she finds extravagance and excitement in the appearance of new angles of vision and vistas. She is concerned about her public becoming a “dull-eyed race who must be dazzled” (Woolf 2010, 171), who look minutely and aslant rather than directly. Because the age is so “littered with fragments” (Woolf 1988, 356), because “the smashing and the crashing began” (Woolf 1967a, 333–334), and “we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction” (Woolf 1967a, 334), the essayist in touch with the living, one herself living the life of incessant changes, needs to respond and needs to weigh their meanings. If it is true that every

7 Following Derrida, in The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf Jane Goldman imports the metaphor of photology as a trope for light and darkness of self-revelation and selfconcealment. Goldman argues that Woolf’s “writing seems extraordinarily photological” (Goldman 1998, 14).

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essayist collects something,8 Woolf gathers many things among which odd fragments serve as important clues in change-mapping and truth-finding. For example, thinking about a collection of comments about Coleridge, she concentrates on the advantages of a form of splintered angles: “it is the only way of getting at the truth – to have it broken into many splinters by many mirrors and so select” (Woolf 2011, 238). Hence, a clear picture of Coleridge is neither smooth nor is it authentic. Thinking of the poet’s eyes, for example, Woolf notes that they “were brown to some, grey to others, and again a very bright blue” (Woolf 2011, 238). Fragments pullulate everywhere and offer diverse reflections. She finds fragments to be like “little relics of beauty in the world that has grown indescribably drab” (Woolf 1994, 94). It is good to be able to call them up with shut eyes. Fragments are markers of authenticity: “now and again the sight of a vanishing coat-tail suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full light” (Woolf 1994, 96). In her essays, Woolf takes note of mannerisms and peculiarities of figures who fascinate her with their vitality and multiplicity. Thus captured, they escape compression into homogenous entities. She acknowledges the value of the essayistic formlessness and pliability to “perch” freely on “some remarkable nose, some trembling hand […] the flashing eye, the arched brow” (Woolf 1975, 64). She attends to particularities and, “Distrusting reality,” Woolf chooses to “insubstantise” (Woolf 1984a, 248).9 Attention to changes in culture and alterations in her subjects sharpen her awareness of changes of selves: “So one changed. But these changes of mine were part of a much bigger change” (Woolf 1976, 173). Woolf believes that a good essayist gives us herself “simply and directly”—and uses the “most dangerous and delicate tool” (Woolf 1994, 220)—her personality. It is with these qualities that Woolf has enriched the modern essay. Her distinct presence permeates the aura of extraordinary zest and enthusiasm, her extraordinary style, and her extraordinary emphasis on living as writing. Sensitive to the architecture of sentences, quality of words and their power to tell the truth, the strife of writing, and the

8 Jan Tomkowski in his excellent introduction to Polski esej literacki. Antologia [The Anthology of Polish Essay] states that every essayist must be collecting something: “books, pictures, notes, thoughts, landscapes” (Tomkowski 2018, lxx). 9 A word Woolf invents to describe what she wanted to do in her fiction, her desire to abstract from the “cheapness” of reality (Woolf 1984a, 248).

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quality of seeing, over and over she meanders through the pages of literature written over centuries, illuminating the singularity of achievements of fellow artists, living and dead. Pursuing and salvaging what may look like “mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust” (Woolf 1994, 34), Woolf responds to what Derek Attridge identifies as the singularity of literature: “an unprecedented, unequalled configuration of cultural materials” (Attridge 2003, 33). She does justice to them in “inventive” reading and writing (Attridge 2003, 33). Woolf promotes new angles of vision opening new vistas for re-visualizing the world and modifying capacities of her subjects. In animation of experiences, allowing access to expression of vision lies the singularity of her essays. Woolf finds a way to put “a new line on the familiar face” (Woolf 1988, 67), to help illuminate a human being and commit her to unexpected connections. Likewise, Woolf the essayist wields the power of her personality without obtruding it—she is not blatant. She is a volatile and faceless figure—not “giving the whole map,” as the great Montaigne did (Woolf 1994, 71). She liquidates the essence and allows elusive and enigmatic lines to emerge gradually. She knows that “face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress their feebleness with character in speech” (Woolf 1994, 72), but her goal is to distract us from the obvious brilliance of one face and its illusion of a synthesis, to stir her essay readers into a contemplation of innumerable reflections and lines, so that they can experience the appearance of faces and their changes. Perhaps her essayistic self-delineations, splintered and multiplied, possess the quality of the humane art she praises so highly in Horace Walpole. From his life-writing, friends “drew […] something superficial yet profound, something changing yet entire – himself” by which she means “that which friends elicit but the great public kills” (Woolf 2011, 227). And so, despite the fascination of the modern age with “the sight of a whole human being” (Woolf 2011, 227), despite the ability of some to unfold the most complex experiences, the rarest and most striking perceptions evade most people. Woolf the essayist will attend to the irreducable. A visit to a dentist is a shared and very common experience. Some people, though, emerge from it altered. In “Gas” (1927), for example, Woolf speaks of “smudged and dispersed” certainties (Woolf 2011, 451) and whirling sensations experienced under the nitrous oxide. Having plunged into “some new sulphurous dark existence” (Woolf 2011, 451), she recollects emerging from the ordeal with a sense of having come really close to the other world, to some truth, of almost seizing “the thing”

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and becoming illuminated (Woolf 2011, 453). This liminal experience provokes a change and triggers an interest in observations concerning changes. Watching the faces of people in a third-class railway carriage, she contemplates the process of alteration from “the smooth pink face” of a baby face to a red-face of a mature woman. Sixty or seventy years deliver what she renders as a “most terrible punishment on the smooth pink face” and transmits “some very strange piece of information” (Woolf 2011, 452). Change is necessary: “An unchanged face would look almost idiotic” (Woolf 2011, 453); change renders different features despite similar expressions that come with old age. They are dull because they are fixed. Yet only very few faces, she concludes, look as if they recognized the change and seized the thing, that is grasp the meaning of the face also as an idea and take advantage of it. Seizing the thing can begin with seizing colour qualities. Though colour explodes all around us—“the earth we stand on is made of colour,” helping to keep senses alive (Woolf 1994, 522)—we often fail to capture it, and even writers cannot taste it fully. Her preference for colour over form becomes obvious. Humans, she ponders, seek colour and detect its alterations. People themselves, though, are not colourful. She shifts attention to her subjective experience. Observing fish in an aquarium, its perfect form and its hues, she discovers that “under our tweed and silk is nothing but a monotony of pink nakedness” (Woolf 1994, 524). Faces, too, do not strike the observer’s sensory apparatus unless colour is added to them. A face by itself is “something flying fast,” as she notes in Jacob’s Room (Woolf 2008, 111); it is a bland surface in itself, unless we align faces with vibrant attributes, positive positions, and new art. And so she posits, “Let us wash the roofs of our eyes in colour” (Woolf 1988, 164). Woolf attaches significance to the intensified observation of changing art, to new colours and new pleasures arising from new languages of colour emerging after the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition—all promoting the awareness of the birth of new sensibilities. Woolf’s decisive and consequential departure from traditional chiaroscuro into spheres of colorism, Goldman proposes, should be read in terms of a “coded articulation of historical intervention” (Goldman 1998, 8). When women enter the public world in Woolf’s essays, they become visible not as shaded and obscured figures—they emerge in and through light and colour. Her manipulation of light, dark, and colour goes beyond aesthetic decisions: “It is this prismatic exploration of the newly illuminated feminine that marks Woolf’s innovatory feminist aesthetics” (Goldman 1998, 22).

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To seize the thing is also to find the language for the excess of visions the thing may provoke. A palimpsestic model of the working of consciousness proposed by the autobiographer Thomas de Quincey, whose masterful powers Woolf locates in suggesting “faces without features” (Woolf 2010, 454–455) and in embracing “the tumult and trepidation of flying multitudes” (Woolf 2010, 455), serves Woolf as an attractive model. De Quincey knew about the necessity of “piercing the haze” (Woolf 2010, 457) to open up “the vision of something for ever flying, for ever escaping” (Woolf 2010, 458). And he managed to avoid dispersal of his visions and dreams by always regarding his self, his central connector. In Confessions of an Opium-Eater, for example, he traces the origins of his excessive use of opium directly to what he diagnosed as rheumatism in his face and more indirectly to “early sufferings in the streets of London” (De Quincey 1922, 12). Exploring carefully “the camera obscura of … [his] fermenting fantasy” (De Quincey 1922, 152), he traces the process of dissolution of his sense of selfdeterminacy. Like a cloud, he says, it “dislimned.” De Quincey uses this aerial verb, coined by Shakespeare, to describe a process of the loss of “lineaments by stealthy steps” (De Quincey 1922, 28). When he comes to “launch himself on the boundless ocean of London” (De Quincey 1922, 140) as a pedestrian tourist, he himself becomes dislimned and then, through writing, capable again of maintaining himself. The principle of infinite divisibility10 and the ideal of incompleteness came to define the modern self.11 No longer dependent on the optical principles of the camera obscura, Woolf exercised new perceptual autonomy. She shows how modern splitting can become positively transforming and regenerative, and how rather than a disturbance, it becomes the dynamics of what

10 For a discussion of De Quincey’s principle expanded in his Logic of Political Economy, see Alina Clej’s A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas de Quincey and His Intoxication of Writing. 11 In the early decades of the twentieth century, a new way of self-fashioning based on splintering found ideals in the bundle theory of the self by David Hume, Baudelaire’s “ragpicker,” and Benjamin’s collector. It provided a way to respond to numerous modern ideas of the splintering of the homogenous, monophonic self. More recently, D.C. Dennett’s conception of the self as always multiple explicates the split in his model of multiple drafts which show that in every given moment our brain registers synchronically multiple tracks of information supplied by many agents.

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we can term autopoiesis —hence her new positions, the “rambling circularity” of her essays (Cuddy-Keane 1997, 907), their loop-like form.12 To seize the thing, she tests her alternative “turn & turn about method” (Woolf 1984a, 247), testing and blurring diverse angles of vision, refusing a linearity of a logical argument or a synthesis, opening to disintegrating interventions, forces attracting and distracting diverse manifestations of the self. The approach gives shape to moments of change and occasions for constellations of reflections on meanings of changes. For example, mapping social and cultural contexts, she tests implications of an important shift in England from “that incessant talking” (Woolf 1994, 184) to looking. In the essay, in its “state of verbality,”13 Woolf interprets the extravagance and intensities that looking and seeing produce, their new modalities and particularities, dramatizing also changes in the form and perceptions of “the thing” and that is “the human face” (Woolf 1988, 164). She attests to this idea’s “paramount importance” and power (Woolf 1988, 164). The thing is a connector between the appearance and the beyond of appearance. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” delivered as a paper in 1924 and since then “usually considered to be her literary manifesto” (Gualtieri 2000, 1), change features as a theme and also as a convention of portraiture. The titular Mrs. Brown from a simple story emerges not only as a character but also as a model. A woman over sixty, “one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness – everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up – suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt” (Woolf 1967a, 322). Thinking about this woman—“very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely” (Woolf 1967a, 323)—sitting, symbolically, in the opposite corner of a carriage, Woolf reflects that this figure can be portrayed in fiction in an infinite number of ways. Depending on the origin, age, temperament, and position of the observing writer, she can be largely ignored for the benefit of solidifying her surroundings; she can be diminished to the

12 This aspect of Woolf’s essays can be analysed through Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Valera’s autopoietic feedback loop theory. These biologists coined the term autopoiesis to capture the working of the autonomous system of cells which despite splitting, always regenerate. See their Autopoeiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980). 13 Thus, John Snyder in Prospects of Power speaks of the essay. Its function is to “declare a private politics of liberation” (qtd. in Gualtieri 2000, 9).

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stature of a universal figure or a soul principle, as Russian writers would have handled her. Woolf considers the treatment of characters by Edwardian and Georgian writers, noting that despite their distinctive, valuable, and necessary choices, they did not look at Mrs. Brown—they ignored her. Woolf, however, in her meagre age is determined to save “our” ordinary woman. She defends the “old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety” (Woolf 1967a, 336) as a life principle and as hope for literature at a point of change, “on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature” (Woolf 1967a, 337). By emphasizing the “things that she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence” (Woolf 1967a, 337), Woolf reclaims not the “complete and satisfactory” presentiment of an ordinary woman, but her off-centre visible presence and her striking optics in “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure” (Woolf 1967a, 337). This gesture of reception seems to promise some closer alliance. The otherness of Mrs. Brown is pronounced in the context of Woolf’s position, but also in the context of the essays. Woolf recognizes elsewhere that “we are enclosed, and separate, and cut off” (Woolf 1994, 560) and that her recognition of the alterity of Mrs. Brown is an important test of the old objectifying operations of meaning. Thus mindful of Mrs. Brown’s vulnerability, she treats her not as an object of distanced aesthetic contemplation but as an end, as a unique subject. Woolf grants her face visibility without which, she will write about another woman, she is “a mist, a wraith, a miasma of anonymous merit” (Woolf 1988, 164). An active face, a physical boundary, and a name define the new condition of Mrs. Brown’s autonomy. Woolf endorses it while also acknowledging that, like life, she cannot be fully captured. Woolf makes visible faces of other working-class women. She gets very close to the ninety-two-year-old Mrs. Grey. Framing her in a seven-byfour-foot front doorway, “green and sunny” (Woolf 2011, 469), in a corner on a chair, with the dim fire burning in the grate, Woolf examines what we can read as an instant of tormenting life that barely flickers. The close-up of the face of this old woman illuminates Mrs. Grey’s entire life: “Her eyes ceased to focus themselves; it may be that they had lost the power. They were aged eyes, blue, unspectacled. They could see, but without looking. She had never used her eyes on anything minute and difficult; merely upon faces, and dishes and fields” (Woolf 2011, 468). Reduced to twitches of pain, tweaks, and spasms, Mrs. Grey is, however, given a voice with which she mumbles ungrammatically her wish to die.

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A diminished figure on the threshold of life, she only sits, too weak to move. Woolf does not stare at her and does not expect Mrs. Grey to act; she acknowledges her resignation, her pain like “a nail” piercing through her, and endorses the boundaries of the inertia of Mrs. Grey. It is of significance that “Old Mrs. Grey” is presented and accommodated in Woolf’s impressive collection of admired and honoured figures. This ethical gesture is extended in the essay “To Spain,” where a timeless life “issues” from an old Spanish village facing the African coast. There we encounter another vulnerable woman, a “Spanish peasant woman who bids one enter her room, with its lilies and its washing, and smiles and looks out of the window as if she too had looked for a thousand years […]” (Woolf 1988, 364). This figure of affirmation and hospitality, nameless, stands for a way of being, a provocation lifted from obscurity in the field of culture closing upon itself. But caught in an archaic visualization, framed in a geometrical perspective, she is not treated as active and alive but as an attractive subject of a philosophical reflection on attention and inventiveness. In the short story “An Unwritten Novel,” she states that “the human face – the human face at the top of the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more” (Woolf 1997, 24). Despite the unutterable excess, she attempts to pierce through the mature faces of poor people and through “the knowledge in each face” (Woolf 1997, 19). In the distracting world full of “fragments of face,” she imagines there is “probably but one person who looks up for a moment and tries to interpret the menacing face” (Woolf 1994, 121). Her attention and sympathy of the eye are measured with the pronounced distance of an outcast, but it is also informed by her unwillingness to re-configure favourably her own face, so distinct from the faces of poor women. She wonders about the barrier the face of the working-class person presents, about its narrower but more emphatic range of expression. Visible and forceful expression and “the sculpturesque quality” (Woolf 2010, 182), as well as the unseen sequences “dormant in their eyes” (Woolf 2010, 183), stamp what she determines is both a natural and impassable difference. Unlike the faces of the ladies, those of the working-class women, she notes in “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild,” “were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines.[…] Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual – on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief. Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present” (Woolf

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2010, 180). This physiognomic reading employs deindividuating codes and conventions responsible for anchoring subjects in their busy environment. Such faces are clearly barometers of class belonging. Additionally, the Woolfian observer’s unsympathetic predilection for class-bound visual stereotyping reaffirms a still larger gap—that between the mind and the face. Commenting on the use of bodily metaphors in this essay, Gualtieri notes in the working-class femininity the production of the “ideal of physical rather than mental androgyny” (Gualtieri 2000, 80). This stands in stark opposition to the faces of refined, upper class women. Acknowledging the separation of these types, Goldman detects symbolic codes in colours of the attire of working-class speakers, revealing not only an all-important “silent pictorial realm,” an emerging language of “voicing women’s past experience and past suffering, but also a new suffrage allegiance” (Goldman 1998, 193).14 Woolf translates this verbally, alerting her readers to new shades of meaning in the play of the liberating language of colours, like the bald purple dress worn by one speaker. A corner lady “so pale, so plump, so compact” observed in the diningcar of a train going to Spain, “seemed as she sat smiling to be riding life over ditches and boundaries.” Watched from the vantage point of the fellow-traveller, the lady is a specimen of the Latin race, living a way of life, possibly a poor life, that is distinct in its way of handling the “extravagances of life” (Woolf 1988, 362). Loading pieces of food on a frying pan covered by a copy of Le Temps newspaper, both she and her husband smiled. After the observer hears that it was food stashed for a dog, she decides that the lady must have been saying that “Life is so simple” (Woolf 1988, 362). Woolf is amused and curious. Searching an equal alliance, she tries to show the woman as alive and active but does not bridge the gap in conversation. She can only conclude in the free spirit of a free traveller with the generalization that, banal as it sounds, perhaps life is simple. Yet, as her examinations of her visual experiences reveal, life is far from simple. In “Mrs Thrale” (1941), Woolf engages with the challenge of depicting a person whose long life was exciting though ambiguous. Woolf says that Mrs. Thrale rendered by Boswell in his sketches “contains

14 Goldman refers to Pethick-Lawrence who explains the impact and influence of colour symbolism, presenting “the purple, white and green as ‘a new language of which the words are so simple that their meaning can be understood by the most uninstructed and most idle of passers-by in the street.’” Goldman speaks of this language as a “‘new language’ of feminist colours” (Goldman 1998, 69).

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so much of Boswell himself” (Woolf 2011, 292) while in J. L. Clifford’s portrait of her, she detects layers of signification going “behind” and “beyond” Boswell’s snapshot of some moments only. Clifford foregrounds the subject, changing proportions, and covering larger vistas with facts not noted by Boswell. The result is a modern portrait that pieces together a different Mrs. Thrale. It “shows a very modern face, with her great vivacious eyes, her loose lips, and the deep scar over the mouth which, by her own wish, the artist has faithfully depicted” (Woolf 2011, 296). Yet, even with the “minute illumination,” she concludes, we cannot grasp the subject: “The more we know of people the less we can sum them up” (Woolf 2011, 292). In “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party” (1929), Woolf reintroduces the figure of Mrs. Thrale as a celebrity exercising the power of her personality over London society. She amplifies this image by echoing society’s praises and then confronting them with the reception of Dr. Barney, who announced them to be “surpassing rather than equalising the reputation” (Woolf 2010, 95). Mrs. Thrale’s eminence is yet further enhanced by facts about her relationship with the formidable Dr. Johnson. At the titular party, however, she engages in acts of mimicry of an invited artist which immediately drive her out of all the favours she ever enjoyed, including even those of Dr. Johnson. She loses all respect and admiration in one evening. Mrs. Thrale, in Woolf’s multi-angled explorations, constantly subverts those features deemed to expose a drastic change in behaviour. Her treatment of the subject opens space and a need for future character sketches, for new faces. Woolf considers also our changing ability to see things and to recognize their shifting significance. We ascribe different values to things we see. In the twentieth century, exposure to the extravagance and tumult of the world altered the human body and its capacities: “It is many ages now since we lost ‘the microscopic eye’” (Woolf 2011, 38), our concentration on detail. While “the heart grew, and the liver and the intestines and the tongue and the hands and the feet,” the organ of perception, the eye “shrivelled” (Woolf 2011, 38), she acknowledges. Attenuated in its powers and precision, the modern eye has atrophied. The “two great chambers of vision” (Woolf 2011, 37) can no longer fill us to the brim with the intensity that colours used to bring. Keeping the eye open, seeing things directly and largely, seeing everything worth seeing, independently, requires an effort only extraordinary beings can manage. Woolf praises the observant artists who used their eyes—like John Evelyn, for whom “the visible world was always close to him” (Woolf 1994, 94), and Dorothy

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Wordsworth, for instance, who “scarcely seemed to shut her eyes” (Woolf 1967b, 203) and, what’s more, “her eye never failed her; she noticed everything” (Woolf 2010, 483). Such abilities are very rare. Certainly, cinema in the twenties presented new, though not quite clear, stimuli. In the important essay “The Cinema” (1926), Woolf notes the centreless polyphonic character of the new medium: “All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos” with “fragments of all shapes and savours” (Woolf 1994, 348). The profusion and energy of momentary images, though unquestionably refreshing, produce both a curious and productive split between the eye and the brain which “are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples” (Woolf 1994, 350). While “the eye licks it all up” (Woolf 1994, 348), the brain reposes. The “ordinary” and “the English unaesthetic eye”—the eye Woolf is interested in—is the active organ, watching, while the brain “agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think” (Woolf 1994, 348). The eye delivers attractive morsels, sedating the brain; yet when it appears overwhelmed, the brain engages. Woolf is attentive to the nature of a wordless, disjunctive language of cinema operating on the eye and dipping into thus far unknown image reservoirs—giving us a heightened and quickened sense of reality, a surplus not obtainable in real life, both “directness and vaporous circumlocution” (Woolf 1994, 351) and, yes, beauty. Deleuze, familiar with this essay as Jason Skeet observes, thus captures this puzzling relationship between motion and cinema: it “puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the brain” (n.p.). Watching The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Woolf attends to its rapid movements. She also registers its new accidental qualities: “a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity” (Woolf 1994, 350). The new medium stimulates our “waking eye,” promising a radical change in imaging the world. Catching the shadowy appearance, Woolf ceased the new powers of the medium. In Michael Wood’s words, she encountered “the principle of montage” that was to become an organizational method of film (Wood 2007, 223), though at the time of writing the medium was still too nascent to be more thoroughly assessed.15 15 Though the theories of Bergson have been widely employed in interpretations especially of the Woolfian moment, it is not certain if Bergson’s ideas on the cinematographic mechanism of thinking were familiar to Woolf.

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Despite apprehension, literary approaches to visual art forms certainly elevate the appeal of literature. Revealing topographies of faces, paintings, and photographs Woolf always considers ways of capturing their contours and their lines as well as motion. Some faces are bound by air and vibrating colour in the impressionistic fashion so admired by Roger Fry and the Bloomsburians. Other faces, as if drawn from within, emanate solidity and distinctive lives. But it is language and in particular, as Gualtieri observes, the “dependence on everyday language” that “endows literature with a far wider appeal than that enjoyed by the language of pure forms and relations which was for her associated with modernist painting” (Gualtieri 2000, 136). In a fictional table-talk essay “Walter Sickert” (1934) a group of friends, word lovers, discuss the visible. They contrast changes brought about by modern conditions, changes from “an aesthetic to a functionalist appreciation of colour and images” (Gualtieri 2000, 134). Colours are no longer graded into one substance.16 Thinking of some insects which in the primeval forests in South America become “all eye,” one of the dinner guests wonders if by any chance somehow “we still preserve the capacity for drinking, eating, indeed becoming colour furled up in us, waiting proper conditions to develop” (Woolf 2011, 37). The pure experience of the “violent rapture of colour” (Woolf 2011, 39), one diner insists, can be recovered in picture galleries. There, becoming “all eye” is a short-lived sensation, albeit a tremendous one: “Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed and finally exhausted me” (Woolf 2011, 38). The eye could not continue pouring things in, they admit. It “shuts itself in sleep” and the subject ends up looking like a “shrivelled air-ball on a red plush chair” (Woolf 2011, 38). Diners become animated thinking of the picture show of portraits by Walter Sickert exhibited at Agnew’s.17 One of the guests negatively inclined to

16 Sickert, in Goldman’s valuable estimation, is “one of the first English artists to respond to French Impressionism, dominated English art before and after the first PostImpressionistic exhibition.” He proposed a new way of handling the colour and embraced “the new tendency to ignore traditional handling of light and shade” (Goldman 1998, 141). Sickert was valued by the Euston Road School of painters who found in his emphasis on content and narrativity inspiration for the development of their urban themes. Degas and Whistler both made him realize that the life about him and its careful observation was a subject worthy of his painterly art. Such interest was considered vulgar in his time. Woolf clearly admires Sickert’s shrewd powers of observation as well as his exploration of the possibilities of low and cool colours. 17 The exhibition took place in 1933.

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a change in an appreciation of colour believes that if we look, we can discover that though we have lost the “all eye” optics of our ancestors, we still have art galleries where we can reconnect with the “all eye” condition (Woolf 2011, 38). We lost it for good but looking at Sickert’s portraits we confront a tremendous site, a human face which is: “a summing up, an epitome of a million acts, thoughts, statements and concealments” (Woolf 2011, 38). No other painter can recreate its “complete and flawless statements” (Woolf 2011, 38). Sickert, a truly hybrid, cosmopolitan and hugely popular figure, they say, could see “the whole of the life that has been lived” in the face he paints (Woolf 2011, 39). While most biographers err because they try to attach irrelevant and false facts about a person, Sickert in possession of the divine “silent” medium “of oil and earth” looks at the face and paints it without compromises, without explanations, but as the speakers observe, with lots of stories for one to create around them, and lots of visions to recognize. Located in the silent zone of painting, Sickert’s faces are implicated into intimate histories of their owners. Speakers notice that the painter likes especially the faces “that have been lined and supplied and seamed by work, because, in working, people take unconscious gestures, and their faces have the expressiveness of unconsciousness – a look that the very rich, the very beautiful and the very sophisticated seldom possess” (Woolf 2011, 41–42). Noting the motion and idiosyncrasy of his human figures, features so dear to Woolf, they entertain themselves by traversing the “the sunny margin” of affinities between the arts, imagining Sickert as both a novelist and a poet, easily transgressing boundaries. Their conversation revolves around the belief in the subject; it does not produce any conclusive argument but, significantly, ends with a reading of Sickert’s photographed face. They invest it with imaginary qualities and features. They see Sickert as not just a painter, but as a man living life to the full.

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Reading the map of one human face,18 “probably the best painter now living in England” (Woolf 2011, 46), reinventing that life and that work, Woolf manages to orchestrate an extravagant biographical experiment fusing fragmentary views and multidirectional reflections into what she imagined would be consoling for us in years to come—a human face as an intersection of the private and public, the personal and the political. In a revealing gesture, the talkers “fetched a book of photographs from Sickert’s paintings and began cutting off a hand or a head, and made them connect or separate […] as if they had some quite different relationship” (Woolf 2011, 38). Their montage indicates a change, a transition towards ideas that negate synthesizing impulses. It is a significant gesture which repurposes portraiture to foreground the mediated character of the image. Sickert himself was producing what he called “echoes”—compositions rooted out from copies of the Victorian illustrated papers and, beginning in the early twenties, he proposed a novel approach to picture-making based on the use of his own photographs along with the black-andwhite press photography. It served as image sources for paintings.19 A 1938 photograph20 showing Sickert (and his wife) in his studio in Kent surrounded by a sea of newspaper clippings gives a sense of his immersion in this practice. In Woolf’s essay, transgressing time and space, print, not paint, provide impetus to render Sickert’s faces. The last highly suggestive image in which we see Sickert’s photograph and viewers hanging 18 In “The Humane Art,” the 1940 essay dedicated to Horace Walpole, Woolf hopes that despite the changing conditions of the map of Europe, there will be people who will “hang absorbed over the map of one human face” (Woolf 2011, 228). The face as the map is a potent image invested with a paralysing fear of changes, of blurring and erasure. Maps need to be scrutinized. The face of Woolf herself, as the efforts of numerous critics to collect and piece it together prove, has been an open project. Recently, Federico Ferrari and Jean-Luc Nancy, contemplating Woolf’s portrait by Vanessa Bell (1912), have concentrated on the potentiality an image of the face presents. In the writer’s blurred face in the portrait, they read a relation with the action not of writing but of knitting. They interpret the revealing image of Woolf knitting as inviting connections with motion but also the shifts of words towards images and faces which in turn define Woolf’s texts (Ferrari and Nancy 2020, 75). 19 As a painter, Sickert was also building his subject out of a mosaic of brush-strokes. His shapes were broad and summary. Woolf, like Fry, considered Sickert a good artist and must have been attracted to his practice of viewing subjects from unusual angles and placing them in unusual positions. Sickert must have fascinated her; he referred to himself as a “literary painter.” He was fluent in many languages and wrote on painting. He loved to dress up and appear in eccentric outfits and under different names. 20 Published by The Daily Telegraph.

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absorbed over the organization of its countenance convokes a community of amateurs who answer Rodchenko’s call to “crystalize man not by a single ‘synthetic’ portrait, but by a whole lot of snapshots taken at different conditions” (Rodchenko n.d.). This turn away from the sum in the essay form connects also with Montaignian patchworking. The “all eye” image makes us realize how appropriate face forms are for the essay as an amiable and mutable art. Woolf will focus attention on a photographic portrait of her sister Vanessa, an image introducing her reminiscences in the autobiographical Moments of Being. In this book, Woolf sees the character features that she considers to be the “best token […] of appearance”: “You see the soft, dreamy and almost melancholy expression of the eyes” (Woolf 1976, 28). Then, she allows both fanciful and straight readings of these features. She imagines the joy and promise her mother felt gazing at the photograph of her talented and caring daughter. And so the positive and intimate introduction to her childhood with her beloved sister is mediated through a photographic image with the ekphrastic hope and fear spread out for our examination. To be sure, Woolf celebrates the asymmetrical qualities of observation. The essays “To Spain” and “Street Haunting” are dominated by ambulatory activities and the spirit of adventure of a female observer. Leaving one’s familiar abode induces topographical and bodily liberation of the subject. The ramble into darkness heightens subjectivity and is therefore an experience to be celebrated. The person who leaves home, she says, leaves behind a shelter which “like a shell has made them hard, separate, individual” (Woolf 1988, 362). Departure for a foreign journey activates a sense of rapture. Its disintegrating appeal paradoxically proves both arresting—when even a trivial moment, gesture, and the “last scrutiny of passing faces” freezes, enhanced by the “solemnity” of the circumstances (Woolf 1988, 361)—and also de-regulating for the mind, when “the hours, the works, the divisions, rigid and straight, of the old British week” (Woolf 1988, 362) lose their precise contours. The precipice experience breaks not only sentences but also thoughts: they are “rent as a glove is torn by the thrust of a large hand” (Woolf 1988, 263). Walking imposes nourishing rhythm, “letting each face give me a buffet” (Woolf 2010, 276). In her essays concerning London, Woolf, the urban peripatetic spectator, goes for city walks alone to return home with a sense of having experienced something re-shaping and regenerative for her identity as a woman. In the nineteenth century, as Deborah Epstein Nord says,

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walking in the city with a sense of abandon was reserved for a “public woman,” as a fallen woman was then called (Nord 1991, 353). Thus, articulations of the female urban vision were informed by “a consciousness of transgression and trespassing” (Nord 1991, 366). The public role of the free urban stroller and conscious and controlling observer21 as celebrated by Woolf was a new experience for women in the early twentieth century. Roaming freely the streets of London, often in the evening, Woolf connects with the rhythms of the city, rhythms she writes into her autobiographical spaces.22 What better form than the essay, the art of wandering, to render that experience in which the destination does not lead to an argument but to visions, like streets “at once revealed and obscured” (Woolf 1994, 481) and to diverse autopsies, as Sir Thomas Browne, so appreciated by Woolf, identified the essayistic projects of selfassessment. Rambling, a metaphor “for thinking and writing,” observes Harris, was also a “principled opposition to the stern linear progress Lytton Strachey so admired in Edward Gibbon, whose readers ‘were not invited to stop and wander, or camp out, or make friends with the natives.’” It opposed, too, “the straight lines and rigid grids that had come to define modern design” (Harris 2015, 110). It is in Leslie Stephen’s peripatetic essay “London Walks” (1880) where Woolf found walking used as a structuring device through which to trace the pattern of thoughts. An expert walker, Stephen praises 21 Woolf’s dynamic eye is the eye experiencing the world directly. Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge/London, 1990) emphasizes the importance of changes in the psychology of vision and physiology of the eye, major changes in the perception of the conditions of subjective vision freed from bodiless dependence on the camera obscura which made it impossible for the observer to experience mobile conditions in which the body could be felt as participating in acts of observation. In the first half of the nineteenth century, geometrical optics was replaced by physiological optics resulting in the exposure of the ordinary eye. Turowski highlights Crary’s argument that visual perception is bound with the movements of the eye and the physical work of concentration, and thus, optics is connected with biology and psychology and optical experiences are celebrated for their diversity. Most of all, this perspective emphasizes the independence of the eye’s activity. Cf. Turowski’s reading of these developments in Crary and in Strzeminski’s ´ Theory of Vision (Turowski 2000, 247–248). Woolf in her proposition reaches what Crary felt was the triumph of abandonment of the body, with its pulsations and phantasms, as a base for vision. 22 In her Diary, she notes that “one must be young to feel the stir of it.” Unlike ladies in carriages with “powdered faces like jewels in glass cases” (Woolf 1984a, 48), she feels free and energized.

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rambles as promoting vivacious thoughts of “varying pulses” and moods (Stephen 1880, 224). London is “naturally swarms with phantoms,” writes her father, but relegates “this huge phenomenon” to a role of a “vast magic-lantern screen on which I may project my own fancies” (Stephen 1880, 224). In the centre and in control, Leslie Stephen, despite the declared mesoscopic predilection, discovers the power of unsealed vision. Rewriting the essay to probe an escape from identity rather than its certification, Woolf finds it necessary to adjust her father’s walking rhythm and its collisions to allow darker transmutations in the peripatetic art of the essay. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) proposes a selfrevision of a disencumbered self through scattered visual impacts. Unlike the lyrical J. Alfred Prufrock who hopes “to prepare a face to meet / the faces that you meet” (Eliot 1968, 1774), the “I” in Woolf’s essay decides to shed her face and venture faceless, “out of the house on a fine evening between four and six” (Woolf 1994, 481), between tea and dinner, on the banal excuse of needing to buy a lead pencil. And so, echoing Prufrock, she commands: “Let us go then and buy this pencil” (Woolf 1994, 489). The evening hour does not threaten with deserted streets but promises both the “irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow” and generosity from an anonymous crowd of trampers (Woolf 1994, 481). Unlike Prufrock, the “I” does not get distressed about oyster-shells in restaurants but, determined to embrace the “illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind” (Woolf 1994, 490), decides to break the covering of the old oyster of habit and familiarity and, thus unformulated, sets off to explore the central arteries of the city as a faceless being “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye”23 (Woolf 1994, 481). This parcelled “I” as an eye does not aim to “force the moment to its crisis” (Eliot 1968, 1775) either; in fact, it abjures face-to-face interactions, “only gliding smoothly on the surface” (Woolf 1994, 482), not probing deeper thoughts—“the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks” (Woolf 1994, 482). When it sees a figure of a woman, in a direct allusion to Prufrock, “accurately measuring out the precise number of

23 On the rich ocular iconography of the twentieth century, see: Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. In his introduction, Jay stresses that “the optic nerve with its 800,000 fibres is able to transfer an astonishing amount of information to the brain and at a rate of information far greater than that of any other sense organ” (Jay 1994, 6).

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spoons of tea” it approves for it is content with “surfaces only” (Woolf 1994, 482), with “bright paraphernalia” (Woolf 1994, 483), and occasionally with miseries. Responding to the visual extravagance of the city, she welcomes a difference, a de-regulation of ways of seeing which she hopes her readers—“we”—will enjoy as much as she does. In her departure is her gain; the “I-less” vision renders habitual perception impotent, it frees vision. The organic eye “floats us smoothly down a stream.” We know that it is “not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure” (Woolf 1994, 482). It is a very active producer of her own visual experiences. In Mieke Bal’s words, we can say that, “like the telephone wire,” the eye works “like a hinge between genres, world, times” (Bal 1999, 176)—like the visible and active turning point inviting motion and hinting at unsettling interventions. The adventure of the “I” as the disembodied eye may seem reductionist. After all, it offers a monocular point of view, and it engages not an empowered binocular taking of the world but a vision of the artistobserver as an organ with a strong predilection for indirect vision, for warmth and beauty, not for “obscure angles and relationships” (Woolf 1994, 483). But the Woolfian eye does not reference the one eye of the Odyssean Cyclopes that Joyce employed24 to satirize his own and modern-day citizens’ weakened powers of observation. The Woolfian “eye” does not sit stuck in the cave like an Homeric Cyclops. It is not “the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the master subject” (Haraway 1998, 194). It is rather an instrument in deviation designed to allow a momentary adventurous escape25 into the world that excludes binary divisions and intimacy, escape into “the heart of the forest” (Woolf 1994, 491), and into fullness and connectivity. It is a potent organ: “sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances” (Woolf 1994, 485). And when it emerges from darkness to light, again it rests, allowing the I to resume her work of writing. In a lamp-lit cozy room of familiarity, she restores haptic vision, touching her new pencil, feeling sheltered, and assuming a changed position. To give form and meaning to life, writing, she seems to be saying, is incompatible with monocular optics; it can be conducted in the light, furnished with the spoils of the visual adventure. What propels

24 See Ulysses, Chapter 12. 25 Walter Pater argued that individual experience “dwindled down” to perpetual

impressions leads to “weaving and unweaving” of ourselves (Pater n.d., 248–249).

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creation are flashes of understanding, chance phrases, surfaces, joys, and appearances caught with “the evening hour” when “we are no longer quite ourselves” (Woolf 1994, 481). The decision to leave the intimacy of her own room and plunge into the dark streets is an act of “inspired recklessness” (Jacobs 2001, 94), dethroning the agency of the optics privileging the face-to-face looking that Woolf identifies in Orlando with the male perspective26 and proposing new terms of vision. Karen Jacobs notices that in Blanchot’s analysis of Orpheus’ descent into the dark underworld, his inevitable gaze forms an aesthetic programme. Its “moment of transgression embodied by the look as the privileged route to artistic authenticity” is an act of resistance prohibiting the gaze and resulting in the slipping of Eurydice into “inessential” realms and the “scattering” or fragmentation of the self. Despite losses, Orpheus by so impatiently following his impulse to gaze safeguards authenticity (Jacobs 2001, 91–94). The “I” in Woolf’s essay, breaking the carapace of old habits, gains momentary freedom from binary oppositions and from herself. Such qualities as “unconcern” and “authority” that Blanchot attaches to the seeing Orpheus (Jacobs 2001, 94), despite obvious differences, pertain to Woolf’s gains as well. Emerging out of the darkness of the modern city, praising vision and its generativity, engaging in a perverse splintering and partial perspective, she proposes a way of seeing, a revisualization of the world that, nevertheless, resists mastery. The form of the essay, writes Woolf, “admits variety” (Woolf 1994, 216)—it is sundry. Brian Dillon finds that there is a shared “aggregate feeling” (Dillon 2017, 85) the essay as art develops to pulverize old cultural material and then to repurpose its heaps. The “particulate,” “unbounded” nature of the essay determines its uniqueness (Dillon 2017, 30). Dillon thus succinctly captures Woolf’s essaying: It all starts with a swirl of dust – cobra-like, in that amazing image – and Woolf’s prose mimics the action of the storm, exploding delicately into flurries of image, sound and metaphor. As so often in her writing, you have a sense of the world becoming particulate, everything airborne and efflorescent or friable, turning to dust, powder, shingle, sand. This writing seems to release spores. (Dillon 2017, 30)

26 In Orlando she writes: “The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned for his liking” (Woolf 1956, 188).

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Dillon so admires in Woolf the feeling for the infinitesimal, for her “glyphic dust motes and powdery shadows” (Dillon 2017, 30) that he proposes to take dust as the founding metaphor of the modern essay. On the other hand, he sees the essay as “the art among others of the sidelong glance, obliquities and digressions” (Dillon 2017, 12). He is interested in the “slantwise” perspectives tested in the essay. After Carlos Williams he says the essay is drawn to “multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness” (Dillon 2017, 15).27 A fragmentary prose form, the essay possesses the inner fragmentariness. Gualtieri observes that we should connect such an “unresolved collection” with “the pre-history of narrative” (Gualtieri 2000, 56). Its structure, subject matter, and alliances reveal the essay as a fragment, celebrating a state or moment of being while foreshadowing some provisional completion or continuity. Emphasizing the connection between the essay and autobiography, Gualtieri concludes that the essay offers the self as a provisional whole only and as a “conglomeration of moments of perception and reflection” (Gualtieri 2000, 45). The autobiographical “Street Haunting” shows that vision, like subjectivity, is multidimensional and partial. Related processes of fragmentation, dissociation, dispersal, explosive breaking into atoms and parts, unhousing, bursting asunder humanist incubators, manifest not some aberration, weakness or destruction, but positive norms of internal organization of the self , consciousness existing around many centres. The freedom of walking provokes relaxations and subversions. In “Street Haunting,” shedding the self, breaking the shell of comfort, and dismantling into parts are among the processes Woolf identifies with changes and with the stuff of life itself. Also, essaying a departure from masterful and appropriating face-to-face encounters, trying indirect practices that erase the unifying face, Woolf activates oppositional centres of consciousness. In science, disunifying processes initiate movement. If examined and extrapolated to their extreme, they produce a condition of arrest, even death. Because dispersal can render a metaphorical subject unable to produce sense, a positive, dramatic, even productive indetermination needs to be curbed by some force of cohesion. And so Woolf emphasizes that “circumstances compel unity,” that wholeness is necessary “for convenience sake.” That is why when returning home, the “good citizen […] must run 27 Dillon alludes also to Walter Benjamin’s references to dust motes and their place in bourgeois life and imagination (Dillon 2017, 83).

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his fingers through his hair” (Woolf 1994, 486), and a dedicated writer must get hold of her lead pencil. Probing ways to get to know and feel what in “Street Haunting” she refers to as “these thwarting currents of being” (Woolf 1994, 486), before a return to the socially constructed “I,” she makes openings for necessary partial visions. Breaking the unity of the face initiates a transformation of ways of seeing, a change that Donna Haraway calls “feminist optics” (Haraway 1998, 194). And splitting, she writes, “is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge” where the “split and contradictory self” is an agent of transformation, one who does not make claims to power but who is able to “construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history” (Haraway 1998, 195). Woolfian splitting marks a change in the terms of vision and in the personal essays, resulting in new orders of creative pullulating.

3.2 Debora Vogel: Cross-Sectioning and Transforming In her dealings with the stuff of life, with what Woolf celebrates as “the velocity and abundance of life” (Woolf 1994, 489), Debora Vogel turns to modalities of monotony and stillness. Her artistic imperatives offer new forms which prioritize polyphonicity and the abolition of hierarchies. Dissatisfied with the old forms, with the overindulgence in colourfulness and the beautiful bodies in art, debunking impressionism, she proposes to rehabilitate (one of her favourite words) “great life-lines” injected with monotony, and melancholy, understood as a “life-programme” and a “rehabilitated everyday” (Vogel 2017a, 394). After Hegel, whom she studied, in the centre of her aesthetics she places form based on laws of symmetry, wholeness, and balance. Vogel develops montages with motifs of mannequins and dolls, theatrical figures whose mechanical movements give a sense of inability, or refusal, to accept the biological principle of life only. The faceless figures in her work are as bold as they are foreboding (Fig. 3.1). There are many unexplored affinities between Virginia Woolf and Debora Vogel: both lived and died in an age that they felt was transitional for art, in times marked by profound and inexpressible changes, which they experienced with a growing terror and resignation. Woolf died by suicide at the age of 59 in 1941; Vogel, a Jew, was murdered in Lviv’s ghetto with her husband, son, and mother, by Nazis at the

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Fig. 3.1 Debora Vogel (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Lost painting. ca. 1929– 1930)

age of 42 in 1942.28 Both Woolf and Vogel were proponents of writing and also wrote literature for women and about women; both were active in the public sphere, giving lectures and talks, writing reviews, and sustaining networks of connections with intellectual circles. Like Woolf, Vogel frames her urban spaces with autobiographical references. While

28 Their bodies were discovered and identified by her friend Marek Włodarski [Henryk Streng]. In the Biały Bocian Synagogue [The White Stork Synagogue] permanent exhibition in Wrocław, her life is symbolically qualified as “unfinished.” See its online version on https://unfinishedlives.eu/pl/debora-vogel/.

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Woolf was the Bloomsburian, Vogel thought of herself as an “ambassador of modernism”29 (Vogel 2017a, 18); she was a member of Artes, a radical Association for Visual Artists30 in Lviv, and she was also associated with the avant-garde Kraków Group. For Woolf and Vogel, life was a major critical and aesthetic category. Though their attitudes to “actual” life were distinct, both embraced the creativity of naked facts, and both intensely explored ways of forming life. For Vogel, the life principle was based on mutually dependent permanent and impermanent biological and social principles. Life was anonymous, nonindividual and, as she observed paradoxically, “crucial as a means for shaping life” (Vogel 2017a, 380). Vogel and Woolf were gallery goers, wrote on visuality and emphasized vision, blending territories of seeable and sayable, thematizing selected paintings and photographs, and inviting correspondences on the verbal and visual in their texts. Both engaged in theoretical debates about art and artists. Woolf praised poetry above any other genre of writing; Vogel was a poet, writing her radically avant-garde “white words” fusing poetry and painting, in Polish and in Yiddish.31 To clarify their ideas, they used the form of the essay, in which they created and recreated the topographies of their selves, writing about places they visited but also cities they knew—Woolf about London and Vogel about Lviv. Woolf felt at the centre of things: Vogel consciously re-frames herself and her innovative figures away from linguistic and aesthetic centres, gravitating towards local settings. Like Woolf, she embraces the appeal of the everyday, inflecting change as a defining condition of modern life. As for the Surrealists, so for Vogel to “changer la vie” is to decry routine. In many ways, she is a “separate” writer (Szymaniak 2006, 155). Isolation and homelessness are for her prerequisites for “seeing well,” as she writes in a letter to Bruno Schulz, her fiancé she was not allowed to marry (Schulz 2008, 264). Vogel wrote in Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and

29 Karolina Szymaniak, Debora Vogel’s translator and devout critic, says that Vogel was active in writing theoretical and analytical articles on Yiddish modernism. She did not declare its ties to any particular artistic direction, thinking of modernism in terms of a fluid phenomenon (Szymaniak 2006, 208). 30 Also known as Association of Artists and Designers. Their exhibitions “decisively influenced the artistic landscape of the city” (Bojarov 2017, 130). 31 Vogel published two volumes of poetry in Yiddish: Tog-figurn (1930) and Manekinen (1934).

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German. Surprising even her closest family32 who spoke German and Polish at home, she turned to Yiddish, the language she was learning as an adult, motivated possibly by a desire to maintain the polyphonic potency of her work and a rigour of expression that a learner of a foreign language always strives so hard to achieve. Responding to Debora’s rigour with unease, Rachela Auerbach, her good friend, regretted encouraging her to use Yiddish (n.d.). The attachment to Yiddish is sometimes interpreted as an isolating tendency informed by Vogel’s distaste for conformism (Bednarek 2015, 84). For this reason, perhaps, her modernist montages Acacias Bloom, “the sad book which describes my fate” (in Schulzforum n.d.), were published in Yiddish (1935) to be followed (almost immediately) by her translation into Polish (1936). The condition of self-imposed marginality that Vogel’s use of Yiddish strengthened revealed her relations to the centre and periphery, also to the peculiar circulation of versions of centres in her work. A declaration of her identity, Yiddish does seem like a “relict” language “chosen by her to write about the disappearing world” (Cielem˛ecka n.d.). Though multilingual, she insisted on expressing herself in a less familiar medium, anchoring her highly innovative ideas in a “minor” language and in local settings.33 It should be added that her relationship with German was also complicated. Passionate about German culture and language, she was teaching these subjects with growing despair. Vogel found the city as liberating and refreshing as Woolf did. She believed that even a casual conversation about certain streets and images could produce art. Lviv, unlike metropolitan London, placed somewhat remotely on the border between West and East, was in Vogel’s estimation a “provincial” city.34 Vogel, confirming in a Polish publication the failure of its Jewish Quarter to “assimilate into ‘people’” (Vogel 2017a, 286), to 32 See the forward by Karolina Szymaniak in Acacias Bloom (Szymaniak 2006, 150). 33 Szymaniak comments on differences in writing styles. Vogel’s texts written in Polish

are “relatively lighter” than those written in Yiddish, especially in the earlier essays (Szymaniak 2006, 236). Szymaniak explains also other far-reaching consequences of Vogel’s choice to write in Yiddish. While it marginalized her position, Yiddish potentially enabled publication in many places outside Lviv; it opened doors to a readership abroad, though paradoxically, in the history of Yiddish literature, says Szymaniak, Vogel remains almost unknown (Szymaniak 2006, 215–217). 34 Lviv, as the editors of Montages dedicated to Vogel’s contribution to radical artistic movements show, was a tense though incredibly vibrant and important city “on the map of modernist architecture and photography, a site for Polish quasi-Surrealism as well as

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become more open and pleasant, insists on the validity of the periphery category: “there still exist a centre and a periphery – elasticity and stiffness, life passing in quieter waves, as though flattened” (Vogel 2017a, 279). She writes in the autobiographical essay “Lviv’s Jewish Quarter” (1935)35 that its Jewish places, like Jewish quarters “the world over,” though close to urban centres, always instinctively turn away from the centre. They remain peripheral, “lying off to the side of life’s thoroughfare” (Vogel 2017a, 279). Sad and solemn, and in their “domain of the chintz and cheapness of life,” alien, only vaguely redolent of “Berlin’s Alexanderplatz or Paris’s Montmartre,” these places are alive but “in a Jewish mode” (Vogel 2017a, 288). The “bastard” streets, the twisted houses and their “brutal everyday” (Bojarov et al. 2016, 281) display the naked ordinariness, though we are to notice that, for example, in one wellconcealed flat Jacob Ehrenpreis kept writing striking essays about “fates and labours hidden from the wider world” (Vogel 2017a, 286). Other rooms of her quarter ooze the monotony of sentimental streets. The frequently evoked Karmelicka Street “designed for purposeless walking” and “fit for the tired and the disappointed” (Vogel 2006, 46–47) attracts the perfection of monotonous life matters. Its beauty parlour, “Salon de beauté,” though, teases the walker out of monotony with a promise of a metropolitan metamorphosis. Vogel shared with Bruno Schulz the belief in advantages of the “proximate perspective […] discarding the familiar distance to things” (Vogel 2017a, 393). Walking the provincial streets in Vogel’s work is an action that liberates thoughts and allows them to take shape. In Karmelicka Street, both charming and sentimental, a nameless walker, like a shrivelled autumn leaf, shows a face covered with dust of sadness and sweetness (Vogel 2006, 47). Their particles solidify into some synthesis and some sense of destiny. And glinting façades of buildings, plastered here and there with layers of incongruous paint, provide much-valued static arrangements.

modernist thought – philosophy, mathematics, literary theory, music, theatre, and film” (Intro., Vogel 2017a). 35 It was first published in Swedish in Judisk Tidskrift 8 and in 1937 in Almanach i leksykon z˙ ydowstwa polskiego.

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Other cities she knew well and wrote about,36 Vienna, where she went to school and spent World War I, and Paris, which she visited, offer similar banality, but they also possess the quality of all-defining “certainty and constancy” (Vogel 2017a, 285) so essential for stimulation and growth. Vogel writes in a letter to Schulz that “we need multiplicity” (Schulz 2008, 241) and that “foreign cities must become our recreation” (ibid). She travels in Berlin. In the well-settled Stockholm, in her essay “The City Without a Care” published in Polish in 1929,37 unlike in inland cities, she finds a magical connection to a steadying wavy breath, a presence which she expertly evokes from paintings by Scandinavian artists. Visiting this city after defending her PhD thesis on the cognitive significance of art in Hegel and Józef Kremer, Vogel isolates particulars. She notes a “round tank of thick greyness” and “the flatness of white” (Vogel 2017a, 357) soaked in the juiciness of the colour and ordinariness of its inhabitants. She sees people “insatiable with colour” (Vogel 2017a, 357), shaping their lives to the same ageless, all-too-regular melody of the sea waves. The “colourless physiognomies” of these people are reflected by the sea. Watching its birds, she notices that they smile. And in this facial expression Vogel detects something of importance: “one cannot call the confused smile that sometimes settles on such a face by any term we know; it is unlike any smile we have known. It denotes something along the lines of an agreement for which words are unnecessary, a gesture suffices” (Vogel 2017a, 360). Cross-sectioning of the gesture and earlier situations, she universalizes: the half-frozen static city comes to embody space in which to experience the fullness of life. The impersonal smile of pleasure, absent in the Lviv montages, invites a synthesizing vision of an alternative universe. 36 Turowski brings to attention the article by Janusz Maria Brzeski titled “Miastaktóre czakaj˛a na swoich rezyserów” ˙ [Cities Awaiting their Makers] published in 1932 in Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Turowski 2000, 283), where the author recommends a departure from a stereotypical perspective in order to see the city in its wonder through such techniques as montage and fantastic forms. These techniques involved the use of different kinds of lenses, changing angles, allowing for close-ups, the capturing of movement, and changes of frames. To montage, he attributed the ability to create a world according to the rules of association, contrasts, narratives, and metaphors, developed under the influence of press photomontage (Turowski 2000, 283). This article is one of many publications at the time which highlight the need for a change of optics and forms of representation of the city. 37 It was originally published as “Miasto bez trosk” [City with no Concerns] in the Jewish political, social, and cultural journal Chwila, n. 3696 (1929), 2.

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Vogel’s twelve short theoretical essays, collected in the beautifully illustrated bilingual English and Polish 2017 publication Montages: Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City, introduce Vogel’s ideas of the city and modern metropolis. The montage is as an artistic procedure, an economical solution Vogel finds most appropriate for the “tendency of our time” (Vogel 2017a, 396) and the pressure of “facts,” so defining of the thirties. Among her evolving montage methods and phases, Vogel includes the principle of “the lyric of cool stasis”; crosssectioning (“a stable scheme of gestures and situations”) (Vogel 2017a, 394); simultaneism (coalescing heterogeneous situations and experiences commending “excessiveness and selection of elements”) (Vogel 2017a, 394); all according to a clear principle, rapid changing of views, shifts from part to whole, and repetition. Vogel was interested in diverse forms of montage including photomontage, literary montage, and inventive montage. In 1934, she proposed a theory of photomontage, and in the years 1936–1938,38 she worked on ideas about literary montage. Her montage essays follow the publication in 1935 of her collection of montages Acacias Bloom, discussed in this chapter. Vogel aligns photomontages with lyrical dimensions, separate from its literary equivalents—reportage and fact-montage. She recommends montage as “a point of departure for building an image and pattern of ‘facticity’ or ‘focus’ of presentation” (Czekalski 2000, 152) in order to mobilize these potentialities for a new autonomous painterly art. Vogel expected that photomontage could gradually be freed of its dependence on the cumulative effects produced by juxtaposition of photographic images to be transposed into quasi-photographic or autonomous painterly creations, as it did in the work of her friend Henryk Streng.39 Photographic iconic imagery she treats as a convenient reservoir of what gradually became the object of valorization: “the worldly element” (Vogel 2017a, 306). In “The Genealogy of Photomontage and Its Potential,” at

38 Szymaniak explains why Vogel’s photomontage in Acacias Bloom departs from those published later in the press (Szymaniak 2006, 157). 39 Czekalski quotes Piotr Łukaszewicz’s review of Henryk Streng’s work Family from 1931 with “fragments of faces as if pasted from cut-ups of photographs” and examples showing a strong dependence on, and influence of, photographic techniques in his paintings (Czekalski 2000, 152).

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first published in the journal Sygnały (1934),40 she introduces photomontage as a genre originating in 1924–1925 in the visual arts, a period which saw the publication of Polish montages by Mieczysław Szczuka. She considers him the form’s pioneer, and to whose theoretical formulations in the journal Blok, she alludes to as nodal points of origin for the genre. Vogel’s distinctive account entails rewriting the history of montage by seeing its origin in Lviv and resisting the temptation to address the impact of earlier realizations of the Dadaists, the direct and economical photomontages of Soviet Constructivism, and the Czech avant-garde images combining poetry and photography. Vogel identifies photomontage as a “symptom of the tendency toward realism in art ” (Vogel 2017a, 311), but she does not allude to the transformation of montage from a modernist aesthetic instrument into an ideological tool which it had become by the mid-thirties. Eschewing a single source of perception, she embraces its geometrical order, its raw material including “unambiguous, sharp, one-dimensional” photographic materials as well as painterly ones.41 Like Szczuka, she praises its potential to render “simultaneity of multiplicity in space” (Vogel 2017a, 313). Because of its economy, montage is most appropriate for rendering the pressure of “facts”42 and for fostering qualities responsive to the dynamic rhythms of the modern metropolis. Vogel believes montage can work as an equivalent to poetic structures, condensed, associative, and athematic in character. In “Montage as a Literary Genre” (1936/1937) and “Literary Montage: An Introduction” (1938), she allows experimentation with bold metaphors and free association. Additionally, she constructs compositions out of situations which share elements taken out of such materials as newspaper cuttings, quotations from street songs, bits of conversational items, and rhetorical phrases. She validates a construction according to a “logical 40 In Sygnały Włodarski published his theoretical text on “facto-realism” in 1936 and Vogel published her texts on art (Czekalski 2000, 156). 41 Czekalski says that Szczuka defended the ideal economic “code” of photography, emphasizing its “precision, speed and low cost” (Czekalski 2000, 7) and used it to create utopian motifs. Montage was for Szczuka an artistic form, a construction that always had “rationalizing” and “economic” connotations (see: Czekalski 2000, 66–69) and one that was accessible to a larger audience. 42 Szymaniak mentions also that Vogel always distinguished very carefully montage from the popular reportage. Her initial label for the form of montage was “stylization in a reportorial manner” (Szymaniak 2006, 163), but over the years she became more and more negative about a concentration on “naked” facts.

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principle: the same logic of different situations allows them [sic] to be united into a whole” (Vogel 2017b, 395). The situations are treated “realistically,” by which she means “stylization in a realistic manner, that is an excessiveness and selection of elements, with calligraphic precision in treating the particulars” (Vogel 2017a, 395). “Mechanical rhythm” in montages works as the guarantor of connectivity. Her critically acclaimed prose work Acacias Bloom [Akacje kwitna], ˛ 43 as Bruno Schulz remarks, is not Vogel’s experiment but a necessity imposed by her creative organization (Vogel 2006, 192). This unique collection of literary montages was initially received as an experimental, even philosophical novel, though a novel that is also a chronicle of episodes, a treaty, diary, to a degree a legend, a set of chapters and commentaries. The original version of Acacias Bloom consisted of three parts: “New Legend,” “Fall,” and “Acacias Bloom.” The “New Legend” includes short montages titled: “De-masking Mannequins,” “New Raw Materials Are Necessary,” “New Mannequins Are Coming,” “A Chapter About Mannequins: To Be Continued,” “A Few More Types of Dolls,” “Beads: A Lyrical Intermezzo,” “Apples, Oranges, Lemons,” “Plates and Glasses,” “Mountains, Trees, and the Sea,” and “In the Center of Life.” In “Fall” section, there are: “The Shoddy Floods the World,” “Calico Wells Up,” “Intermezzo: Coffee,” “The Fall’s Follow-Up: Adventures Are Sought.” In “Acacias Bloom” part, we find three montages: “The Wheel Comes Full Circle,” “Acacias Bloom …,” “Autumn Conversations,” and “Potato Fields.” The 2006 edition contains another collection of twenty-one montages published in 1933 under the title “Flower Shops with Azaleas” and a collection of eleven short episodes appearing under the title “Building of the Railway Station.” Acacias Bloom’s nonhierarchical orderings do away with “man-woman” and “subject-object” binaries (Bednarek 2015, 102) and make it possible to deal with what Vogel considered the hardest concept of all—that of the great event of life itself. Vogel aims to enhance the perceptual experience of life in multiple orchestrations. With montages, emerging out of the most important phenomena of Lviv modernism, she can construct the legend of the city. Vogel constructs montages in which to capture symptomatic paradigms of life and lifeless life. Designating as her goal the “polyphonicity of 43 Acacias Bloom has not been translated into English. All the translations from this text are by the author.

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life” (Vogel 2017a, 396), Vogel, as Schulz observes, gives expression to some “degradation,” some “resignation from individuality,” some curious “acceptance of mechanism, some unification with determinism” (Vogel 2006, 190). When applying the logical principle to her literary montages Acacias Bloom, Vogel coalesces diverse situations and experiences through multitudinous associations with the word “life” and the appearance of the concept of life qualified as simple, broken, unsolved, used, and abused. The concept of life is never individual or subjective. It appears in diverse collocations (“the sense of,” “the season of,” “the evening of,” “the bill of,” “the kitsch of,” “to return to,” “to order,” “to get through”) and it collides with diverse particulars tinted with omnipresent monotony (“little lost things of life,” “evenings of life,” “people who appropriate our lives”) and death. The excess of references to life creates not only a defined rhythm but also a strong sense of a commanding idea that there is never enough of life and living and that non-living is also living. Resonating the affect of resignation and hope, montages in Acacias Bloom multiply life and its dialectics, commending excessiveness of matter into geometrical form. Extracts of her montages appeared in the journals Inzich and Sygnały.44 Vogel’s intentions and suggestions were often violated in these publications by breaking the unity of seemingly disconnected elements and facts and thus disabling the apprehension of their hybrid design, made up of descriptions of the urban atmosphere with fragments of conversations, songs, news, notices, clichés, and illustrations. Finally, the montages were composed between 1931 and 1933 in Yiddish, published in Yiddish in 1935, then, as noted, re-arranged and translated by the author into Polish and collected in a three-part volume Acacias Bloom, published in Polish as Akacje kwitna˛ in 1936 and in 2006. “Acacias Bloom” in “New Legend” section of Acacias Bloom begins with the announcement of the demasking of mannequins, stirred with strings of longing. Vogel assembles these privileged inanimate humanshaped figures of banality to look like both amplified real-life models in shop windows and out in the street, formed, smooth and finished with the

44 Extracts of Acacias Bloom were published from 1933 to 1939, printed in Lviv in Vogel’s Polish translation. The journal, “devoid of any agenda, shaped a vision of Lviv as a multicultural city” (Vogel 2017a, 256).

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contour,45 and like dummies—matter-of-fact, impersonal, “dividuated” figures. Subjects with powerless vision, they appear without visual agency and without subjectivity and yet their apparent involvedness with Lviv, she insists, belongs to a category of life. They maintain the rhythm of stasis Vogel reviews as a fundamental basis for art and life of any value. She returns to mannequins in the volume of poetry Manekinen (1934) where suffused with longing, they are dolls rendered precisely with eyes in autumnal colours, and faces of “surprised” porcelain. In the barber’s windows, they feature as old or naked torsos with glazed eyes and with faces that “become flat sheets of glass- / squares of translucent glass like days” (Szymaniak 2006, 277; translation mine). In Acacias Bloom, too, their hypnotic influence rests on the absence of the messy implications of human subjectivity. Asking about life-experience, trying out static material relationships, Vogel finds them germane to the category of life not yet-written. In the visual economy of the interwar years, mannequins were omnipresent in the streets, and in galleries, they were developed from figures of consumer culture to complex figurations of women’s bodies “fixed before the fleeting, distracted gaze of the metropolis, while reinforcing the sense of anonymity in city presence as spectacle without identity” (qtd. in Kinnahan 2017, 100–101). Before Surrealists, visual Dada artists developed an interest in the automata and mechanized dolls linked to mannequins. Their mechanical, “stereotypical movement” and their anonymity were often associated with “fatalism” (Turowski 2000, 394).46 In the First Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton writes that the “marvellous is not the same in all ages; it participates obscurely in some 45 In the excellent exhibition The Face organized by Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden in February 2018, window displays mannequins featured as heads made from plaster, celluloid, glass, wood, and wax, mirroring the ideals of beauty and fashion trends, advertising and communication, as well as the art of design, and economic and social history. Organizers of the exhibition emphasized that in the first decades of the twentieth century manufacturers of window display mannequins initially looked to examples from Greco-Roman antiquity, folk art, and the doll industry. The features of the heads were shown as both accessories and design objects. Mannequins from the 1920s exemplified diverse social role models like the urbane femme fatale, the virtuous Gretchen, and the dandy. 46 Mannequins have not lost their appeal. More recently, the “mannequinization” of the human figures of Maeterlinck and De Chirico, the faceless masks of the Über-marionettes of Craig and Picasso, and the dolls of Bellmer (Turowski 2000, 296) are acknowledged as main forecasts of our post-human resources.

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kind of general revelation of which only the particulars reach us” and shows that the modern mannequin is such a revelation “capable of stirring the human sensibility for any length of time” (Breton 1924, 12). Pierre Mabille, the editor of a Surrealist-oriented Minotaure, defined the marvellous as a poetic tension enabling an escape from aesthetic stereotypes and logic-driven existence. When thinking of Marc Chagall’s “marvellous” mannequins, Vogel praises the clash of beauty and the affect of resignation, even terror. Like Chagall’s art, Vogel suggests, such figures remind about “the great and heavy responsibility to life” (Vogel 1937, 20). Eugène Atget, a master of urban photographic documentation of mostly deserted streets of Paris, captured such marvellous figures, for example, in a 1912 photograph of a Paris window showing rows of headless and limbless corseted mannequins. This photograph was singled out by Surrealists for their publication of La révolution surréaliste. Placed in the context of a dream, the decapitated mannequins, in Benjamin’s reading of the value of Atget’s influential mannequin photographs, mark the critical moment of change in portraiture: the passing of the aura surrounding the representation of human figures and the emergence of new fantastical possibilities. For Vogel, they had to do with cool stasis. Vogel shared with her friends—Bruno Schulz and Henryk Streng— their interest in the presence of mannequins in the context of Lviv art and Lviv culture. For Schulz, however, mannequins were not “marvellous”; they are empty constructs summoned for one gesture only, for one short moment; their cruel man-made characters did not forecast any future (Schulz 2014, 67). Schulz treats his own mannequins as objects symbolizing the decline of culture, most of all its commercially-driven soulless sensuality. Their ontological status cannot be the same as that of humans. Disagreeing with Schulz’s conception, though drawing on some of his language, and looking in the direction of the “marvellous” potential of innovative figures in the art of Henryk Streng, Vogel defines “mannequiness” as a quality of stillness and monotony, a quality she will seek in her idea of a new being in control of the chaotic processes of civilization. Her mannequins are allusive figures, still objects delineated with hard geometrical contour and local determinants, the utopian lyrical

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emblems of life itself.47 Their “ideal” human form anticipates a new phase of history. Vogel invited Henryk Streng48 (Marek Włodarski) to complement the Polish edition of Acacias Bloom 49 with 15 montage-like drawings, facto-montages, consistent with her work’s general conception.50 In unpublished reviews, she identifies Streng’s simplicity of geometrical forms, the forceful and strong lines of figures—mechanical humans, as well as his portrayals of passive and active forms as all being alive. Piotr Słodkowski argues that though Streng was very receptive and frequently adapted and circulated such motifs as, for example, the figure of the hairdresser and the barber’s shop, familiar in Cubist and Surrealist aesthetics, his figures acquire new significance when rendered in connection with Lviv locations, in the context of a larger theme of a town understood as “lyrical and ‘universal sphere of a Jewish biography’” (Słodkowski 2019, 150). Valorization of the culture of the body, of physical labour, and craftsmanship were some of the aspects of modernization of life in Lviv’s Jewish community (Słodkowski 2019, 147), and Streng expected that his montage-inspired idiom would express new patterns of facticity (Fig. 3.2). In the drawing “Heads” from the “Florist with Azaleas,” Streng frames over twenty female heads with stylized hair in patterns of lines suggesting rhythm and harmony. These qualities, as well as the repetition of lines and curves, according to Vogel, define the category of life for Streng (qtd. in Słodkowski 2019, 137). Streng’s drawing features in “A Treatise on Life: Chapter One” of Acacias Bloom. There Vogel presents a “Salon de Beauté,” where a well-combed hairdresser attends to the thick waves of his faceless customers’ hair, one after another, to discover among these perfectly sculpted waves of hair—a life quality. The place is all important as it is within its frames that such a revelation appears, and that life

47 This interest is mentioned in Marek Włodarski/Henryk Streng (1898–1960). Mi˛edzy centrum a peryferiami. [Marek Włodarski/Henryk Streng (1898–1960): Between the Centre and Periphery (Sopot 2013)]. 48 Streng changed his name to Władysław Włodarski, a change which illustrates his

unstable identity in Lviv. Like Vogel, he was fascinated with the exploration of its cultural codes. 49 In 1936, this important work appeared in Polish, translated by Vogel and published by the Rój publishing house. 50 Streng also illustrated Vogel’s collection of poetry published in Yiddish under the title Tog-Figurn (Day-Figures 1930).

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Fig. 3.2 Heads (Henryk Streng [Marek Włodarski]. 1929. Muzeum Narodowe, Warszawa)

indeed is meaningful. Streng’s heads with regular lines of hair correspond with Vogel’s precise detail: “every three centimeters a wave” (Vogel 2006, 41). This detail resonates also in other montages. Vogel’s lyrical prose and the visual rhythm of Streng’s drawing frame an ordinary event in which the geometry of hair waves, like other geometrical solutions in Vogel’s and Streng’s art, invites a rehabilitation of anxiety assuaging forms. The assertion about the presence and value of life is made by the hairdresser, a figure like a waiter and manicurist, always exposed and doomed to other lives on the other side of the window, discovering things long since discovered. By comparison, Louis Aragon’s hairdressers from his The Peasant of Paris (1926) are sensuous facilitators of success in erotic life, preparing heads and faces for the rituals of natural selection. Surrealists like Aragon focus on the blond hair of faceless female figures. Woven like fabric, electrifying with luminous reflections, the hair, not the face, triggers fantasies of bodily pleasures and other phantasmagoric visions. The face has no place in the Surrealist realm of attraction.

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Streng was for a short period a student of Fernand Léger in Paris and shared his teacher’s interest in precision and directness, also in details. “Before the epoch of the cinema,” wrote Léger in 1933, “we did not conceive the individuality of the fragment” (Léger 1965, 99). The advent of cinema contributed to its “extraction” and “personalization.” Streng’s master wonders if anyone had been able to notice a leg before they saw it in a film, shod and hidden under a table. Captured by a camera, such a leg could act emotionally on the viewers the same way a face could (Léger 1965, 199). In “The Human Body Considered as an Object,” Léger declares that “at this moment, to the mind of the modern artist, a cloud, a machine, a tree are elements as interesting as people and faces” (Léger 1965, 133). Dethroning the theme in art, Léger proposed to treat such human features as the face objects of art—to concentrate not on their sentimental value, but on their aesthetics (Léger 1965, 98). And as an object of abstract art, the face could become an oval shape with no hair but with added shapes such as make-up, eye, and ear. In “The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart,” a film episode,51 though, hair plays an important role in attracting the interest of a male mannequin. Shop window mannequins would bear similarities to aesthetic faces (Léger 1965, 89). Acting on such intuitions, Streng broke the human body into geometric figures in quasi-surreal arrangements; he shifted the focus from the face to heads, de-individuated types. In Streng’s narrative method, Vogel admires the anonymity and the stasis of such worldly fragmented elements of Légerism (Vogel 2017a, 365). Most of all, she praises his lyricism steeped in the aura of “provincial” Lviv, his use of local place names, graffiti, and other street signs. While at the time Western artists frequently used figures from comparable signs and from town fairs, the signs and also mannequins were there to suggest a way to escape from life, an alternative realm. For Streng and Vogel, Wojciechowski argues persuasively, the aura of the pageant was not an exotic or fantastic form of escapism but a component of the “extraordinary” ordinariness of the everyday in Lviv (Wojciechowski 1981–1982, 14), a modernist motif domesticated. It seems that the still and melancholy mannequins, and the urban primitive, belonged as much to Lviv’s lived settings as it did to Lviv’s aesthetic constructions.

51 Mannequins became popular also in film. Alberto Cavalcanti’s Nothing but the Hours (1926) plays on the ambiguity of these figures.

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Combining abstract, wavy lines, vagueness, and heaviness while also accentuating tough reality, Streng practised a new concept of realism, of art modelling the real. At its heart, Streng places his quality of “the mechanical automatism of the human figure” (Vogel 2017a, 317). It is brought together in “awkwardness and resignation” (Vogel 2017a, 365) and later with striking sadness and sorrow. Vogel saw in their “mannequiness” forms defining his inspirational Constructivism: Especially memorable […] is an awkwardly smiling head with two plumcoloured, smooth, and circular eyes, and beside it three plums, stylized, steely, rounded, and wise like the eyes beside them. In this and similar compositions the ‘intellectual’ principle of balanced contrasts becomes the worldview by which the boundary between matter and person has been naturalized, and the person has become a mannequin subject to the unavoidable rule of life. (Vogel 2017a, 365)

Clearly, Vogel identifies strongly with the physiognomies of “mannequiness” in Streng’s work, keen on their blind torso, awkward golems, and their shared “dull, hard movements” (Vogel 2017a, 366). Deploying the logic of movement, their bodies undergo subsequent metamorphoses into blocks, fragments, and phantoms. In the urban settings of Acacias Bloom, Vogel depicts such an anonymous mannequin figure “the shape of a person with the function of a machine” (Vogel 2017a, 394). A faceless doll with wax and porcelain skin, with perfect hair, glass and steel jewellery which coalesce all forms of materiality to exhibit frustrated spectral presence. Heavy, made-up, dressed in tight corsets, such dolls roll about through the pavements of Lviv. Vogel writes that there are many incarnations of these dolls, and female ones made out of such materials as porcelain and paper and male ones, of iron and sheet metal. For example, in the “Spring and Hat Boxes” montage from “Flower Shops with Azaleas,” she connects the movement of the falling cardboard boxes, paper, hat, and confectionary bags “like pink leaves of chestnuts on the grey June streets” (Vogel 2006, 18) with the movement of female torsos. We observe how in waved hairdos, ancient eyeless torsos; eyeless on the wave of meaty greens and hosts of diverse, amazing and delicate matters which were happening all around and which were to pass. (In the ancient torsos, in the busts from hair salon windows and in the female breasts from streets, blind

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hollow eyes look out for life; they are stretched for an unknown shiver of happiness and their unknown potentials). (Vogel 2006, 18)

We hear of some arrangements made for these deceptive figures, but the porcelain torsos with breasts were unable to receive life in any way other than with new dresses (Vogel 2006, 18). The artificial beads and other metamorphic attributes with transformative bearing suggest connections with evolving relations, retroactive and projective. The excess of textiles, elaborate and outlandish, enhances the quality Vogel (like Woolf) identifies with life as always multiform. Textiles also suggest texts, textures, entanglements, and arrangements—the realm of art, necessary for thinking through life. Vogel rehabilitates these visual shapes as things of life. Like Surrealists, Vogel employs mannequins and dolls as figures, variants of face, enmeshed in materials, anticipating a new era of artificial shapes and exciting monotony, a new formed and balanced life to come. Its priceless material assumes such forms as hard lines, squares, and circles. It is stiff and sad like an “uncertain, lost mask from the rotten pinks and greens (back then the mask of Toulouse-Lautrec presented anew by Jules Pascin)” also like “the face redolent of the pear-shaped face of Picasso’s women with round, lazy eyes” (Vogel 2006, 68–69). Its soul may reside only in: “the black, grey, brown drop of an eye” (Vogel 2006, 70). This is the material world where life is “light and not obliging” (Vogel 2006, 89) and where in the centre a reconditioned face, a wry mask, detached from its originating form, represents monotony and stillness—the qualities Vogel identifies with the soul of the world. Unlike the Woolfian London of lights and promises, the city in Vogel’s montages is a theatrical stage with advertising neon lights and panels, street signs, materials of all sorts and inanimate figures bearing similarities to humans only in shape; its forms fixed in schemes of minimal gestures and situations. Freed from individual preoccupations, the city is a compositional realm of intersubjective identities. Its organization, as she herself writes, “constitutes fatalism” (Vogel 2017a, 394). The aesthetic face forms of this equalized and levelled world, like other elements of urban space of modernity, freed from old sentiments and patterns, rehabilitate the necessity of such a component for our understanding and appreciation of life. Elsewhere she writes that anxiety drives us in the direction of the irrational of art, and art alerts to the “necessity to ‘live’”—in a sense of the banal and shoddy but perpetual ballad (Vogel 1937, 20).

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Yet, Vogel frequently escapes the city for the private space. In her poetry, essays, and short prose works, Vogel challenges established functions and proposes a way of thinking about rooms as an “antidote” to modern malaise (Vogel 2017a, 293–294). In a poem “My Flat,” the speaker goes out to go back, again, to the “chilly pearl shell of my flat.” In “The Apartment in Its Psychic and Social Function” (1932), a theoretical exercise in applied aesthetics, rooms contain “elements of certainty and balance,” “boundary and measure” against open space with its “elements of the chaotic and the baseless” (Vogel 2017a, 293). The recession to the new type of interior, to its cohesiveness and concision, is driven by a metaphysical need for protection, but above all by the “spectre of external catastrophes” (Vogel 2017a, 300) brought by progress: “never before has mankind been so run down as today” (Vogel 2017a, 300). The dread of the threatening urban rhythms makes us desire a certain type of shaped and shaping space, compressed and manageable but with “possibilities and adventures” of the vast “space without shape” (Vogel 2017a, 294). Vogel postulates that a room of one’s own carries international and multiple temporal features which offer a personal landscape. Defined by the life rhythm of its inhabitant, the room or apartment of one’s own should be organized and measured and its modernist features always harmonizing with the desires of its inhabitant. Vogel dismisses contemplation of rapidly changing processes of perception, a subject so dear to Woolf. Referring to the theoretical deliberations of two architects: Hans Poelzig and Franz Löwitsch, and the painter Władysław Strzeminski, ´ she proposes Geometrism as a new architectural style capable of ensuring the centrality of objects, a steadying and purifying location for an unstressed individual, and a site of regenerating kinetic potentials.52 A room carries a potent social function, furnishing in us “an instinct for a certain way of sensing things and ideas” (Vogel 2017a, 300). Woolf, famously acknowledging in 1929 the necessity especially for women to possess a room of their own, focused not on a desirable protective balancing of architectural elements of aestheticized interiors, but on the rich creative forces

52 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh shows that these concerns were current. Benjamin, Stepova,

and El Lissitzky expressed similar interests in dismantling “contemplative behavior” towards, for example, art works presented in modern interiors. In his Demonstration Rooms, El Lissitzky defended the conception of the room as space helping to “make the man active.” He showed an interest in “human bodily motion” and activating the viewer (Buchloh 1992, 56).

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of women who “have sat indoors for these millions of years” and “overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar” that reflect “that extremely complex force of femininity” (Woolf 1977, 95). At the same time in 1930, in the noted essay “Street Haunting,” she writes about the “the solitude of one’s own room,” its oppressive confining character created by familiar objects mirroring “the oddity of our own temperaments” as well as “the memories of our own experience” (Woolf 1994, 481). Though it is always good to return to the sheltering atmosphere of one’s room, without the adventure of the streets, without reality, a woman’s room can become a stifling, sealing “shell-like covering” (Woolf 1994, 481). Woolf thus seeks, and trusts, the energy, the vastness, and the polyphony of the world outside. Vogel does not share Woolf’s cognitive and psychological optimism of the liberating world outside but, like Woolf, she secures a room to affirm its uncharted possibilities. She relates the room to a possibility of thinking about a subject in a state of stasis, exempt, and vitalized. Out in the city, passers-by follow different rhythms and live interrupted lives. In the lifespace of a room, a refuge of imagination, the subject glimpses certainty and closure. Arranged with desired elements, condensed and comforting, the room’s “cool stasis” allows new re-imaginings: An apartment’s expression is like the expression of a human face, which can be reduced not to the structure and effects of individual elements (nose, mouth, eyes, brow – these can be quite similar in several people), but to their conceptually elusive positioning, their arrangement, their composition. The face of the apartment, too, results from an arrangement executed instinctively, in which (under ideal conditions) the very space of the room has already adapted to it in advance. (Vogel 2017a, 299)

The withdrawal into the sanctum of the private room, a place endowed with face-like expressivity, undoes the chaos of the world. A place of containment, open to inspection, invites mental dismemberment which can reveal “different rhythms grating against each other” (Vogel 2017a, 294), their individual character, their contents, tensions, and stresses. Attention to arrangement, which Vogel always highlights, makes us more receptive to unexpected associations. This critical essay credited to “Dr. Debora Vogel-Barenblüth,” and appearing in Przeglad ˛ Społeczny, a journal dedicated to social work and aid for orphaned Jewish children in Lviv, carries a strong conviction about the need for countering menacing

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forces in modern civilization. Modernist aesthetic solutions, abstraction and stasis, as exemplified in the room of subjectivity, assuage the loss of bearings in the world. The face does not disappear from the view but in fact, like a complex geometrical form, reminds about the most significant role of composition in life: “Becoming accustomed to the geometric element enables one’s surrender to the entirety of the work of art” (Vogel 2017a, 300). Vogel’s appeal to abstraction, informed by the theories of Wilhelm Worringer,53 is based on a devaluation of the individual characteristics of experience and an escape from biological perception into aesthetic forms and abstract thought. Thus, the bounded apartment with its geometrical shapes, recognizable and identifiable forms, appears as a frame of the not-self freed from the authority of the external world. Its meanings are inseparable from the processes of creativity. Michael Levenson captures this modernist trope of embodiment when he writes that “the room is the body’s body; the next vessel beyond the surface of the skin: the rectilinear volume correcting for our soft organic curves, the carapace of personhood” (Levenson 2007, 5). For Vogel, its imaginative casing is the name for the necessary corrective and protective forms. Woolf, as presented in the first part of this chapter, tests splintering and pullulating to launch experiments in her impressionistic autopsy. The reliance is not on formal compactness, but on essays and short nonfiction pieces—in Brian Dillon’s words, forms “with ambitions to be unformed” (Dillon 2017, 32) which in the work of Woolf and Vogel lead to an increase in the degree of focus. Both authors concentrate on particulars, and both avoid a binocular appropriation of significant vision centred on “looking the world full in the face.”54 Going beyond the visible and

53 Wilhelm Worringer saw abstraction as an enclave of stability in the world of flux. Karolina Szymaniak observes that Worringer’s influential Abstraction and Empathy (1908) proposing two distinctive types or impulses in art—three-dimensional and abstract—argued that they were expressions of distinctive attitudes to the world. Vogel knew his writings and embraced his ideas (Szymaniak 2006, 90–93). Rudolf Arnheim, who places perception, along with conceptualization, among the higher-order cognitive practices, addressing Worringer’s appeal to the abstract/geometrical creative styles as ways to escape external reality and naturalistic art, highlights the limitations of such a dichotomy. In his view Worringer, biased to perceptual cognition, failed to see abstraction as a necessary component of all art (Arnheim 2004, 224). 54 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Woolf 1956, 188).

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secure “I,” like Woolf, Vogel proposes strategies of re-figuration, defacement, cross-section, and increase as ways of resisting habitual perspectives and conventional hierarchies. Virginia Woolf and Debora Vogel, early twentieth-century female peripatetics in their subjective forms of writing, vindicated and validated the value of the fragmentary and the provisional across different art forms. They applied aesthetic innovations of splitting and cross-sectioning to address their versions of forms of life and to probe new ways of writing it. Above all, engaging with the urban rhythm, responding to the dynamics of modern civilization, their rambling and creating, their ambulatory ubiquity, despite fundamental differences, produce innovative perspectives de-regulating and thus refreshing “the thing”—the human face.

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Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Accessed 19 February 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2398. Rodchenko, Aleksandr. “Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot.” Accessed 21 August 2022. www.teoria.art.zoo.com/against-the-syntheticpor trait-for-the-snapshot. Schulz, Bruno. Ksi˛ega listów [in Polish]. Edited by Jerzy Ficowski. Gdansk: ´ Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2008. Schulz, Bruno. Sklepy cynamonowe [in Polish]. K˛ety: Wydawnictwo Marek Derewiecki, 2014. Schulzforum. Accessed 20 August 2021. https://Schulzforum.pl/pl/sciezki/ debora-vogel. Skeet, Jason. “Woolf Plus Deleuze: Cinema, Literature, and Time Travel.” Accessed 1 November 2018. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue16/skeet.html. Słodkowski, Piotr. Modernizm zydowsko-polski. ˙ Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski a historia sztuki [in Polish]. Warszawa: PAN, 2019. Stephen, Leslie. “London Walks.” Cornhill Magazine 41 (1880): 222–238. Szymaniak, Karolina. By´c agentem wiecznej idei. Przemiany pogladów ˛ estetycznych Debory Vogel [in Polish]. Kraków: Universitas, 2006. Tomkowski, Jan. “Wst˛ep.” Polski esej literacki. Antologia [in Polish]. Edited by Jan Tomkowski. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 2018. Turowski, Andrzej. Budowniczowie s´wiata. Z dziejów radykalnego móodernizmu w sztuce polskiej [in Polish]. Kraków: Universitas, 2000. Wojciechowski, Aleksander. “Introduction.” In Marek Włodarski (Henryk Streng), 11–12. Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1981–1982. Wood, Michael. “Modernism and Film.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 217–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Vogel, Debora. “Literary Montage (an Introduction).” Translated by Benjamin Paloff. In Montages: Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City, 393–396. Łód´z: Muzeum Sztuki Łód´z, 2017b. Vogel, Debora. Akacje kwitna˛ [Acacias Bloom]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2006. ˙ Vogel, Debora. “Marc Chagal” [sic]. Jednodniówka. Zydowski Uniwersytet we Lwowie. Lwów, 1937, 20. Vogel, Debora. Montages: Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City. Łód´z: Muzeum Sztuki Łód´z, 2017a. Vogel, Debora. “My Flat.” Accessed 1 June 2022. http://unfinishedlives.eu/pld ebora-vogel. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Grafton, 1977. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol. 1. London: The Hogarth Press, 1967a. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol. 3. London: The Hogarth Press, 1967b. Woolf, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday. New York: Dover Publications, 1997. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt, 1976.

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Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1956. Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. Oregon: Harvest, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1920–24. Vol. 2. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984a. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1936–41. Vol. 5. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego: Harvest Book, 1984b. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1919–1924. Vol. 3. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1928. Vol. 4. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. Orlando: Harvest Origins, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929–1932. Vol. 5. Edited by Stuart N. Clarke. Boston: Houghton, 2010. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1933–1941. Vol. 6. Edited by Stuart N. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. The London Scene. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.

CHAPTER 4

False Faces of Władysław Theodor Benda and Edward Gordon Craig

4.1

Introduction

Masks, as Władysław Teodor Benda Władysław Theodor Benda defines them, are “coverings for the face, taking various forms, used either as a protective screen or as a disguise” (Benda 1946, 11). More than ever, the world has become full of protective masks, exposing a threatening vision of the world and a threatened condition of the human in the world. Manifesting shared global fears of the invisible enemy, such utilitarian masks are produced without careful delineation of the face. They preclude contact, unlike masks carefully crafted for the face to create an illusion of readiness for an exchange. Promoting their significance, Benda posits that such masks are capable of transformation, for “when a person, no matter how sophisticated or naïve, confronts a masked man, that person will be mystified” (Benda 1946, 14). Despite the general dissolution of mystery as a graspable commodity, Benda proposes that the mask can act on its maker, wearer, and viewer in many thrilling ways (Fig. 4.1). Władysław Teodor Benda (1873–1948) and Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) are the two major proponents of mask resurgence in the twentieth century. Though they brought very distinctive values to their praxes, both creators propounded the transformative qualities of masks. Their intimate relations to masks, not as passively representative surfaces

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_4

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Fig. 4.1 W. T. Benda in the company of masks (Photograph from The ´ Greenwich Village Follies, 1920. Private collection of Anna Rudek-Smiechowska)

but as sculpted objects—zones of intersections—deserve fresh attention. The previous chapters mapped active ways artists of the twenties and thirties—Witkacy, Woolf, and Vogel—engaged with face forms as media of subjectivity,1 and I have demonstrated the efficacy of face forms in changes, disfigurations, and transfigurations which these authors employed to probe and discover new aesthetic and imaginative relations for their subjects. In photography-minded life-writing of the interwar 1 In his theory of subjectivity, Guattari’s speaks of such figures as “shifters of subjectivation,” as fragments with existential function, able to bring about changes in “auto-referentiality” and “auto-valorisation” (Guattari 1995, 19–20).

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period, the ruptured, mimicked, and fake face forms become open coordinates for disclosing life-experience and for imaginative re/compositions of a self. In this chapter, attention to masks highlights a different facet of the engagement with face forms for the sake of autobiographical performances. Closely allied with the face, the mask will be showcased as a form of “imaginative agency” (Brant) inviting an exchange, while autobiographical performances by Benda and Craig, so much concerned with masks as figures of relationships, will be discussed in terms of their preoccupation with mediation and the materiality of media. This chapter examines how in the lives of these two mask proponents, the Polish-born visual artist Władysław Teodor Benda and the English theatre designer and artist Edward Gordon Craig the face features as a field of conscious projections. They were both learned men and producers of art objects. By harnessing, among other forms, photography and lifewriting, they mixed with masks everything they came to recognize about beauty and spirit, turning masks into instruments of change. In his journal The Mask, Craig writes in favour of the masks: “As veils for the face, hiding its weaknesses and revealing what is in the soul of the poet, masks have always seemed to us a gain” (The Mask 1912, no. 4.4, 272). Benda, whose masks were considered among “the greatest contributions to the modern ´ 2016, 240), writes, in a typically modest stage”2 (Rudek-Smiechowska manner, of the mimicry achieved with their help and of the empowering source of pleasure masks bear. Benda’s life coemerged with the practice of mask-making. Examining the territories of these authors’ mask work, I will bring together two closely related points of focus. The first concerns the aesthetic devaluation of the human face in the work of these artists; the second addresses the production of the auto-enriching relation to the world through engagement with “quasi-objects”3 —false faces. I will show how in the lives of Benda and Craig false faces are agents, and in Guattari’s understanding, consistent and persistent “operators” of change with the

2 Rudek-Smiechowska ´ quotes these words of praise by a journalist from The Washington ´ Post (“About Those Benda Masks,” September 18, 1921) (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 347). 3 A term borrowed by Bruno Latour from Michel Serres to highlight the distinctions between inanimate and human subjects. The world is full of “quasi-objects” and “quasisubjects.” Bill Brown, who brings this particular point to attention, argues that modernists struggled to integrate inanimate humans and things (Brown 2001, 14).

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capacity to crystalize segments of subjectivity (Guattari 1995, 19). Clare Brant’s concept of imaginative agency can help relate animative powers of masks to an awareness of the self investing attention and care in them. In the subject-mask relation, the expressive instance allied to the face will be of special importance. Craig, additionally, imagines masks engage in a network of exchanges purposive for the future. Masks shaped Benda’s and Craig’s ideas about life and self.

4.2

The Face on the Mask

The proliferation of masks and mask-like prostheses in the twentieth century emerged out of historical shifts and transformed specifics of culture, highlighted here as transitional phases of concerns with selfhood. From being a marginal sub-genre, an aid in the process of artistic creation, in the period between 1880 and 1910 the mask was revived to become a formally emancipated, “transgressive and ineluctable” (Papet 2008, 11)4 object. As such, it could be used in the network of exchanges to act and receive activity.5 One of the main reasons why masks “mesmerized”6 modernists was their ambiguity. Appealing to dissimulation, the magical, and the fantastic while also probing possibilities of sincerity and authenticity, modernist mask artists sought a recognition of liberation from the identity of the face. Masks carried the potential to loosen the rational mastery of the self, to invite polysemy, to entertain reveries through the alignment with faces of others, to create possibilities of self-invention, to indulge in disfiguring re-compositions, or to assume a changed gender, age, bearing, and physique. The possibilities of remaking enabled by the mask are

4 Edouard Papet in his analysis of the representation of the mask in visual arts of the twentieth century, quotes Paul Vitry’s article from 1903 in which the author predicts that the mask as a modern piece of art will become an isolated fragment capable of connecting and disconnecting freely in any space (Papet 2008, 11). The identity of a mask as a mutable object transgressing, for example, the boundaries of high and decorative art was strongly opposed by Craig. 5 Like Latour’s actant, “something that acts or to which activity is granted” (qtd. in Brant 2019, 151). 6 The word “mesmerized” carried a special set of meanings in the twenties and thirties. I will refer to it in later parts of the chapter in connection with transference of energy between subject and object.

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opened up, for example, in the acclaimed Man Ray’s surrealist photograph “Black and White” (1926). This dialectical image of the face of a Western woman appears with an eastern mask representing a female head in which the subject and the static material object playfully align the identity of the mask with the identity of the face, though in the composition of the image the primary role is given to the mask. Each requires an onlooker, presenting “a performance of a presumed authenticity that is itself already a performance” (Batchen 2021, 12). Kiki de Montparnasse, actress, mannequin, and dancer in one, and the African mask do not oppose each other but rather reflect each other so much so that we can say that Kiki’s face becomes her mask, heralding the potentiality of the conjunction of opposite states of being, possibly, an incarnation of “a new modern femininity, less the type and more the elusive one” (Bajac 2008, 223). In the transitional decades of the twenties and thirties, “women of two faces,” writes Quentin Bajac, entertain challenges to received notions of sexual, racial, and social identity, especially in numerous autobiographical texts, exposing the lives of masks (Bajac 2008, 223). Masks became frequent accessories in portrait photography much praised by other Surrealists,7 who were focused on the individual unconscious and the invisible spheres reachable through masks as figures of alterity. They paved the way for potential doppelgängers, projected as shadows and as foreshadows. They “spoke of hybridity, metamorphosis, the blurring of boundaries between human and animal, human and machine, the animate and the inanimate. They were associated with fluidity of identity, with acts of mimicry in which the mimic becomes that which she or he imitates” (Henning 2017, 168).8 7 Henning stresses that masks belonged to the iconography of Surrealism. Their photographs, she argues, expose “the animate-inanimate, insofar as they are inorganic objects that substitute themselves for the once-animate, photographed in such a way that they appear alternately as real faces and as lumpen things” (Henning 2017, 13). 8 It is well established that the experiential figurations of metamorphosis drive the main concerns of the avant-garde artists. Unmasking hidden primitive selves but also the hidden truths of the time appealed to Dadaists like Paul Outerbridge who made use of masks in his hyperbolical but also provocative art engaged with the modern media culture. Benjamin presents adherents of Dada as artists exercising various shock techniques designed to “assail the spectator.” Their effects based on frequent changes of focus and presence of tactile elements “promoted the film” and, like the film, were meant to distract, not to facilitate contemplation (Benjamin 1969, 238). Hugo Ball himself wrote that what fascinated them about masks was “that they did not embody human, but larger-than-life

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In the modern period identified by Jean-Luc Nancy with the questioning, or “the collapse of the possibility of a face-to-face of the ‘self’” and with the remarkable “renewal” of the “desire that seeks a face to look at” (Nancy 2018a, 86), masks settle as a recomposing resource of expressions and qualities. Masks want to be seen. They conceal the face while attracting to a “behind the mask” (qtd. in Grabher 2019, 35). The photography critic Francis Hodgson goes further proposing that the mask can “redouble” face’s “compelling force to be viewed” (Hodgson n.d.). The mask does not negate the face but, paradoxically, precariously strengthens its overwhelming appeal, which is why Benda emphasizes that the mask “must be more impressive and interesting than a human face” (Benda 1944, 15). Considering artistic processes involved in mask creation, Benda defends the aesthetic surplus as a means of stimulation for the casual viewer. The attraction and sense of the mask emerge from the face, from what and how it both attracts and opposes the face. Masking is “intrinsically challenging,” though, notes Hodgson, evocatively referencing the receptive attraction: One part of photography’s appeal to most viewers is a strange element of voyeurism. Not that all subject matter is looked at with sexual eyes, but that there is a recurring pleasure in being able to take more time to view with intensity and concentration than is afforded when looking at things in vivo. Look carefully in the real world, and you are always out of

characters and passions” (Ball n.d., 64–65). He proposed that new masks could allow access to conditions bordering on madness. Marcel Janco made Dadaist masks out of the modern materials like newspapers, burlap, cardboard, wire, and cloth. They looked like oversized faces and were used as props for performances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Hugo Ball writes also in his diary Flight Out of Time (in an entry for April 24, 1916) that in the masks “The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible” (Ball n.d., 64–65). One other example we can use here is George Grosz’s skeleton mask he wore in Berlin. It conveyed a violent protest against the brutality of World War I. Also in Arbeitsjournal as well Kriegsfibel, Bertold Brecht, as Didi-Huberman writes, was very attentive to masks. He gathered masks of soldiers in conditions of extreme heights or extreme cold, and gas masks of civilians in war conditions. Brecht collected death masks, before having his own body set in a mould (Didi-Huberman 2011, 157). Under the theatrical, technologically-informed conceptions of Oskar Schlemmer, masks returned to liberate dehumanizing fantasies of the artist inviting changed modes of participation from the viewer. Turning to the Congo masks, Picasso discovered not technology but new spiritual simplicity. In Emil Nolde’s “Mask Still Life” series, for instance, masks hang in the painterly setting as objects imbued with strong subjective emotions germane to agency.

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time before you can have fully grasped what you see. Look carefully in a photograph and things (physical and associational) appear which seemed to have been hidden. That produces a pleasure in seeing: it provides its own rewards by revealing more or revealing otherwise. Masks both repel that kind of scrutiny and invite it. I defy anybody not to look harder at a mask than they do at a face. It’s almost as if the mask carries within itself the invitation to unmask if you dare, to unmask if you can. Look hard enough at a mask and it might just dissolve. (Hodgson n.d.)

Highlighting the visual pleasure of a specific type of image, the critic stresses not the identificatory messages of the mask, not the “territorialities” of the face but the catalysing relevance of the bifurcating experience achieved through the application of the mask. He charges it with the capacity to free vision by orchestrating changes in perception. An image, Jean-Luc Nancy highlights, “is that with which we enter into a relationship of pleasure” which is connected with “the attraction from which it emerges” (Nancy 2016, 77). For him, the mask is a face looking at us and drawing our attention, drawing us into relationships through its representation and through the world it evokes (Nancy 2008, 13). Offering itself to our gaze, the mask, the philosopher intimates, fakes something, often in order to reveal something. And this divergence excludes self-enclosing and mere presence for and by itself. The power of the mask resides in its identifiability: the mask presents a type or an idea. When moulded, when designed and adjusted for the face, however, it reveals something other, pulling us into relationships such as that of a “lesson, suggestion, temptation, hopelessness, certainty […] challenge, invitation, charm, rebuke, role or task assigned, verification, waiting for a response, trustworthiness, and engagement” (Nancy 2018b, 99–100).9 With each mask, there is a promise of breaking open the exclusivity and singularity of the face. The face on the mask is an illusion “not because it fakes something but because it is made: produced, elaborated, developed, formed, pressed, coloured, decorated” (Nancy 2018b, 99–100). Independent of other identifications, it presents itself as an “unfathomable presence,” a sort of “original masquerade” (Nancy 2008, 14). On its back side, or underneath it, there is nothing except that which forms it. It is identical to itself and this is yet another reason why we look at it so penetratingly. We seek something but find what, elsewhere, Nancy refers to as 9 Unless otherwise indicated the translation is by the author.

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“surplus enigma” (Nancy 2018a, 84) which for him conceals no mystery, nor does it represent anything. We always consider the mask front-on; it “goes dead in profile” (Hall 2000, 33). The frontality appeals and resonates beyond words. The mask, “always ‘presented’ to the audience,” and for some audience (Hall 2000, 34), however, remains closed. Its lips are still and it remains silent. Thinking about these attributes while reconstructing the landscape of the face in his projects, Benda insists on this disunion: “masks and living faces in juxtaposition clash and kill each other” (Benda 1944, 57). Denying the mask compatibility with speech, he attends to the lines, to the rhythm and harmony of surface features but guards the frontier between silence and speech.10 Looking at the art mask, we look at a closed face, a stitched, sealed, and held together secret, a permanent form of being, impossible in the form of a living subject. Absence of eyes and mouth is an impulse Nancy identifies in connection with portraiture meant to “make us hear a speaking before or after speech, the very speaking of the lack of speech” (Nancy 2016, 73). He means here the rhetorical acts of speech like mimicry and gestures, poses, and looks. And set in motion, the mask projects surprising moments of agency. When donned, varying movement and position of the masked head and the neck in relation to the rest of the body create alternative and psychologically surprising expressions: “the moment a person puts on a mask, he changes into another being; his body seems to change in appearance, its proportion and character, and the onlooker immediately forgets his real features, even if the masked person is an old friend” (Benda 1946, 14). Benda stresses the enchanting way the mask communicates without speaking: […] as various masks are put on the same person his figure will seem to alter. Its proportions and character become in the eyes of the spectator the figure belonging to the mask, and this is most convincing when the figure is nude. An ugly face makes the whole figure appear ungainly, just as a beautiful physiognomy will bring to our consciousness its beauty and grace. (Benda 1944, 14)

10 On this point see Max Picard’s The World of Silence. Pickard writes about the human face as the ultimate frontier between silence and speech. The silent man does not rise above the image of his face, above or beyond the landscape of his face.

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He has in mind his masks which are so lifelike that they can be mistaken for living faces. But he also extends the claim to all masks as silent but dynamic constellations. The emphasis on physiognomy is important, as it highlights the disciplining function of the mask. As a form, it permits control over the expressions it presents. A heterogeneous surface, the mask exudes silence also through an allegorical appearance of the living and the dead. Masks express silence of those whose features are imprinted on them and whose physiognomic features may belong only to the past. Karl Kerényi proposes to address the reversals: the mask makes it possible for the living to become the dead, and the dead living (Kerényi 2005, 648). Considering the connection to the past and to the unknown, Nancy veers towards the “funerary” aspect of the mask. Because of the presence of that which extends beyond the identifiable—and which we can refer to as the “archetype” of the mask— the mask “soars on the absence” (Nancy 2018b, 100–101). Absence in this case, however, is connected not with disappearance or mourning but rather with non-living. Nancy emphasizes that the mask possesses immobile, hollow and stiff features and so it remains an inscrutable, impermeable, and indifferent presence (Nancy 2018b, 101). The mystery and silence of masks attracts both Benda and Craig. Benda likes to look at his masks in the studio, hanging undisturbed and fixed. Craig, developing a theatre of shadows and unknown forms, glorifies motionless stone-like mask forms. For him, these silent inorganic forms can precipitate a new realm. Looked at, the tenacious, non-living qualities of masks transform into ephemeral things. They appear as such in photographs of Benda’s private rooms and in Craig’s visions of his theatre space. Motionless, they attract a contact that is also distinctive. Rilke, reflecting poetically on the silence of dolls, decides that it is “its established form of evasion.” After all, “made of useless and absolutely unresponsive material” and functioning “in a world where destiny and indeed God himself have become famous mainly by not speaking to us” (Rilke 1994, 33), the mask, like the doll, communicates otherwise. Though silent, like the doll, it is capable of returning the attention and tenderness for careful treatment. A loving relationship to things, the poet believes, works reciprocally; things can be grateful for a tender handling. The poet marvels: “how such treatment breathes new life into them,” and how it can “endow them with a firmness of spirit” (Rilke 1994, 29). Benda suffuses his masks with lifelong loving care. Craig sees the noble presence of masks as vital for the future of the art of theatre and of life.

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And indeed, in return for the attention both artists provided, masks under their intense care grew into imaginative life resources. Both Benda and Craig express concerns about what they identify as a symptom of modernity11 —the loss of respect for and the extinction of masks in European culture. Benda laments that “our civilized world has neglected and forgotten the use of masks” (Benda 1944, 14). Determined to breathe new lives into masks, and spirit into the especially spiritless art of the theatre, both creators set to recast the roles and functions of masks in conjunction with other arts by shaping, drawing, painting, and photographing them. In Benda’s and in Craig’s personal narratives, the issues of engagement with the materiality of masks often take precedence over the work of telling a story. They emphasize how in its formation, the mask goes through the form of the face—if it is a mask made to represent human or animal physiognomy. The maker isolates from the surface of his model’s face, for example, “the bone construction of the face, the tenseness or relaxation of the facial muscles and the quality of the skin” (Benda 1946, 15), eliminating some traits, intensifying certain peculiarities, and enhancing expression. Breaking the unity of the face, its re-composition results in changes of harmonies, counterpoints, and rhythms of the facial surface. Benda and Craig write about masks and also collect masks—not as popular decorative and mass-produced objects, false faces emblematic of degradation of culture, but as autobiographical objects of participation, real false faces. In an authoritative article on the mask Benda wrote for Britannica, he defends its enchanting use as a source of metamorphoses for its maker and wearer as well as for the spectator. In archaic societies, attention to such a special object served as a prerequisite of “‘participation,’ a collective subjectivity” (Guattari 1995, 25). Benda develops methods of circulating his masks in private and public circles, always to appreciation of all parties involved. Craig repeats after Nietzsche that 11 German ethnologist Andreas Lommel shares the idea that masks “degenerated in Europe into a mere object of use: to disguise or to protect” (Lommel 1981, 215). In his Masks: Their Meaning and Function, he traces anthropomorphic and zoomorphic masks across all continents to discover relationships between masks, mask-ceremonies and diverse world orders. He is of the opinion that unlike the men of the primitive world who readily gave shape and form to life, and who were thus enriched by these representations, modern Western men have excluded from their sphere of interest death and, with it, interest in the unknown so crucial for the development of mask-making. Peter Hall also laments that “We moderns are very patronizing about masks” (Hall 2000, 24).

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“there is so much goodness in craft” (The Mask 1910, no. 2.12, 164) and that, quoting Goldoni, the mask “is the finest commodity in the world” (The Mask 1912, no. 5.1, 97). Europeans, he is convinced, have lost the wisdom and the tradition that informed the mask use in ancient drama when “faces were held to be too weak and disturbing an element” (Craig 1930, 102). He laments that Europeans have also lost the audacity to “invent and use new masks for a new type of Drama” (The Mask 1926, no. 12.4, 163). Additionally, the cinema-mindedness of the contemporary viewers worries Craig as territory alien to sacred matters and dependent on slavish adherence to ready and limited facial expressions. The cinematograph, as he refers to it in The Mask, can be ghastly and dangerous for the art of the theatre but also for the landscape of the mask. That is why he so vehemently defends it against other arts: “Everything that is profound loves the mask” (The Mask 1910, no. 2.12, 164). Craig also embraces the Nietzschean idea of the subject as a depthless series of masks. As the maker convinced of his distinctive condition of the mind necessary to advance a change in culture, drawing on his spirit of the poet and theatre reformer, he becomes an advocate of the new “world mask,” inspired by great oriental and ancient masks made by artists, developed in conjunction with movement, and charged with ethico-aesthetic impulses. For Craig, and also for Benda, the sense of the mask emerges from its power to act and to attract. Craig believes that it comes to resemble us and marvels “what fun and what fancy we can make within its shadow” (Craig 1919, 110). Benda expects the mask to deceive and to impress, and, through its beauty, to mystify. Against all odds, both believe that masks can shape ideas about life and can make the experience of the unspeakable and the unknowable accessible. Masks are their terms for being in the world.

4.3

Benda the Face Former

How did Benda masks become consistent and persistent attractors in his life? And how did he tether his own life to them? Władysław Teodor Benda worked in many fields; Jadwiga Daniec lists “sculpture, portrait and mural painting, illustrating magazines, books and advertisements, creating posters, souvenir programme covers and decorative panels, designing stage scenery and costumes, and in the art of theatrical mask-making. His other activities included teaching and writing” (Daniec 1994, 22). With the help of his aunt Helena Modrzejewska, Benda came from Poland to

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the United States in 1899.12 He took what he learned in Szkoła Sztuk Pi˛eknych in Kraków, in Heinrich Strehblow Art School in Vienna, and in Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco and Chase Art School and Art Students League in New York, and developed it into a half-century long artist’s career. His work belonging to the “Golden Age of American Illustration” acquired a distinctive character. Critics tend to agree that as an illustrator Benda perfected a characteristic controlled line, integrating the rhythmic qualities of Art Nouveau with the geometric Art Deco. Unlike other illustrators fashioning the “freshed-faced ‘All American Girls,’” writes Ronald Naversen, Benda rendered women whose faces “exuded a mysterious foreign sensuality” (Naversen 2010, 36). The designator “Benda woman” came to be identified with the new ideal of beauty represented in the fusion of Art Nouveau-like gracefulness and the attractive seriousness of expression. Thinking of such faces, Fred Taraba, who prepared a catalogue following the 1902–1903 exhibition Exotic Drawings and Theatrical Masks by W. T. Benda, praised him as a “master of lyrical beauty” (Taraba 1993, 104). Mark B. Pohlad writes about Benda women as “the elegant, cat-eyed, eastern European Venuses” (Pohlad 2009, 19). Before photography replaced this popular art in the early 1940s, Benda’s covers for all major magazines and illustrations in newspapers13 “reached almost every address in America” (qtd. ´ 2016, 85), bringing him recognition and the in Rudek-Smiechowska financial stability needed to pursue his mask projects (Fig. 4.2). At the age of 41 in 1914, he made his first paper mask for a masquerade ball. It was created by gluing together variously shaped pieces of heavy wrapping paper. Benda then set to make it more permanent and preserved its shape in more durable materials. By 1918, he made twelve more masks. 12 In 1911, he became a naturalized American. 13 Anna Rudek-Smiechowska ´ lists over fifty titles, including the most popular ones like

Life and Hearst International. According to the critic, Benda’s career as an illustrator was ´ 2016, 78). She also records at its peak between 1910 and 1914 (Rudek-Smiechowska illustrations for thirty-six volumes of various book publications (with the notable example of Willa Cather’s My Antonia) and sixteen World War I and World War II-related propa´ ganda posters (mostly in pencil and carbon) (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 198) and for ´ which he produced very small drawings (some no bigger than 2 cm) (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 221). Additionally, Benda worked for advertising campaigns where he featured as ´ a subject promoting art products (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 209). For a good choice of representative examples of Benda illustrations, see: www.americanarchives.com/benda. htm.

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Fig. 4.2 “Golden Goddess.” W. T. Benda. Mask, 1921, Ann Taylor Collection, Redding (Photo. Anna ´ Rudek-Smiechowska, 2009)

As his interest intensified, Benda kept developing his skills: “A thousand dollars would not cover the time, study, skill and labour I put into each mask. But theirs is a hypnotic charm, as the Greeks early discovered” (qtd. in McCabe 1920, 324). This delicate and exacting work brought him recognition already in 1918 when his masks were shown at private shows, for example, for the performance by members of the elite Coffee House Club in New York. The practice gained momentum when he started producing masks for pantomime and theatre. By 1930, writes Naversen, Benda was “regarded as a world-recognized authority on masks” (Naversen 2010, 38). For over thirty years, this highly dedicated artist invented and perfected unique techniques of mask-making. It is estimated that by 1939 he created from 50 to 80 masks.14 What originated as an idea to entertain friends by means other than words became a theatrical 14 We do not have a precise record of his masks. Anna Rudek-Smiechowska ´ quotes the estimate from the 1964 The Christian Science Monitor in which the number of masks was assessed to be in the hands of private owners. The critic establishes the imprecise treatment of the output even by Benda himself. Numbers he reveals in his autobiography

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tool and evolved to the status of an image, circulating in professional press photography, in literature, theatre, film, newspapers, lectures, and exhibitions in auction houses and galleries. Benda’s “false faces,” it needs to be stressed, were invented and developed by him and he always defended the method for making as he often said, “my false faces.” They survive preserved in Benda Family Archives,15 in Illustration House in New York, in the Polish Museum in Chicago, and in the Ko´sciuszko Foundation in New York where for years Benda was the artist in residence. In his design, Benda writes, he worked without any models to achieve such qualities as “simplicity, impressiveness, vigor, and rhythmic coordination” (Benda 1944, 52). His masks have themes defined by a single feature. Also, they bear distinctive forms: some cover the face of their wearer completely, some are only half-masks, some are ceremonial, and others are masks for hanging; there are masks for masquerading and masks for acting; grotesque masks and beautifying masks. Each is a unique work of art. Benda emphasizes how much observation and comparison of human faces as well as knowledge of anatomy, zoology, and anthropology goes into the making of masks. Their maker must recognize not only the infinitely variable human forms but also other masks, their dynamism and significance. In his time, this preeminent mask maker and mask expert drew the attention of influential art and theatre critics. When in 1920 Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair discovered Benda’s Gramercy Park studio in New York, he was struck by the “breathless beauty” of his featherlight paper masks. In his Introduction to Benda’s autobiography Masks, Crowninshield notes his powerful experience of “painted faces which – bodiless and without sight – seemed to return my gaze” (Crowninshield 1944, vii). It was their magical lightness as if of “miraculously made soufflées ” (Crowninshield 1944, viii) and their spirited vigour, their lively motions and skin-like textures that captured the critic’s sensitive attention. Crediting Benda with the revival of modern masks and through them

´ and in articles he wrote for the press do not necessarily add up (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 231). 15 The most significant one being the collection of Benda’s granddaughter Anne Taylor in Redding, USA. Ronald Naversen writes about Thatcher Taylor, Benda’s great-grandson, who recalls growing up around Benda’s masks displayed all over his family home. Taylor also credits a lot of family photographs showing Benda working on his masks (Naversen 2010, 44).

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with the injection of the magical qualities into modern culture, he highlights the influential presence of what in American and British journals came to be identified as “Benda masks.” Photographs of exquisite Benda masks were present in Vanity Fair. Vogue, too, showed Benda masks in by then noted fashion photographs by Edward Steichen.16 Familiar with Hollywood and its deadening uses of make-up, the “transient putty,” Crowninshield reserves the theatre as the site for the “extraneous and magical thrill ” of the masks (Crowninshield 1944, x). Among significant performances illuminated by Benda masks, like other critics, Crowninshield recollects the twenties pantomimes in the Greenwich Village Theatre. Benda’s involvement with masks started with designs for musical revues like “The League of Nations” in the Greenwich Village Follies, also in many of its dances. This very popular full-scale musical grew out of restaurant entertainment and was to develop later into a series of Broadway shows. In the words of one critic, the Follies were a “riot of colour, rhythm of line, beauty of form, splendour of harmonious costume, magic of light” (McCabe 1920, 324). Of interest is that J. M. Anderson, who masterfully staged the shows, reached also for stage designs by Craig. Critics ranked Benda among the theatre radicals “of whom Reinhardt and Gordon Craig are Old World Leaders” (McCabe 1920, 324). In 1920, “An Episode With Benda Masks,” with six distinctive masks worn by the dancer Margaret Severn was staged about two hundred times, to the tremendous applause of spectators. Severn was mesmerized by the Benda masks she used in Follies: The masks took possession of me and empowered my body to express eloquently their different personalities. One could imagine that each mask housed a discarnate spirit that then gleefully possessed the body of its wearer. Or you could reverse this idea and say that the appropriate movements of the dancer gave way to the mask. Or that elements ordinarily hidden in the subconscious mind of the dancer, who was now disguised by the mask, could be fully expressed without inhibition. Whatever it was, the impact on the audience was electrifying. (qtd. in Naversen 2010, 37)

16 Appearing with explanatory captions. Edward Steichen set a new standard for aesthet-

ically refined, theatrically approached photography of celebrities working for Vanity Fair and Vogue. For the Vogue Magazine layout in 1926, Steichen photographed fashion models Marion Morehouse and Helen Nylons with Benda’s masks “Golden Beauty” and “Dolorosa.” Steichen’s striking 1908 portrait of Gordon Craig is on show in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

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And it was Severn who popularized them on the American stage17 and who often spoke of the masks as sources of inspiration for her new choreographic compositions. Another accomplished classical dancer Adolf Bolm, the soloist and choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera House, also wore and admired remarkable Benda masks. Gramercy Studio was a “place of enchantment” where Benda, “maskmaker supreme and extraordinary” (qtd. in Piotrowska 1946, 39), worked so hard. Benda masks became not only popular but also very desired cultural items. So impressive and lifelike were they that the dance critic Walter Sorell places them at the climatic, though final, “stage of the life mask” history beginning with the eighteenth century. Sorell writes that in the twenties, important and famous clients were drawn to the New York studio of the “wizard of the ‘social mask’” in great numbers. They were ordering masks which could still compete in their likeness with photography (Sorell 1973, 189) and it seems that they also complemented photography, merging with its allure and enhancing its new clichés. When the masks appeared in Vanity Fair in September 1920 photographed by Maurice Goldberg and Arnold Genthe, they became a sensation.18 Thus, an individual autobiographical act flew outwards into cultural life. Arnold Genthe, who in the mid-twenties photographed Greta Garbo to great acclaim, produced a series of photographs with Benda masks worn by models in picturesque outdoor settings. This exposition helped their recognition as carriers of aestheticized models of the face— the cultural identifying functions of faces as masks. The twenty-seven photographs19 from 1920 comprise an iconographic collection of the painted and heavy-maquillaged masks, highlighting a “mask-up” quality Baudelaire described as an “abstract unity in the colour and texture of the skin […] that approximates the human being to something superior 17 Anna Rudek-Smiechowska ´ writes that masks were used in other revues like The Grand Street Follies from 1924 or Noël Coward’s This Year of Grace. In 1916–1933, Robert Edmond Jones who directed Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, produced 16 ´ performances with the use of masks (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 325). Coward, explains Mariola Szydłowska, applied masks in an episode “Dance, Little Lady” of This Year of Grace to highlight the contrast between very fast leg movements of artists performing a jazz dance with their still, hollow faces (Szydłowska 2007, 83). 18 The collection of 27 photographs of Benda masks by Arnold Genthe is housed in the Library of Congress in Washington. See: www.loc.gov. The Library also houses the largest collection of Benda’s drawings. 19 The photographs are held at the Library of Congress in Washington: www.loc.gov.

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and devine” (Baudelaire n.d., 33). In the past, such models had been offered by religion and metaphysics. In the twentieth century, photography and mass media helped promote and circulate false faces for the public to desire. Genthe further exposes them masterfully in alluring natural settings, with natural light, thus bringing to light the idea that photography cannot escape masks and masking. To better understand Benda’s private mask mythology, we turn to his autobiographical text Masks (1944). Comprising eight chapters and gallery of seventy masks, designed, executed, and photographed mostly by Benda himself, as well as including his additional illustrations and studies primarily from the twenties and thirties, as well as photographs of his handmade model of an imaginary French town from 1922 used as the background for his mask shows and exhibitions, it forms an involved life narrative. It testifies to his intense and intimate life connection with masks. Beyond that, its value as an assemblage of mask images lies also in the photographic documentation of the masks Benda captioned to provide identification of the names and titles of masks and also the years of their origin. Benda writes that his autobiography Masks, an “arduous” project, was propelled by requests received over the years to comment on his “false faces,” to unmask Benda masks. What was created to be silent and mystifying, he came to use as a life-writing object, organizing both his private and his public affection. To fit the proposed form of “how to” art guide, in the narrative masks are considered from the viewpoint of a spectator, mask user, and instructor. The verbal seizing by the author remediates material masks, triggering an ambiguous relationship in which the maker faces his silent creation, that which he claims to imagine or represent, to uncover its intended fashioning, while at the same time trying to re-fashion it, and himself, in a different medium, in language, in sketches, and in photography with captions, interestingly in the third person. Despite the disclaimer that masks be used in pantomime and dance only, masks cross over and install themselves as the main territory of vital components from his life, anticipating also that the “how to” guide will inspire those who will reach for this hybrid text. That they have becomes apparent, for example, in Ronald Naversen’s personal testimony in the article he published following the exhibition of Benda masks at an

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international interdisciplinary mask conference.20 Naversen describes the discovery of Masks in a local library and its seminal influence on his career as well as the lives of mask makers and performers around the world.21 The “Gallery of Benda Masks” section of the narrative features masks “all designed and executed by the author” (Benda 1944, 68). This collection represents the diversity and excellence of his work. Captions not only anchor them in time but also qualitatively establish their particular merits. They accompany direct photographs of masks as well as reproductions of Benda’s drawings. Some are already signed with Benda’s initials or with his full name, most are dated.22 Also, the captions set the impersonal tone, relying on the third person as if to switch roles—from the maker to that of the curator of the work. These paratactical elements supplement specific information presented in the eight main chapters but also send the reader back to designated pages of the body of the narrative for an explanation. The photographs are treated as an inadequate medium in comparison with the material objects they portray because they fail to give justice to such essential attributes of masks as the richness of colour and the harmony of the design. Drawings and sketches of studies presented as preliminary forms highlight the long process of mask-making. Together with step-by-step illustrations of the process, accompanying adjustments, references to materials, and purposes behind particular masks, captions emphasize the effort that goes into making masks, over and over again, “sketch after sketch” (Benda 1944, 60), and the serial attempts at getting a motif just right through careful observation and selection, multimedia preparations, and painstaking tinkering. “The Old Wag” mask, for example, illustrates the intricacy of the wiring

20 The conference “The False Faces of W.T. Benda” accompanied the 50th Annual USITT Conference & Stage Expo in Kansas City” (Naversen 2010, 40) in 2009. 21 He writes that studying mask carving in Bali he “found a tattered copy of Masks which was being used for inspiration by the master mask maker and as instruction for his students” (Naversen 2010, 40). Naversen also quotes Elizabeth Popeil, one of the curators of the retrospective Benda masks USIIT exhibition, who shares her thoughts on the impact they had on her: “how timeless something can be when passion and craft are combined […]. It has also given me a whole new perspective on masks and their use in theatre” (qtd. in Naversen 2010, 46). 22 The masks are from the twenties and thirties. The first Benda mask “The Blue Demon” is from 1914 and the caption explains that, with additions, it received its final shape in 1939.

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behind such features as the hair of the type represented. Additionally, various sources and inspiration, like animal faces, are acknowledged. Benda writes that his masks are not portrait masks23 but “simplified and intensified synthetic representations of various human types or their moods” (Benda 1944, 43). Critically, they remain entirely faithful to human physiognomy, what’s more, they are perfectly-fitting life-masks that could be worn by anyone regardless of their head size. Though Benda emphasizes physiognomic features and attributes so much importance to the reading of human and animal faces, he can be also dismissive about the nature of masks as mere types; they are objects with meaning and mystery, “weird, perfidious, and singularly perplexing” (Benda 1944, 1). They share attributes with ancient and more recent masks in general through the element of mystery they usher in; the illusions they produce and the psychological effects they have on the human soul (Crowninshield 1944, xvii). In Benda’s view, mystery, the uncanny quality of the mask, resides in the power of the mask to produce a new personality of the wearer in the eyes of the spectators and also in the mind and body of the mask wearer. While exploring the salience of physiognomy, Benda emphasizes the integral, bewildering nature and strength of a delusional metamorphosis that a false face can stir. He acknowledges, in Brant’s words, an imaginative agency of the mask. At a party his sister attended, Benda recollects, guests complimented her beauty, not recognizing the fact that she was wearing the mask her brother made. When she took it off they were amazed to discover what Benda liked to refer to as the “auxiliary” illusion—the false face proved to be a glad thing.24 The agency of the mask can be exerted through movement. Changes in the proportions of the mask alter our perceptions of human figures, making them either shorter or taller. Masks whose features are rigid, if executed with attention to nuances, blend facial expressions to the effect that even minor movements of the wearer create the impression that it is the expressions, not the angles, that change. Also, the mask’s movements impact readings of expressions. Our facial expression changes, “a gentle smile becomes an arrogant sneer or a supercilious grin when the chin is 23 Except for the masks of Abraham Lincoln, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Katherine Hepburn. 24 Rudek-Smiechowska ´ quotes this story from an article “Are You Tired of Your Face? ´ See Benda” published in Arkansas Gazette on April 7, 1922 (Rudek-Smiechowska 2016, 232–233).

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raised” (Benda 1944, 4). From Benda’s concise exposition, the reader gathers that the mask enables a range of ambiguity and also a certain indulgence in pleasure. It can be animated by very subtle movements while also animating movements. Of special importance in the acting mask are holes cut for the eyeballs. The eyes in the masks are painted and only holes for the pupils are pierced to allow for some light. Spectators compensate for this gap by relying on the illusion, adjusting and readjusting perception. Even though it is the framing of the eyes of the mask that produces the special magical quality, the spectators’ eyes nevertheless focus not on the gap but on the eyeballs of actors and, engaging their mental eyes, they generate vague sensations of motion and life. Thinking about masks, Benda says he is conscious of their rich social lives going back to ancient uses and their evolving significance in past civilizations. Framing his life around the mask-making episodes, like Craig, he sketches his own version of the history of masks. Benda writes about the uses of masks by primitive people, suggesting that they strike affinities in thinking about the soul as being somehow interconnected with the practice of mask-making. Familiar with a great many collections of historical masks, he notes conceptions, meaning, and workmanship of masks by peoples from the Americas to Java and Bali. He acknowledges the diversity of traditional uses of masks and traces of their vestiges in Europe, for example in Poland as Jasełka performances. Benda gestures to his native Poland where he says masks are a living element of the national culture and where they were traditionally used in Slavic rituals, also developing in response to Church teaching. In these contexts, as ceremonial and death masks, they were often zoomorphic representations. His 1933 “Rusałka” mask, for example, represents one of “the mischievous Slavonic wood nymphs or dryads who lure young men of Poland and Russia into deep woods, whence they never come back” (Benda 1944, 123), as the caption describes her. What we see in this particular mask is not a portrait or a caricature but a type of a woman. The sculptural character of her face suggests solidity and firmness. She smiles, showing teeth, her slick hair and straight brows may be seen to suggest malice and evil. These two emotions on a chart for the Western mask maker designed by Donato Sartori and Jacques Lecoque are contrasted with goodness. They typify a woman who is about forty years old and who is a spinster. According to the chart, these negative emotions suggest that the animal closest to this type is a serpent and the paper form used should be sinuous and sharp

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(qtd. in Knight 2004, 371).25 Benda’s “Rusałka” presents such a defined type with its collective character, but she is also individualized; her strong personality shines through in the attractive curvature of her lips. In Masks, Benda, the pioneer of modern masking and mask-making, and an inventor of a new way of framing the face, describes in a simple and yet intricate way the “arduous” process from both aesthetic and practical sides of shaping a carefully designed sculpture. The purpose is not to illustrate the type but to “stir a wide scope of varied emotions in the onlooker’s soul” (Benda 1944, 23). The effect of masks rests on the stillness of their lines. He extends the emphasis on the importance of harmony and semblance to life, suggesting that they should be controlled by the much emphasized principles of “rhythmic coordination” (Benda 1944, 22). This feature emerges as the distinctive, clearly defined goal behind his practice. From the “swarm of faces” (Benda 1944, 21) and facial expressions, also from non-human characteristics and abstract ideas he observes and compares, the mask maker chooses peculiarities— features he then amplifies, simplifies, distorts, or subjects to the rhythmic coordination. Having found the theme of the mask, Benda writes, he subordinates all other features to this one isolated aspect. To achieve the perfect form—exact, lifelike and durable—Benda, by way of painstaking experimentation with diverse materials and years of testing, devised a new way of compressing about twenty-five layers of bleached paper. Its perfect thickness, durability, firmness, surfacing, wiring, varnishing, and gilding result from application of extremely labour-intensive direct, mould, wire armature, and cardboard methods as well as a wide assortment of tools. He lists among them: “wood-carving tools, surgeons’ scalpels, jewellers’ burrs, silversmiths’ files, shoemakers’ knives, razor blades, penknives, scissors (long and short, straight and curved), a set of small clamps, callipers (both exterior and interior) as well as a box of pliers, tweezers and nippers of every kind and description” (Benda 1944, 43). Benda reconstructs the steps he takes when making masks, the consecutive stages of production from the outlines of the frame of the face to the filling of the lips. Additionally, he illustrates the adding, cutting, patching, and elimination of matter of his original methods for constructing false faces with sketches and instructive illustrations.

25 “Rusałka” appears also as an illustration of Zofia Nałkowska’s novel Women (1920) to be linked with the mask of a maturing woman.

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As a mask maker, Benda feels singled out among his contemporaries. He is an “uncanny wizard” entangled in an anachronistic activity of interest to bizarre clients and delighted friends (Benda 1944, 61). Moulding false faces, without abandoning his “I,” the wizard experiences the thrill of going beyond the “I.” He knows he has at his command a large repertoire of patterns to draw on, “long-established bounds, […] particular forms, traditional imagery, and formal conventions” (Britannica n.d.), and he is sure of the attention of his audience, no doubt a welcome position in his particular existential situation of an exile. Benda often emphasizes the excitement his operations produce: “I have seldom done anything in my life so much appreciated by artists as these masks, they go wild over them! But also they are appreciated by people who do not know anything about art” (Robbins 1913). Masks and their figurations provoke strong pleasure. Benda invests engagement with masks with the highest level of importance in the theatre but also in ballet, pantomimes, and all kinds of fantastic performances. He welcomes their reappearance in the theatre as an attribute used by all actors. Benda travelled extensively around the US lecturing about masks, displaying them but also performing in them. His one-act pantomime scenes, all in all about 16, were accompanied with classical music. Unfortunately, the texts of these scenes have not been published, remaining in possession of his family members. Benda, who was not a theorist like Craig, knew of Craig’s conceptions and spoke favourably of his predecessor’s tremendous influence in conceptualizing the roles of masks in theatre. He acknowledged that Craig was making masks “germinate” and that the dramatic expression of masks made by Craig resonated beyond the sphere of the theatre (Benda 1944, 57). But he also sensed that unlike him, Craig was making a mistake, allowing masks to clash with faces and thus allowing silence to mix with speech. Craig, in his view, compromised also by reducing their application to incidental episodes. Craig did not set masks in the scenery that would correspond with their extravagant character. Though some critics, like Kenneth Mac Gowan, pointed out Benda’s ignorance of ´ 2016, 321), such advocates of the Craig’s reforms (Rudek-Smiechowska use of masks in theatre as Eugene O’Neill26 encouraged viewers to look 26 Naversen writes about O’Neill’s collaboration with Benda for his plays produced in the twenties, the critic establishes that no specific references to Benda’s masks have been

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at Benda’s masks for they were more expressive than the faces of the actor ´ 2016, 326). (Rudek-Smiechowska

4.4

Craig the Face Re/former

Recognizing the role of Edward Gordon Craig in the revival of the use of masks in drama in Europe, Benda refers to the book-long essay by Craig, The Theatre Advancing (1912) where the artist heralds the mask as “the thing” that is as vital as it is degraded in modern culture. Craig laments that the mask “has frittered itself away to a piece of paper, badly painted or covered with black satin” (Craig 1919, 103). Though concerned more with examining the imaginative potential of masks, especially in the theatre, than with the technical aspects of their design, in the book Craig is emphatic about materials and their rearrangement. They should be all inorganic. Ancient masks, he recalls, were made of precious metals and stones, sometimes of leather. Working with them allowed imagination as “this which heals, by which you see, by which you hear, by which you understand and are converted to the truth of life” to fuse with the maker, to become him (Craig 1919, 62). For Craig, imagination, connected to simple instruments and beautiful forms based on ancient tradition, is a necessary prerequisite for art making. The ideas about masks by this “first aesthetician of the theatre” were often “scouted as perversity” because critics, Enid Rose argues, confused actuality with an ideal27 (Rose 1931, 83–86). Scholars like Patrick Le Boeuf, Christopher Innes, and Dennis Bablet identify Craig as the author of enduring theories of the theatre. He is remembered also as the theatre artist with a large, though often deemed puzzling, written legacy. His visions, though, continue to stimulate scholarly interest. Olga Taxidou emphasizes the huge impact of his work on the generations of theatre makers across Europe. Denis Bablet argues, for instance, that Craig’s vision anticipated experiments by the Russian avant-garde as well as the work of Bauhaus and the German expressionists (Bablet 1962, 111). Lorenzo Mango speaks of The Theatre Advancing as “the theory of twentieth century directing – synthesizing the aesthetic and creative essence identified (Naversen 2010, 38). He alludes also to the employment of Benda’s masks in one of Noël Coward’s reviews, though again, it remains to be confirmed. 27 Even though, writes Rose, “Shelley, Coleridge, and Lamb had also expressed a wish for the use of masks to be re-studied” (Rose 1931, 83).

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of theatre” and channelling it towards Modernity (Mango 2011, 2). Although Craig himself notes in his Paris Diary: “I am reputed to have been much stolen from” (Craig 1982, 43), he does not hide that he took much and freely from his predecessors. Unquestionably, among Craig’s enduring conceptions is how the mask occupies a strategic position—despite a surprising paucity of direct references to masks among his texts on theatre aesthetics and their pronounced absence in his teachings. This is a point raised by Le Boeuf, the curator of Craig’s oeuvre in Bibliothèque national de France in Paris. Commenting on a series of Craig’s scrapbooks, Le Boeuf writes that this iconographic collection, especially sections including preparatory drawings of faces and masks, gives a sense not only of Craig’s awareness of the most avantgarde tendencies of his time but also of his readings of ancient and eastern models. The scrapbooks also reveal the sources for his stock of faces and masks. Le Boeuf mentions not only crucial inspirations—Greek terracotta statues, plaster cuts of masks and heads, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass — but also the persistence of the artist’s interest. Boeuf writes that Craig constantly carried Leaves of Grass in his pocket, opened on page 353 (Le Boeuf 2008, 204). On the “Faces” page, Whitman displays a rich repository of forms and surfaces of people’s faces, objects, and places, both attractive and repulsive to the eye of an urban viewer. When Craig references the mask in the context of the theatre but also beyond its implications, the mask features as an operator between the real and the ideal realms, the most vivid standard of expression, the symbol of the future itself. Craig is not shy about its irresistible attraction and his intense valuation of masks and masked entities: “I have spoken and written in praise of the Mask over and over again” (Craig 1919, 103). Indeed, his range of references to masks is overwhelming. Le Boeuf sums it up, stating that Craig “used, designed, theorized, semantised, and collected” masks all his life (Le Boeuf 2008, 198). Craig repeatedly returns to the idea of the regenerative and liberating potential of masks. Fractious and inscrutable, they are always a “gain,” he writes in his journal The Mask, the first magazine devoted entirely to the theatre, and a unique self-referential project (The Mask 1912, no. 4.4, 272). In his life, he goes beyond preoccupations with the mask as a literal and metaphorical concept to engage with masks as performative objects. Their agency is undeniable. He anticipates that in the future their capacities will become potent imaginary agents. Craig began to use masks in 1900 with the staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and in 1912, he used them in

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his famous staging of Hamlet in the Moscow Art Theatre. Over the years, he also employed them in several Masques. Though, as most critics agree, he did not develop a coherent theory on the use of masks in the theatre. Rehearsing its fragmentary formulations and its visual representations in the form of photographs, drawings, and illustrations, also in projects for puppet motions, we get a glimpse of an artist’s life built around a growing idea charged with the capacity to script actions. In conceptualizing this “existential operator,” to use Guattari’s apt term, Craig writes how it always goes through the form of the face, through the reduction of its features. For example, his series of 1909–1910 drawings of masks for Hamlet in pencil and chalk bear hand-written critical comments about them being too face-like, too real, or too decidedly expressive instead of merely indicating features, or being completely featureless. Denying the efficacy of the face as an aesthetic form, Craig indicates his allegiance, quoting Nietzsche: “Everything profound loves the mask,” and like Nietzsche, he emphasizes that “it is part of more refined humanity to have reverence for the mask” (The Mask 1910, no. 2.12, 164). In the journal The Mask, he includes illustrations of full page plates of masks, his designs and engravings for masks and mask designs by other artists. Also disparate plans for his “masked marionette,” modernist ideal performer, develop on its pages. Every copy of the journal includes some illustration of a mask. Those by Craig are either mythological or mystagogic in character. They are drawn with a graphite pencil, in ink, painted and photographed. He also reproduces masks by other authors. The illustrations in this hybrid journal constitute a lively personal collection of mask images, a modernist collection with a strong connection to the identity of the journal’s editor. As a collector, Craig accumulated African masks,28 he owned the best collection of puppets in Europe, and about 6000 theatrical books in a great number of languages which he managed to gather in his life in order to attempt to “comprehend [theatre] as a whole” (Craig 1982, 27). In his Paris Diary, he records not only books and brochures but also over three hundred postcards with little theatres, their insides and outsides. Since 1931, he wrote in 1933, he had collected 196 little booklets mostly in French, others in Italian and that overall he possessed 7,000 to 10,000 opusculi. Despite financial difficulties, he kept purchasing books, believing, like a true collector, that “the assembly

28 Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich holds some of this collection.

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becomes more radiant by the entry of a new light” (Craig 1982, 141). He also updated his list of private theatres and traced the lives of actors, playwrights, and architects through rare books. Additionally, Craig kept photographs of masks to demonstrate distinctive expressions, some which he used for illustrations of types and personalities. Le Boeuf describes various angles of the same mask Craig photographed in order to obtain strikingly different expressions. The preparatory sketches he kept also show his transformations of one mask into images of diverse personalities. A mask of a Caribbean underwent such changes to serve finally as a standard illustration of Robinson for the publication of Robinson Crusoe (Le Boeuf 2008, 201). Negative about spiritless theatre in England and in Germany, Craig pondered the fleeting character of the theatre: “no playwright, no actor, no company holds one theatre steadily all the time,” because in theatre “all is hectic change” (Craig 1982, 119). And he planned to influence its future with the help of world masks. Provided it is not dull, Craig tirelessly defends the theatre mask as an instrument of liberation. Writing his essay “A Note on Masks,” Craig describes how he is facing a beautiful Etruscan figure. It is bronze, and its “overwhelming spirit” and its poise of conviction make him aware of the weaknesses of the human face. The ancient masters of theatre excluded real faces from rituals for they were “held to be too weak and disturbing an element” (Craig 1919, 10). In a beautiful stone idol from distant times, he finds a stable and potent resource for concealing emotion which he finds hinders art. Craig praises the stony face against the worthlessness of the human face’s “six hundred expressions.” It may be the “realest of things” but because it is “over-full of fleeting expression –– frail, restless, disturbed and disturbing” it has no value (Craig 1919, 105). The face cannot perform the functions necessary to take us “beyond the reality” (Craig 1919, 104), to separate us from everyday life. Its deficiency, weakness, and confusion he compares elsewhere to the glove “which hides all the most delicate and most expressive lines and curves of the hand” (The Mask 1913, no. 5.3, 214). Thus, Craig dismisses “that spasmodic and ridiculous expression of the human face” (The Mask 1908, no. 1/3.4, 59). He expects clarity and directness: “instead of six hundred expressions, but six expressions shall appear on the face” (Craig 1919, 104). Though he stresses the advantages of such reduction, he remains vague about their exact nature. At the same time, he expresses his contempt for painted faces that confuse naïve viewers, and for frittered masks abounding in collections of lifeless antiquarians, in homes of people who use them as

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props for conversations, and in Futurist-like explosive projects. In the six isolated expressions, he expects some unerring repetition and durability which he connects with Egyptian art and an ideal reality. To remain visible and readable for the viewer, Craig insists, and to assist the transformation that he reserves for great art of the theatre and life in the future, the ideal mask must be created, not be given or found. It must be an artifice. It cannot be retrieved the way valuable things are dug out and collected by treasure hunters, the modern lifeless antiquaries. And so he urges the actors to “get” to masks and connect with their “invincible power” to advance imaginative transformation: “you will be better fitted to ascend” (Craig 1919, 113). He expects that this potent agent can elevate and trigger powerful reactions of mystery. Only a skilfully applied theatre mask can restore and carry the dramatic expression of both reticence and desire of men from the past. In his view, such an impersonal mask is capable of reconfiguring responses to life and engaging altered relations. Karen Dorn notes that this type of mask is an attribute connected with the theatrical tradition of commedia dell’ arte, with archaic forms, the “symbol of the symbols” linked with the performative actions of actors (Dorn 1975, 178). More recently, Sir Peter Hall has echoed the longlasting appeal of the theatrical mask’s clarity of expression. He argues that because it is always single and fixed, unlike the face, the mask gains higher authority as a “tool of imagination” (Hall 2000, 29).29 For Hall, as for Craig, the naked, and screaming or laughing face, repels. The face cannot present the range of feelings and passions without disturbing and distracting the spectator. Ancient players had faces they could use, says Hall, but they chose masks in their theatre in view of the disciplined manner in which they engaged in the “quintessence of emotions” (Hall 2000, 28). Such masks operated as great enablers. In the realm of theatre art, the face may be inefficacious but, Craig nevertheless realizes, it is necessary. Employing montage-like methods, Craig clashes the two zones of interaction between the living faces, which belong to life, and the false faces, which belong to the realm of Art. Especially as a life writer, Craig opts for conversational compositions based on montage-like collections of fragments, quotations, and texts indebted to diverse traditions and genres. Jelewska posits that mixing traditions and styles, suggestions and illusions, Craig seeks to reconstruct the tradition of 29 Belting emphasizes the paradox elaborated by Hall in reference to ancient masks “by hiding, we reveal” (Belting 2015, 65).

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the theatre (Jelewska 2007, 212) and to remodel it for the future. When he delineates the role of the mask in it, he tests a number of aesthetic relationships in a montage-like dissociative manner. Thus, various concepts of the mask are put in motion and their indeterminate collisions with the face spark connections with his ideas on life and art. The dissociative method is apparent in his one-man periodical The Mask published irregularly in Florence between 1908 and 1929.30 This unique multimedia autobiographical project, now available online, impresses as an incredibly “well-dressed” project, to use Craig’s words (Craig 1982, 27). In the journal the “Book Beautiful tradition blends with the continental Art Nouveau school” (Taxidou 1998, 1)31 ; its many essays and pronouncements blend with his drawings for stage designs, his illustrations, typographical experiments, reproductions of print designs, maps, photographs, and, as mentioned, drawings of his masks. International in its range of references,32 its visual habitus remains intimate in perspective. We marvel at how richly this solo project engages in lifewriting, theory, literature, poetry, and criticism. Despite Craig’s scepticism about his writing abilities, The Mask is very well-versed indeed. Literary devices and figures abound in his poetic idiom. Craig quotes profusely from various authors; building engaging narratives, he uses aphorisms, epigrams, humour, literary forms such as fairy tales, dialogues, and short stories. In her magisterial study, Taxidou goes as far as identifying its narrative dimension as a “meta-theatrical performance” and a “‘drama of ideas’ of extreme verbosity” (Taxidou 1998, 185). Already in the first volume of The Mask, Craig writes that “there is something more seemly in man when he invents an instrument which is outside his person, and through that instrument translates his messages” (The Mask 1908, no. 1.1). And in an advertising notice in a later edition, he stresses that: “ONLY A POSITIVE NEED FOR THE MASK HAS

30 In 1918–1919, he ceased production of The Mask and published The Marionette which was much reduced in size and scale. 31 It was preceded by The Page (1898–1901) which Taxidou shows was Craig’s first stage for exercising his strong desire to perform (Taxidou 1998, 7). This dress rehearsal for The Mask was published in “the finest of Arts and Crafts traditions” (Taxidou 1998, 161). The Marionette was published between the 8th and 9th issue of The Mask. It deals with marionettes, being a marionette itself for The Mask, as Taxidou suggests (Taxidou 1998, 162). It ran 12 issues. 32 Published in Florence, the journal was also distributed to all major cities in Europe.

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CALLED IT AGAIN INTO EXISTENCE” (The Mask 1923, no. 9.1). His mask is a correlative operating on many levels. In her study of this permanent performance, Taxidou identifies multiple “layers of masking and disguising” (Taxidou 2016, 149) at work. Indeed, controlled by the mask-wearing and mask-dependent performer, The Mask has no equal in its modes of exposition. The periodical served Craig as a platform to define his identity as an artist: “Craig fabricated himself as much as he fabricated his art through The Mask” (Taxidou 1998, 181). Craig “turns himself or is turned into a mask” that is into a “pure form of theatrical writing ” (Taxidou 1998, 175). He writes under 65 pseudonyms33 which he develops into complicated theatrical characters with micro-biographies and sketches for portraits. He employs diverse narratological strategies and puts on different masks to diffuse the personal voice. But rather than hiding the author, the impersonal masks employed by Craig in his magazine help construct and amplify the diffuse identities.34 One of its facets was that of a mask impresario. His theoretical and practical innovations were of great importance for William Butler Yeats and his periodical impacted the Irish poet in several ways, not to mention the fact that Yeats collected copies of The Mask and wrote for it. From 1907, he worked on a play The Player Queen “frustrated by the thought of ‘every player finding or not finding […] the Antithetical Self’” (Gould 2013, 22).35 Yeats sent a draft of “The Mask” to Craig which was meant to be a lyric for this play in 1908, at the time when he was “brooding over various aspects of his behaviour and writing” (Gould 2013, 23) and when he found his serviceable self. Craig, in turn, offered Yeats his “A Mask for a Mask” to be used for the character of a Fool in The Hour-Glass and Yeats embraced it enthusiastically and appreciated the impulse Craig offered him. Yet while Craig was focused not on illuminating the faces of actors but promoting his screen designs, enhancing the three-dimensionality of 33 Taxidou writes that “Craig went to great lengths to establish personalities for the supposed characters behind the pseudonyms. In quite a Stanislavskian manner he creates biographies for the most important ones and sketches them out in his notebooks” (Taxidou 1998, 178). 34 Taxidou hints that one of its difficult aspects was the fascist framework he sought to dress in masks (Taxidou 1998, 176). 35 In 1908, one of the major preoccupations of Yeats was the bronze mask of himself produced by Kathleen Bruce (Gould 2013, 22). Gould also writes that Yeats was interested in obtaining the death mask of Synge but received no permission from his brothers (Gould 2013, 25).

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the theatre, developing mime and movement, and, overall, working on forms which would offer greater theatrical possibilities of transformations to emphasize beauty, Yeats made different light choices, imagining the theatre as the art of the actor, employing masks as devices for estrangement to “substitute for the face of some commonplace player, or for that face repainted to suit his own vulgar fancy, the fine invention of a sculptor” (Flannery 1975, 99). Despite these differences, Yeats credits Craig saying that he has given him “forms and lights upon which I can play as upon some stringent instrument” (qtd. in Flannery 1975, 98). Yeats adapted his plays (The Land of Heart’s Desire, The Countess Cathleen, The Hour-Glass ) to include staging Craig’s screens.36 He was planning to put the Fool from The Hour-Glass and the Blind Man from On Baile’s Strand into masks, saying he would like “the Abbey theatre to be the first modern theatre to use the masks” (Gould 2013, 26).37 The plan failed though. After the financial crisis of the Abbey Theatre in 1914, it was impossible to offer visual splendour and Yeats returned to the Japanese Noh drama and its mask—“an image which would make the face of the speaker ‘as much a work of art as the lines that he speaks or the costume that he wears’” (Flannery 1975, 108).38 As well as the journal, biographies served Craig as yet another platform to promote his ideas about masks and for self-amplification. In Ellen Terry, thinking about his mother, he marvels that “perhaps life is important” (Craig 1930, 5). His earliest childhood memories are those of the theatre as he experienced it as a young boy when his mother, Ellen Terry, “the best English-speaking actress of her time” (Craig 1930, 153), captivated the audience with her spirit and spontaneity. Led by the figurehead of Henry Irving, that realm he fashions is perfect. Both actors—Henry 36 He wrote in a letter to his father in 1910: “I shall get all my plays into the Craig scene” (qtd. in Dorn 1975). 37 Flannery suggests that the connections between Yeats and Craig were stronger in terms of their conceptions of tragedy. Craig published Yeats’s essay “The Tragic Theatre” in The Mask. In Yeats’s personal dramaturgical and theatrical conceptions elaborated there, Flannery sees similarities between Yeats’s concept of tragedy “which in its subordination of ‘character’ to ‘passion’ is related to Craig’s ubermarionette theory, also to Yeats’s “own ideas on the dialectic between self and anti-self (or mask) as a means of personal expression” (Flannery 1975, 98). 38 Their “illusive-allusive world” inspired his Four Plays for Dancers, especially At the Hawk’s Well where he attempted to use them as ways of escaping the actor’s self (Sorell 1973, 69).

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Irving and Ellen Terry, though opposing—were sustaining presences not only of his career but also of the English theatre. Craig’s39 “mother-in-art,” as he writes in his biography Ellen Terry and Her Secret Life, was a free spirit. She was a “movement” (Craig 1930, 165), and she was life itself. By contrast, Virginia Woolf remembers this genius actress as the one who “filled the stage and all the other actors were put out, as electric lights are put out in the sun” (Woolf 2011, 285). She marvels at the ephemeral nature of the actress’s success and is saddened that “what remains,” is “at best only a wavering, insubstantial phantom – a verbal life on the lips of the living” (Woolf 2011, 286). And to counter the effacing of such a grand figure, Woolf tries to sustain what she can on paper, sketching the life of Terry in its contradictory aspects, its original scripts. Ellen Terry and Her Secret Life is, likewise, written to preserve the distinctive nature of the electrifying life of an actress. Craig knows he cannot bring his mother to life, that all the biographies and all the documents are only approximation and that “the net result was that no one knew her as she was – and all was seeming” (Craig 1930, 9). Yet he trusts that there is some life out there that cares and protects. He senses it as an invisible and nonverbal force outside any known laws. That vague and unchangeable life looks after individuals against the intolerable pressures of the crowd. Craig tries to portray Ellen Terry with the goal of defending her memory against pressures and insults by Bernard Shaw who had permitted the publication of her correspondence with him. For Craig, Ellen Terry was a genius actress with an irresistible, if fatal, attraction to the theatre, a public person, a celebrity he identifies with her initials as E.T. and a private woman, his beloved mother who knew how to live and by this he means living not an “organized” life, “not the life as laid down by the religious, legal or social rules, but the life itself”—“the very dear life” (Craig 1930, 6). This elusive, mystical category cannot be written, he adds, nor can it be painted or even talked about. That is why the images of her included in this biography, as well as in his memoir Index to the

39 Gordon Craig’s full name was Edward Henry Gordon Craig. Craig was a pseudonym.

It comes from a Scottish island Ailsa Craig his mother saw and thought it would be a good artistic pseudonym for her daughter. Craig’s famous mother, Ellen Terry, never married his father Edward Godwin and Craig did not want to use the name of his mother. In his biography of her, he says the name was given to him by his mother who was determined that he would become an actor (Craig 1930, 77).

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Story of My Days, though produced by acclaimed artists like G. F. Watts, are only seeming. Though the private mother and the public mother were “leagues apart” (Craig 1930, 63), the loved and the secretly loving forever separate, he attempts to reconstruct and preserve the nature of the distinction. Recollecting the past, Craig evokes the “tremendous looking” in the looking glass that goes on in the lives of actors. In the theatre, “one is sure to find his reflection and the reflection is very much more to us than the solid thing itself. So we stand and talk to each other’s reflection and go on looking at ourselves” (Craig 1930, 106–107). This mode of communication and participation seems to work as an exhibiting key to disclose his mother’s identity, also to introduce and illuminate his own self-identification as an artist. Looking at his mother as a lookedat “heaven-sent” actress, as a reflection, he also takes the opportunity to cast and recast his reflected reflections. She is all movement and change, “always the same, never twice alike” (Craig 1930, 11). He, too, is an artist, attracted and reflected through bouncing reflections, both framing and vanishing. In The Mask, by comparison, writing as Graham Robertson, he looks at her singular, self-created face as a refraction of the celebrated spirit of life: that unpaintable face, the strong chin, the firm mouth with its wonderful lines, so generous and yet so sensitive and tender, the strange pale eyes, wistful, questioning, ever with a hint of tears in their very brightness. [...] a unique face which has never been before and never will be again, the gladdest, saddest face in all the world [...] and yet, a face which, had it belonged to some other, might have passed unnoticed; for Ellen Terry, among her many creations, created her own beauty. Perhaps no other face has produced such marked effect upon the Art of its time. (The Mask 1909, no. 2.3, 4)

Craig reaffirms here not only the complex organization of the face but also its connection with the body. He celebrates its unquestionable unified presence and expressive force. The admired face of his mother is a carrier of expression and affect. She spent her life in the theatre, looking out, and

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to his regret, away from her family. Unlike Roland Barthes,40 though, he retrieves this beloved face to reassert not its individuating role, its value for him, but its socializing appeal. Included in the biography, a sketch of her profile by his notable father Edward Godwin and three photographs in which she looks away from the viewer are funerary illustrations of the uncapturable brilliant star. In the biography, Henry Irving emerges as the antithesis to his mother. While she was all movement, Craig’s idol was “still, seldom moving” (Craig 1930, 165). Craig praises Irving as the most “expressive” actor, as an ideal actor, “equal in creative power of a fine poet” (Craig 1930, 96). And he has no doubts that “with Irving it was, above all, his face which commanded – for when, as in Othello, Lear and Coriolanus, his face was black or bearded, something of his power was gone” (Craig 1930, 165). The co-presence of Terry and her partner Irving—the two knighted celebrities—creates a personally-charged montage-like dynamic allowing Craig to recompose his own position in the theatre of the future. Like a perfectly controlled “masked marionette,” Irving is at once fully alive and at the same time stylized,41 both historical and modern, the spirit and the form. This correspondence, writes Enid Rose, is exemplified in durable form in great sculptural images of art. For this reason Irving had been a student of sculpture, and for this reason Irving’s acting was a fascination to the great sculptor Alfred Gilbert. For this reason, also Craig brought the idea of the Uber-Marionette back to the consciousness of artists of the modern theatre. (Rose 1931, 85)

Craig remained under the “mesmeric” power of Irving’s acting. Taxidou explains how the mechanics of mesmerism, named after Anton Mesmer’s research into the relationship between personality and magnetic fields, was what Craig constantly referred to in his praises of Irving. Mesmerism, which defined not just the electric power of the actor’s expression, additionally highlighted by the introduction of electricity on the stage, but

40 In Camera Lucida, Barthes famously declared the just image of his mother which he chooses to conceal from the viewers’ eyes. 41 Also William Archer in Masks or Faces praises Irving as an actor with passion, one “who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art” (Archer 2012, 212).

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also its impact on the audience. Craig was attracted both to the sculptural quality of Irving’s body and to this electrifying quality of the face (Taxidou 2016, 629–631).42 He also fetishized him as a father figure he never had. Looking at Irving, he marvels at length: There are many books which tell you about him, and the best of all the books is his face. Procure all the pictures, photographs, drawings, […], and try to read what is there. To begin with you will find a mask, and the significance of this is most important. Think you will find it difficult to say when you look on the face, that it betrays the weaknesses which may have been in the nature. Try and conceive for yourself that face in movement, movement which was ever under the powerful control of the mind. Can you not see the mouth being made to move by the brain, and that same movement which is called expression creating thought as definite as the line of a draughtsman does on piece of paper or as chord does in music Cannot you see the slow turning of those eyes and the enlargement of them? These two movements alone contained so great a lesson for the future of the art of the theatre, [....] pointed out so clearly the right use of expression as opposed to the wrong use, that it is amazing to me that many people have not seen more clearly what the future must be. Should say that the face of Irving was the connecting link between that spasmodic and ridiculous expression of the human face as used by the theatres of the last few centuries, and the masks which will be used in place of the human face in the near future. Try and think of all this when losing hope that you will ever bring your nature as exhibited in your face and your person under sufficient command. (The Mask 1908, no. 1/3.4, 59)

This serious and composed face of the master actor is Craig’s imaginary agent, connecting the past and the future. Irving projects measured and rhythmic fullness. His defined facial lines can be abstracted into a mouldable form and animated by two controlled movements of the mouth

42 Taxidou makes a very useful reference to a treatise on acting by William Archer, Masks or Faces, where the two axes—stylization and expressiveness—are discussed (Taxidou 2016, 628). Speaking of Irving though, Archer admires the actor’s masterful reliance on his experiences. He quotes Irving’s declaration: “if tears be produced at the actor’s will and under his control, they are true art; and happy is the actor who numbers them among his gifts” (…). Additionally, Taxidou supports her idea about Craig’s attraction to “mesmerizing” qualities of Irving’s acting locating it, after Jane Goodall, in the eyes: “the means by which the mesmerist generates a contagious interiority” (Taxidou 2016, 631).

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and enlarged eyes. No other intrusions are welcome. Such a dismantled surface is an allegory of the human space, not quite removed from Deleuze and Guattari’s facial model of the white wall and the black hole, oppositional to rationalizing and emotionalizing drives. It erases the face to become a zone of intensity instead, allowing for more alliances and action in the future. My two examples illustrate the contradictory attitudes at work in Craig’s struggles. He studies the mesmerizing face of Irving to reject its unique accidental movements. Elsewhere he expresses impatience with other actors’ “fiery faces, bulging eyes, and lips wried with grimace” (Craig 2008, 97). He senses in such unfixed faces the same dominance of the similar unfortunate social communication. Ordinary faces in Parisian cafés also seem somehow wrong, “either perplexed or a settled, expressionless something” (Craig 1982, 89). He negates them to seek instead manifestations of the highest intelligence and peacefulness in still and solid forms. Stone effigies from ancient places of worship in Egyptian art, their solemn, beautiful, and detached faces, the sculpted eyes which will not betray anything but charm, sensitivity, and love radiating from every face (Craig 2008, 96) inspire his radical visions of ideal face forms of the future. Craig tries to bring attention to the sculpted face of Irving and to marionettes as descendants of such countenances created in the image of God. In Asia, they lived and were begotten by a spirit, a potent symbol embracing all things beautiful in life, the past, but also the future in death. Today, their ancient potency is gone, and with it beliefs and visions that had kept them alive. But the modernist Craig hopes to find in the detachment and “noble artifice,” grace and seductiveness, a new face form, a correlative of a new life. Like living faces, Craig finds words anti-theatrical. He devalues them on the assumption that the theatre’s destination is not about thought and reason but vision. Deficient and interfering with beauty, words cannot equip the theatre with the dignity it needs to express life, so critical for the spectator to receive along with beauty. In The Mask, he insists on silence as an agent bringing to the Arts unity, and masks as silent instruments can support the visual transformation in the theatre. De-emphasizing the role of literature, even rejecting it as a primary source of theatrical language, Craig nevertheless produces book-length studies where literary examples and allusions abound, and where the tradition he is interested in invigorating is seen in terms of inclusion.

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When Heinrich von Kleist wrote “On the Marionette Theatre” in 1810, he defended inanimate puppets by applying the form of an essayistic conversation with a friend, a dancer in a local theatre. Marionettes, not dancers, the friend argues with a visionary air, are masters of grace and control, free from constraints of consciousness and affectation “seen […] when the soul, or moving force, appears at some point other than the centre of gravity of the movement,” and able to achieve the highest surges of lightness and brilliance (Kleist 1994, 5–6). Writing in 1907, Craig dedicated his well-known conversational essay “The Actor and the Ubermarionette” to William Blake. Testifying to the great poet’s ease at coexisting with other genres and styles, he introduces his main agents in an open form, one that allows him to rehearse polyphonic structures of subjectivity. Craig’s Ubermarionettes—inanimate and free, masculine, controllable figures—are fit to don a number of masks simultaneously and to change them in the course of a spectacle. They possess “death-like beauty while exhaling a living spirit” (The Mask 1908, no. 1.2, 12), a feature that makes them alluringly ambiguous. These puppets, both spirit and mire, are the key to his theory of the theatre where the playwright who maintains a central role becomes a “new” model of the actor’s art infused with the Platonic idea of peace, rhythm, and harmony. As we have seen, Henry Irving approximates the ideal form, the idea of Perfection. Craig coined the term “Ubermarionette” while in Berlin when the debates and theories about the marionette in performance were growing in popularity across Europe.43 Very much a reflection of his time, Craig’s depersonalized, mysterious, and pure statue, the “Ubermarionette,” seems a perfect autonomous entity complimented by masks. There is a lot of ambiguity about the exact nature of this entity and a regret that he never constructed one. Despite Craig’s fuzzy revelations about the exact size and nature of this figure, it is clear that its face was meant to remain hidden from our gaze.44 Keeping in mind Blake’s 43 In “Actors and Puppets,” Taxidou writes about the nineteenth-century aesthetic and Symbolist “cult of the puppet.” She writes that “in the Anglophone tradition, Artur Symons, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde all write passionate tracts exalting the puppet as the ultimate art form. This was a legacy also continued by many modernist writers who are not readily associated with ideas of theatre and performance, at once underlining the centrality of the theatrical paradigm for modernist experimentation in general and the particular attention paid to the performing body in this context” (Taxidou 2016, 632). 44 On the numerous hypotheses surrounding Craig’s idea of marionettes, see Patrick Le Boeuf’s “On the Nature of Edward Gordon Craig’s über-Marionette.”

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inscription, the reader is reminded that a form in the poet’s mind is never derivative, not “abstracted nor compounded from nature” but originating from the “Imagination” of its creator (The Mask 1908, no. 1.2, 13). This is Craig’s concept of a marionette and we can think of uses for this liminal and faceless effigy-idol not only in the theatre of the future, as he attempted to conceive it as early as 1906, but also in the world beyond. Marionettes gesture towards technology as one of the liberating forces of modernity. In digital contexts, they affirm the foundations for incorporeal machine subjectivities. For the “homo informaticus,” Craig’s figures anticipate phantom-like forms appearing in films in which real actors’ faces and personalities are digitally and endlessly incarnated (Hendrykowski 2007). As Craig imagined, machinic forms project abilities not only to change a mask for a mask but also to command connections beyond the real.

4.5

Ficta Facies

W. T. Benda and Edward Craig engaged masks in their lives, persistently and consistently. In their life-writing masks are figures of relationships for both defacing and face-setting practices shifting and undoing the power of facial images. This chapter has shown their masks as imaginary agents operating on the face and becoming complementary to the face. Distrusting language, Craig calls for defacement through art. He puts forward an ideal, a standard of expression in art, beautiful and definite not as a vision of death but of a vitality for lives to be written in the future. His masks—imaginative agents with autonomy and energy, complex composites of material and abstract orders—displace individuating for “dividuating” worlds. Benda masks served him as sources of personal re-composition, objects of durable pleasure, and agents of relationality. He died backstage on November 30, 1948, in Newark Public School of Fine and Industrial Art in New Jersey while preparing a presentation of his masks. He fell over his masks, with one mask in his hand.

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Mango, Lorenzo. “The Manuscripts of the Art of the Theatre by Edward Cordon Craig.” Acting Archives Essay, 2011. Accessed 26 May 2020. https:/ /www.academia.edu/67202789/The_Manuscripts_of_The_Art_of_the_The atre_by_Edward_Gordon_Craig. McCabe, Lida Rose. “The Revival of the Mask.” Art and Decoration 13 (October 1920): 324–360. Accessed 8 June 2020. www.archive.org/details/ artsdecoration13newy/page/n345/mode/2up?q=the+revival+of+the+the+ mask. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Masqué, Demasqué.” In Masques: De Carpeaux à Picasso, 13–15. Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Portrait. Translated by Sarah Clift and Simon Sparks. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018a. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Image: Mimesis and Methexis.” Translated by Adrienne Janus. Nancy and Visual Culture, edited by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Accessed 7 May 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1bh2kbj.9. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Zamaskowany-zdemaskowany” [in Polish]. Translated by Wojciech Dudzik and Dorota Sosnowska. In Paradoksy maski, 99–103. Warszawa: PWN, 2018b. Naversen, Ronald. “The Benda Mask.” Theatre Design and Technology 46, no. 4 (Fall 2010). Accessed 23 July 2020. www.Docpalyer.net31138368-the-bendamask-by-ronald-naversen. Papet, Édouard. “Un Regard Sur le Masque.” In Masques: De Carpeaux à Picasso, 10–11. Paris: Museé d’Orsay, 2008. Piotrowska, Irena. “Benda Masks and Their Ancestors.” Polish American Studies 3, no. 1/2 (1946): 39–41. Pohlad, Mark B. “The Man Behind the Mask—W. T. Benda.” Illustration Magazines 4, no. 13 (2009): 4–36. Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Little Pritzel.” In Essays on Dolls. Translated by Idris Parry, 31–39. London: Syrens, 1994. Robbins, Emily Frances. “An Artist Who Came from Poland and Brought a Rich Gift.” Metropolitan, May 1913. Rose, Enid. Gordon Craig and the Theatre. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1931. ´ Rudek-Smiechowska, Anna. Władysław Teodor Benda. Universitas: Kraków, 2016. Sorell, Walter. The Other Face: The Mask in the Arts. New York: The BobbsMerrill, 1973. Szydłowska, Mariola. “Władysław Teodor Benda-Twórca masek teatralnych” [in Polish]. Pami˛etnik teatralny LV, no. 1–2 (2007): 69–88. Taraba, Fred. “W. T. Benda, Craftsman of Lyric Beauty.” Step-by-Step Graphics 9, no. 1 (1993): 104–110.

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Taxidou, Olga. “Actors and Puppets: From Henry Irving’s Lyceum to Edward Gordon Craig’s Arena Goldoni.” Late Victorian into Modern, edited by Laura Marcus, Michele Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, 626–638. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Taxidou, Olga. The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig. Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1933–1941, vol. 6. Edited by Stuart N. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 5

Sir Cecil Beaton and the Art of Modern Façade

5.1

Faces as Forms of Allure

Contemplating Virginia Woolf’s face, Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) noted not only its distinctiveness but also rare qualities of the kind that make one think that “a face can be a reverend and sacred thing” (Beaton 1930, 37). Dedicating a vignette to “Mrs. Virginia Woolf” in his 1930 The Book of Beauty,1 Beaton included two sketches of Woolf’s facial profile and the full figure drawing of Woolf in her mother’s wedding gown from the famous 1924 British Vogue photograph by Horst P. Horst. While Beaton expresses his awe, noting also Woolf’s public vulnerability—“she curls up at contact with the outer world” (Beaton 1930, 37)—Woolf leaves 1 This is the first book Beaton wrote. He explains that it was to be a contemporary version of the Victorian albums (in which lovely ladies were presented in lovely scenery facing a page of “glowing descriptive text”) with his photographs and his prose introductions (Beaton 1951, 57). Brenda Silver makes a point that Beaton “appropriated her photographic image for his ghostly description” and that in this work “he anticipated what became a major aspect of her construction as icon: the verbal portraits of Virginia Woolf that read her character in and through her photographs” (Silver 1999, 135). Based on costumes and poses from the book, a performance of series of tableaux vivants was produced in Chicago, bringing his photographs to life. In Photobiography he recalls being embarrassed to see total strangers dressed in the manner of his models facing the confused audience. “Fame,” he felt came to him “in the most unaccountable and disturbing way” (Beaton 1951, 58).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_5

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no doubt about her contempt for his gaze as well as for his work. She never submitted to Beaton’s requests to photograph her. His “style and manner” she found unacceptable; she told Vita Sackville West he was “a mere Catamite” (Woolf 1977, 428). Woolf despaired about her inclusion among the “super-pretty and the exotic,” in the book Beaton imagined in the style of old Victorian books of beauty, a type of a “Regal Gallery”2 (Beaton 1930, 3). She featured there as a “charming” and “recognizable creature” like her fictional heroines. Woolf wrote: “I’m so furious at being in Beaton’s book – I was never asked – never sat – never saw the horrid worm and there I am seized for ever” (qtd. in Humm 2003). Photography was a “constant presence in Woolf’s life” (Humm 2012, 296). Mindful of its power of manipulation, she did nevertheless recognize the relevance of visibility and the allure of glamour. Woolf “wanted to produce the luminous effect” and remained “deeply invested in finding glamour, or producing it in the language of her novels” (Brown 2009, 70). Rejecting Beaton’s visual language, she did not hesitate long to allow her image to be captured by photographers like Gisèle Freund and Maurice Beck.3 Also, like many amateur female photographers of her time, she photographed friends and family with her own camera, while with Roger Fry4 she contributed to an album of Victorian Photographs 2 In his diary The Wandering Years, Beaton writes about the composition of his first book, which he considered monumental: “After many weeks spent in the British Museum Library among sentimental engravings of ladies holding leaves as they inspired the poets of their day, I returned home to write my eulogies of their contemporary counterparts” (Beaton 2018, 274). In his Photobiography he notes that it proved to be a “succés de scandale” because of some of the undignified poses he designed for society ladies (for instance “lying head to head on the floor”). “No doubt,” concludes Beaton, “it was a terrible book, but I was thrilled to think I had produced it” (Beaton 1951, 57). Hugo Vickers refers to The Book of Beauty as “a parody of a sentimental Victorian album” (Vickers 1993. 141). He writes that its first edition sold out very fast, though its reviews were not as forthcoming as Beaton had been hoping for. Vickers also documents Woolf’s reactions, quoting her response for The Nation and the Athenaeum to the inclusion of both sketches and, most of all, the underlying “principle” of the book: “a method of book-making which seems to me as questionable as it is highly disagreeable to one at least of its victims”—to which Beaton replied defensibly, “which caricaturist ever asks his victim for permission to include him in a book of caricatures?” (Vickers 1993, 142). 3 Beaton praises Beck’s portrait of Woof as magnificent despite Beck’s “nonchalant manner and distaste for artificiality” (Beaton 1944, 38). 4 Introducing Cameron’s portraits of famous men and fair women, at the time when the “position of photography is uncertain and uncomfortable,” Roger Fry incisively observes “how much the writers and artists are on show. How anxious they are to keep it up to

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of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron (1926). In her dramatic account of Cameron’s life, Woolf is attentive to the serious matter of beauty, noting without hesitation that Cameron was without it. Capturing “Miss Edith Sitwell” in The Book of Beauty, in a drawing in which she reposes on a high ornate chair and in his acclaimed photograph in which she lies in state on a mosaic floor among stone angels, Beaton introduces a different beauty, a “rare treasure” (Beaton 1930, 36). Sitwell, he says, is “utterly perfect […] flawless”; she presents a lyrical profile and emanates a unique ethereal aura (Beaton 1930, 36). Though his images do not accentuate them, in his descriptions Beaton stresses her “upward-glancing, secretive eyes” and, quoting her brother, “her pale and legendary face” (Beaton 1930, 36). Writing to Beaton, Sitwell expressed her admiration and excitement: “What an extraordinary gift you have; really it is quite unbelievable” (qtd. in Vickers 1993, 88). Sitwell championed his photographic expression and over many years cherished their collaborative friendship. Prefacing his book of Images, she writes of “the usual beauty and glamour that distinguishes all Cecil Beaton’s portraiture” (Beaton, 1963). For his part, Beaton never showed any interest in her poetry publications, though she appeared so unlike classic Edwardian beauties he glorified. Throughout his life Beaton remained magnetized towards her—the writer and poet whom he came to define pictorially. Of the thirty-nine beauties in the curious Book of Beauty Beaton pays special tribute to Greta Garbo who, as he testifies in his diaries, gave rise to a sense of perdition5 no other face ever produced. Her extreme beauty was “deeper than we thought possible,” her “bone construction and carving were proof against all methods of photography and lighting” (Beaton 1930, 47). Beaton admired the aesthetic perfection of Garbo, studied her photographs, watched her films, wrote diary entries about her, entered into a romantic relationship with her, proposed to her, and never ceased to be mesmerized by her unique ethereal face with the “eyelids blackened heavily and the brows plucked in the shape of a butterfly’s antennae” like some “ephemeral sprite or naiad” (Beaton 1930, 46). For Beaton, as for his contemporaries, she conveyed a state of beauty and the required pitch.” Scientists, he believes, do not need this kind of visual support (Fry 1973, 25). 5 “Mystical perdition” is what Roland Barthes identified with the effect that the face of Garbo produced on those who saw it in the flesh, or in the films like Queen Christina (Barthes 1972, 56).

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mystery that was beyond the superlative. In his diary, he quotes E. M. Foster, who speaks of Garbo as “a rare exception, an occasion when the vast public unanimously approves of what is truly magnificent” (Beaton 2018, 385). The three examples of women serve as catalysts for Beaton’s interest in beauty; he wanted to “see the face from a fresh and enthusiastic point of view” (qtd. in Vickers 1993, 589).6 Meticulously selected and controlled, glamorous personas promoted a reality that was both alluring and unobtainable. By sculpting their faces with light and shadow, blending them with fame and thus investing them in fantasies, Beaton the photographer not only amplified the appeal of select faces but also kept it alive. Glamour, a “constant if fitful quality […] arising out of an environment that mixes human and nonhuman so as to produce captivation” (Thrift 2010, 297), enticed viewers with mystery and a promise of transformation. At the same time, proliferating symbols of allurement, Beaton was engaging in self-representation that was also receiving affirmation from vast audience. His autobiographical texts reveal, in Thrift’s words, a very productive “creation of worlds of virtual self-difference that allow “extra-yous” to thrive for the “alternate versions of ‘me’” (Thrift 2010, 298). In this chapter, I will consider Beaton as a portrait photographer stimulating the magic and charm of glamour understood as form and modulating it for the purposes of self-expression and self-aggrandizement not only within what Mellor calls the micro-culture of “the photocracy” (Mellor 1986, 12), but also beyond it. For Beaton apprehending the alluring face forms triggered writing. A photographer and a photographic historian, a writer and a chronicler of his life, a painter, a set designer, an illustrator of the silver age of ballet, an actor, a war correspondent, and a travel writer—Beaton has received critical attention as an exponent of glamorous statuesque compositions of the famous and the beautiful, as an English collage maker of twentieth-century faces. As a photography commentator who attempted to turn photography into literature he has been under-examined. The new genres of life-writing he practised, photobiography and interiorography, have not received the attention they deserve. Beaton took photographs all his life and he attended to writing all his life, haunted, as he says, “by a sense of the elusive” (Beaton 2018, 6 In 1969 his retrospective photographic exhibition in the Museum of the City of New York was titled 600 Faces.

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9). The personal relationship to the quality of charm and its broader links to creation of glamorous personas and magical worlds deserves renewed attention. In the interwar period, new standards of behaviour defined by cosmopolitanism and standardization were emerging to change the role of aristocracy. Photography made it possible to transport glamorous personas to the world of theatre and opera where intimacy and charm were among the main manifestations of attraction. Driven by a strong desire to become part of “culturi”,7 Beaton created new sources of connections with such imaginary forces and experiences. Beaton was interested in accession to “worlds,” in Nigel Thrift’s sense of spaces where the subject is not created (as in older “disciplinary regimes”) but where they exist. Made available with the strengthening impulses of public intimacy such spaces were “giving rise to a particular style of going on” (Thrift 2010, 295). In his diary, Beaton notes his appetite “uncurbed for closer acquaintance with those glorious people whose works were published by the Hogarth Press, who painted in mud colours or lived in Gordon Square in rooms decorated by Duncan Grant” (Beaton 2018, 180). Though he never managed to get connected to the world of Bloomsburians, ultimately, he succeeded in creating his own practices of “rendering prominent ” (Thrift 2010, 295) a world, a small universe, in his two chic houses: Ashcombe and Reddish House. His extraordinary visitors’ book, showcased by the Victoria and Albert Museum, is a veritable “who’s who” of the twentieth century in England, crowned with the signature of Queen Elizabeth II.8 The book is a proof that to sustain the link with the glamorous world, Beaton carefully fashioned his own world and his theatrical façade of a man of glamour.9 First “stage-struck” and then “society-struck,” Evelyn Waugh satirized, Beaton navigated masterfully in the world of make-believe, “between the footlights and the chandeliers” (Waugh 1986, 568). His experiences were amplified by Vogue to the immense interest of glamour-desiring public and the profit of new media.

7 As he expresses it on a number of occasions (qtd. in Vickers 1993, 227). 8 As part of the 2012 exhibition Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton. Its curator, Susanna

Brown, introduces the Visitors’ Book on YouTube. See: https://youtu.be/_6hC-oTftkQ. 9 On the significance of Ashcombe for the creation of intimate Arcadia, his interiorography managing both being and seeming, see T. Bru´s’s “Interiorography in Words and Images: Cecil Beaton’s The Story of a Fifteen-year Lease.”

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Beaton embraced glamour, a quality that “limits and fixes our vision but also acts as a tool of exploration” (Thrift 2010, 296). As a style it both acts and is acted upon. The glamour shot uses “photographic stillness as a form of death” and this pleasant stasis, suspending the human appearance in a form of perfection, between “’portrait and still life,’” emblematizes the star’s image (Beeston 2018, 167). Beeston emphasizes the role of the soft focus and complex artificial lights, especially the “high-contrast norms of ‘Rembrandt lighting’” as tools in the production and dissemination of celebrity images in early Hollywood, images which became more influential than the films in which the stars appeared (Beeston 2018, 167). Producing glamorous images in excess, Beaton concentrated his efforts to endow the face with such withholding quality of stillness. In a “cool portrait style” Beaton pioneered (Jeffrey 1984, 198), glamour defines a certain magical vision of what matters in the world. Its elite appeal in Beaton’s photography rests on his capture of still rejuvenated face forms: “with a passion for detail,” Beaton “subtly posed, ruthlessly touched up and artistically stage-managed his sitters” (Siemens n.d., 5), creating and sustaining both the beauty myth of Edwardian Britishness and his own legend as “the Byron of the camera”10 (Beaton 2018, 394). Writing in his well-received history of British photography—the first of its kind—Beaton argued that in the new epoch of media expansion magazine editors “make no pictorial concession to the sitter, and all is sacrificed for the entertainment of the reader” (Beaton 1944, 42). Himself a praised contributor to illustrated newspapers and magazines, he nevertheless worked under the conviction that indeed “pictorials” were able to sculpt faces and figures and to “influence the public mind” (Beaton 1944, 42).11 In Vogue, for example, building on the

10 The expression used by a critic writing about Beaton in Life magazine in 1938. It is particularly appropriate considering Byron’s sense of the power of glamour and, as Gundle argues, his “susceptibility […] to glittering façades.” Byron, like Walter Scott, managed to “develop glamour as an alluring imaginative realm connected to lived reality” (Gundle 2009, 36). Beaton, like Byron, forged his behaviour through theatre. Byron “loved the world of professional illusion and the possibilities it offered for the displacement of conventional morality” (Gundle 2009, 67). 11 In Beaton’s estimation, photography in magazines such as Picture Post, Illustrated London News and magazines sponsored by Condé Nast (like British and American Vogue, where his photography and articles, caricatures, and illustrations appeared for half a century) was technically brilliant and of tremendous vitality (Beaton 1944, 42).

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style of Adolph Baron de Meyer,12 he contributed to the enchantment “under the guise of true representation” that glamour—so dependent on its main medium, photography—was spreading (Gundle 2009, 158). Working as an artist for Vogue for over half a century, Beaton triumphantly added to “the emphasis on visual wonders and effects” that such magazines were capable of disseminating in mass society. In Gundle’s words, he became a force which “unleashed the dynamic of envy that was central to glamour” (Gundle 2009, 158).13 Indeed, aware of its agency, Beaton employed glamour relentlessly. Even in his earliest experiences with Brownie cameras, he recognized that. a continuous battle wages between you and the camera as to who shall be the master. When you discover in your pictures that your subjects are invariably featured at their worst, you begin to embark on a lifelong career of watching various lights playing on the surface of the face. By degrees you become conscious of when and why people are looking their best, and whether consciously or not, you will view people from the best photographic angle. (Ross 2012, 9)

Unquestionably, he succeeded triumphantly in many areas that go beyond the glamorous society portraiture. Beaton was the sole British exhibitor at the influential 1929 Film und Foto exhibition of modernist photography in Stuttgart. His “stature as Britain’s first twentieth-century international media-artist at home in Hollywood, London, New York and Paris” (Hoole 1986) is acknowledged by many critics. Even early on in his career, Beaton came to believe that he was “The Story of an Exception,”14 of someone who could not be ranked among other contemporary photographers.

12 Gundle writes that Baron de Meyer’s “characteristic soft focus setting and lighting came to decorate every issue of the magazine.” Meyer gave his models “an aura of elegance derived from English chic, Slavic charm, and Parisian dressmakers.” Thus he also raised the status of photography among the rich. Gundle sees Beaton as building on this artistic style (Gundle 2009, 158). In the first decades of the twentieth century, De Meyer’s photography defined also the visual language of Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. 13 “Cecil Beaton’s camera,” wrote British Vogue in 1941, “has come to represent a sort of Vogue’s Eye View of the years” (Ross 2012, 8). 14 This was how Beaton introduced himself in a catalogue for his November 1927 exhibition. This was also the title of one of his essays.

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His massive autobiographical oeuvre, which includes 145 volumes of diaries kept from 1922 to 1974,15 along with the bulk of more than a hundred volumes of scrapbooks made from the early thirties to the late sixties16 and comprising newspaper clippings, his old prints, playbills, essays and drawings, testifies to his genius at self-creation. Beaton wrote and illustrated almost forty books, worked in costume and design, and published numerous articles on social and cultural issues, in particular providing advice on questions of appearance. These texts disclose a life dominated by the cultivation of an idea of beauty and the perpetuation of glamour—the thirties brand of enchantment—a desire for which, as stated, photography, along with illustrated magazines like Vogue, were to generate. His life-writing also constitutes an invaluable record of a professional life, one evolving from a phase in history where a photographer was but an inferior tradesman to a stage where he could claim a celebrity status. For his creations Beaton was knighted in 1972 by Queen Elizabeth II, who had earlier been his content sitter. Noël Coward, attributed with “the glamour of success,”17 commanded Beaton to always appraise the façade (Beaton 1979, 12). Bearing this advice in mind, also minding Coward’s warning to mask his homosexuality in order to avoid what “exposes one to danger” (Ginger 2016, 27),18 Beaton harnessed the unique capacity of photography to render facial textures, visual impressions and moods, especially through the use of the close-up, the format that he felt “registered most effectively” (Beaton 1944, 46), eye-catching if concealing, façades. Beaton celebrated the face as a façade—an estheticizing surface of illusion in which he merged two

15 Edited in an unexpurgated version by Hugo Vickers, Beaton’s biographer in 2003. Beaton did not merely diarize, but also reflected on the irresistible richness of daily living, as his early magazine articles such as “How One Lives from Day to Day” testify. Beaton’s diaries have been donated to St. John’s College, Cambridge University. Many of them are in illegible writing as he kept them in all sorts of conditions. Ginger notes that some periods are intensely documented and even re-written while others are quite sparse. Beaton would also “add notes to an earlier period long after the moment” (Ginger 2016, 346). 16 According to James Danziger (2010, 11). 17 As Beaton refers to him in “Have Your Glamour” (qtd. in Gundle 2009, 167). 18 Ginger quotes Coward’s reasons. Coward, who was making sure his own voice was

“definite, harsh, rugged,” advised Beaton to hide his homosexuality as “it closes too many doors. It limits you unnecessarily” (Ginger 2016, 27). Beaton, in turn, reflected “I am really a terrible, terrible homosexualist and try so hard not to be” (qtd. in Ginger 2016, 18).

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distinctive affordances of this figure. After Wojciech Kalaga, I will identify them as the metonymic and the metaphoric. Beaton celebrates the façade as a culturally established metonymy of self-fashioning, testifying to the “high” status of the maker. He also celebrates the façade as a metaphor for the face, reversing its negative connotations with insincerity and inauthenticity. Despite the bold scale and range of Beaton’s dedication—its “symbolic violence”19 —for the artist and culture such metaphoric expenditure was commercially and culturally fertile. Etymologically, the word “face” and the word “façade” have come to connote facticity and activity; since the face and the façade, being external surfaces, imply some interiority, we expect that they will gesture beyond their attracting surfaces. Yet, as Kalaga proposes, the uniqueness of the façade lies in its status as the “simulacrum of the interior.” Because of how it defines excess, the façade is the other—deceitfully promising more than it can possibly deliver or announcing what can only fail to materialize. Its surplus, imbalance, and its conventional framing, however, neutralize what is central for the face—its ethical imperative (Kalaga n.d., 19–20). Unlike the face, the façade welcomes the viewer, invites contact, and is often seductive with its beauty. This clearly manipulative “phatic-expressive” function (Kalaga n.d., 20) is acceptable in façades conceived as metonymies celebrating the owner or the splendour of the architectural interior. Conversely, the face as a façade always connotes some illusion, if not falsity. Like the façade which is there to appeal, glamour too is there to attract and seduce. Stephen Gundle argues that glamour as a system, a “shared language of allure” (Gundle 2009, 6), unsettles us with its mixture of qualities, its excessive and abundant effects. Because they can sometimes be grasped and emulated, glamour renders itself a source of self-definition (Gundle 2009, 6) and of persuasion. Most importantly, with its makebelieve, glamour sustains the illusion that is intrinsic to photography. In the new age of photographic image, the new language of visual persuasion evoked an arrested and constructed beauty. For Beaton, photography was an art which “may be said to have begun with man’s discovery that the tanning of his face in summer was due to the chemical effect of the sun’s rays on his skin” (Beaton 1944, 7) and which developed in response to changing ideas of beauty and interest. Sensing new times and new purposes, Beaton, however, acknowledged 19 Pierre Bourdieu’s term used in Language and Symbolic Power (qtd. in Kalaga n.d.,

25).

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that “there is beauty and beauty” (Beaton 2010, 157), and that beauty anchored in an eventless radiant realm promises explorations and applications beyond the world of social contradictions. For this purpose, beauty needs a framework. The rapidly changing fashions in the portrayal of sitters and also changes in attitudes to sincerity marked the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society. He knew that the demand for new types of beauty could be quickly supplied, that “merely to raise the chin just that little bit higher, to elongate the neck or to lift the arms to a brass tray behind the head, was to appear sensational” (Beaton 1944, 34). A “media utopian”20 submerged in a filmy bath of new media, as he imaged himself in a well-known self-portrait from a New York hotel, Beaton had a sense that there was history to be made. Before World War II, he said “there were over five million photographers in Great Britain, and over sixty thousand workers were employed in the snapshot industry” (Beaton 1944, 42). Mindful of the competition, Beaton chose to follow his intuitions and his passion for acting,21 harnessing and re-ordering modern photography into what we can call after Foucault the “great play space.”22 In it, Beaton re-enacted the experience of expenditure and renewal23 that came with “the job of permanently recording the features of a human being” (Beaton 1951, 181). He became a photophilic, cultivating his fascination with the power of the image of the photograph itself, obtaining “his phantasies from within that artifact” (Mellor 2012, 10) and disseminating them. Referring to his selected photographic portraits from the twenties and the thirties, the first volume of his diary The Wandering Years 1922– 39, his Photobiography, and his Portrait of New York, I intend to engage with the dynamics of expenditure and renewal that inform his assertive practice, but also to show how in the autobiographical texts which address overlapping interests, he relives this dynamics while both displaying and unmasking the construction of façades and of many extra facets of Beaton. Beaton believed that to be a photographer it is necessary to always keep up to date, to maintain close relationship with contemporary life, 20 Buchloh’s term (Buchloh 1992, 60). 21 In his biography of Beaton, Vickers writes that “one reason why Cecil enjoyed being

a photographer was that it nourished the actor in him” (Vickers 1993, 89). 22 Michel Foucault’s term for the game of photography involving the introduction, which photography enables, of the play of the virtual as real (qtd. in Brunet 2013, 104). 23 I am indebted here to Stuart Morgan, who in “Open Secrets: Identity, Persona, and Cecil Beaton” presents Beaton as a man of renewal (Morgan 1986, 111–119).

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to be also a journalist: a photographer’s “pictures must ‘make news’; and nearly always the news is his subject rather than the photographer’s art” (Beaton 1951, 183). At the same time, he did not feel contemporary at all. Looking back at his career, he comes to the conclusion that the fact that he became a photographer was a result not of the mastery of the medium or other external factors such as luck, but rather due to being “intensely interested in a large variety of people whose tastes are often far removed from my own” (Beaton 1951, 183). A master of the performance of sitting, Beaton set out to make any face look attractive and elegant. In a tribute to his art of portraiture, fellow portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz concluded that he was, indeed, a “virtuoso of found light. He understood back light, side light, open shade. No photographer had a longer or more intense romance with the window” (Leibovitz 2015). Yet unlike her, he did not rely on numerous assistants nor did he employ very complex technology. Beaton wanted to believe he was a sole actor. With the emergence of the photographic era, the British painted portrait, which for centuries enjoyed immense popularity, went into decline. Sir Roy Strong attributes this not only to the arrival of the camera, but also to the “collapse of the confidence which so dramatically affected the establishment classes with the First World War” (Strong 1991, 11). The loss of their power and prestige, as well as an unwillingness to embrace modernist experimental techniques (Strong 1991, 11), led to the disappearance of this well-established and much-desired “norm of expression” (Strong 1991, 27). Portraiture in a society operating with changed hierarchies faced new demands. Strong is of the opinion that the Edwardian era “brought one last burst of the visual rhetoric in the grand manner but after 1914 it was dead and hollow” (Strong 1991, 27). Its place was taken up by photographic practices. Beaton, whose photographic career started while he was at Cambridge in 1922,24 developed in defence of the traditional norms and modes of visual expression which Strong deemed were in decline. This was sustained by the need to safeguard a certain demographic in society, to

24 His first photographs appeared in Vogue in 1924. He became a contributor not only of photographs but also of caricatures and illustrations. In November 1927 his exhibition of photographs and drawings at the Cooling Galleries in London established him as a major photographic figure. With success in the magazines came financial rewards which, as he acknowledges, allowed him to indulge his fancy, “riotously” (Beaton 1951, 43).

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create a personal genealogy of beauty and charm, to animate its cultural circulation, and to write himself into such a tradition of “high” portraiture. After Baudrillard, Mellor sees Beaton’s passion in terms of “the code” in the fetishized object. It encompasses “the British cultural codes of female dress, the stage and Empire – the codes of his Edwardian childhood […] a passion for an entire world made up of photographs” (Mellor 2012, 10). The term “photocracy” proposed by the society weekly The Sphere,25 as Mellor writes, can be used to designate figures of Bohemia and the beau monde who were Beaton’s sitters and target audience. This was a new world created by the mechanisms of publicity, dominated by “the connoisseurs of the popular and mass-circulated photograph” (Mellor 2012, 11). It is significant that the codes Mellor talks about include those “possessions, heritage, prerogatives, styles, and practices of aristocracy and of the appropriation and manipulation of these by commercial forces and other actors in the urban environment” (Gundle 2009, 7). Their release into the public sphere led to the creation and dissemination of glamour. Beaton recognized the irresistible appeal of such objects of allurement and expressions they allowed when as a young boy he devoured newspapers and learned to identify the faces and places of the well-known. The major exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London called “The Bright Young Things”26 (2020) confirms that the world of stylish and glamorous subjects Beaton inscribed himself into not by birthright but through his desire, social avarice, and his photographic eye owed its existence largely to photography. The Bright Young Things27 shared the interest in the public circulation of gazes ensured 25 Another society magazine, The Sketch, published Beaton’s work from the 1920s (Mellor 2012, 20). Other society press at the time included Tatler, The Bystander, and The Graphic. Mellor says that “society” and theatrical portrait photography was consolidating its place in competitive journalism (Mellor 2012, 25). 26 Opening in March 12, 2020, and featuring 150 works by Beaton. The exhibition was interrupted by the Covid restrictions. 27 The Bright Young Things, defined by Evelyn Waugh, were “a society, cosmopolitan, sympathetic to the arts, well-mannered, above all ornamental even in rather bizarre ways, which for want of a better description the newspapers called ‘High Bohemia’” (Waugh 1986, 568). In Vile Bodies he satirizes this exclusive social circle as party goers attending “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood” and many other parties (Waugh 2011, 145). They read Daily Excess and possessed a “kind of vicarious inquisitiveness into the lives of others” (Waugh 2011, 131). In the novel Cecil Beaton as David Lennox, the producer

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by photographers. Their subjects were glamorous, that is “available to the public, and for commercial or professional reasons, [they] regarded this availability as an important part of their being” (Gundle 2009, 164). Beaton, their “natural soulmate” (Gundle 2009, 168), championed this style of living and adopted a public persona to match the style, his façade of the artist of glamour. He insisted on a renewal of the old aesthetics,28 old norms, and on the reinvention of formalized ideals. His “‘re-stagings and re-framings” followed “the radiant, eccentric lines of British culture” (Mellor 2012, 58). As Mellor, Beaton’s most prominent critic, emphasizes, Beaton stands firm for a return to the Edwardian or Victorian imagination of “‘feminine’ ornamentation,” safeguarding the notion of modern beauty connected with aristocracy, nobility and the stage, all of which were targeted by “modernizing elements” (Mellor 2012, 51). He feeds the fantasy of “old-world femininity” (Mellor 2012, 51), he bans contemporary dress, and neutralizes the present day with fancy dress and a nostalgia for lost European pageantry. Beatonian nostalgia encompasses his resistance to change, his Victorian solutions, and his return to Victorian vignettes. For Beaton, the high point of history was the Edwardian era before the Great War. He designed period revival sets and complex scenography, cultivating such a “version of history as comedy, where pleasure could be renewed through the consoling apparition of the ‘beautiful’ photograph” (Mellor 2012, 45). World War II was for Beaton a transfiguring purgation. He made over 7000 war photographs as a journalist and photographer in all parts of England and in war fronts in Libya, Burma, India, and China. It is hard to disagree with Mellor’s contention that the war images Beaton produced were a sanitized version of events with of “enterprising photographs,” is one of Waugh’s Bright Young Things (Waugh 2011, 121). In a moving memoir of his Ashcombe house, Beaton quotes John Sutro’s letter in which he consoles Beaton after the lease of the magical house expired: “Your sadness of leaving can be tempered by the thought that you created at Ashcombe for your friends an atmosphere of rarefied aesthetic and physical enjoyment, which they could never have found elsewhere.” Sutro also adds, “I am glad you are going to write a book about Ashcombe. I think it should be made clear that we were not a group of delinquent Bright Young Things dressing up purposelessly.” He finds it was one of the “distorted legends” and defends strongly their shared “innocent and agreeable enjoyment” (Beaton 1949, 121–122). For a visual representation of flappers in their style and panache see also Anthony Wysard’s “At a Bright Young Party” painting. 28 Of some interest may be his design of the Edwardian bedroom at the Ideal Home Exhibition as well as his famous designs for his two homes.

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Beaton’s typical devices, such as “irony, theatrical framing, the grotesque, the use of mirrors and an open display of fiction”—even “Hollywood fictions,” moving from frivolity to implications of heroism (Mellor 2012, 46). Another important feature in the cultivation and recording of his fantasy29 was Beaton’s use of colour. Mellor notes that before the war the photographer favoured a kind of grisaille—soft grey—producing an “even-toned world of melancholy” (Mellor 1986, 55). This changed after the war with a return to his high, artificial colouring of the costumes from his childhood memories. Colour was then employed by Beaton as one of the key figures of difference, artifice and appeal. As Beaton himself understood, his position was “at the terminus of the old studio portrait system” between the “photographer-as-artist” and the photographer as a “corporate agent of Vogue” (Mellor 2012, 26). Writing homages to studio portrait practice as “part of a wonderland of artifice […] also an “artist-gentleman-photographer” (Mellor 2012, 26), Beaton felt motivated to defend personalized photography against homogenizing professional forces. He was also unwilling to upgrade his camera, for years relying on his toy Kodak 3A camera and on his inspiration. As an amateur in the old sense of the word, Beaton perceived “inspiration” and “individuality” as the keys to a certain lifestyle and a certain style of looking. Mellor stresses Beaton’s motif of detachment, his interest in amusement, his abstinence from business, and his disdain for commission. He “put forward performance and the exhibition of the charismatic self” (Mellor 2012, 34). What consumed him was a very calculated practice of celebration of his magical persona of glamour. Describing the transition from amateur to professional status, from the setting of his studio to the intimacy of the strangers’ homes where he was treated like a tradesman, Beaton acknowledged that this new role brought with it a whole new set of perspectives on his life, as well as on the lives of his “clients,”30 at the price of old congenial encounters. What 29 When asked about Beaton’s photography, his friend Truman Capote said he considered him “first and foremost a recorder of fantasy.” He also added that Beaton “documented and illuminated the exact attitude of the moment” (Beaton 1951, 164). 30 Beaton surveys those intimate spaces thinking about taste: “I have often been

astonished to see what uncomfortable and tasteless surroundings many of the so-called privileged classes live in. In New York, apartments are badly proportioned, and there is seldom an object or piece of furniture of the slightest merit or value. In London rooms are shabby, needing a coat of paint and, in winter, inadequately heated. As for Paris - it is amazing to discover that the French princesses, duchesses, countesses and baronesses

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he found challenging were not just new demands but also the fact that “portrait photography had become a tight web of styles and stylisticalities”31 (Keating 2017, 120). These in turn marked recognizable changes in the way he looked at his models. The poet and essayist Peter Quennell, Beaton’s contemporary who wrote introductory essays for his collection Time Exposure,32 explains another critical challenge Beaton faced as a transitional portrait photographer in the late twenties: faces of that period were hard to photograph – pale triangular slips between twin crescents of licked-down hair, framed by the dingle-dangle of barbaric ear-rings. Previous critics have observed of the human face that it appears to change every twenty-five or thirty years; but recently the transformation has been far more rapid. Not once, but half a dozen times, has the idea of beauty altered. (Beaton 1941, 8)

Beaton found that no comparison of these changes was possible. Instead he recommended to aspiring beauties “to study well ‘the top layer’ of the beauties of today,” those who were “the loveliest, the most chic and attractive” (Ross 2012, 154). As established, Beaton himself contributed to their production and celebration via the Edwardian universe, the intimate and the ideal, the gilded and picturesque world coherent with his narrative of the exalted spheres. In the thirties, magazine photography in Britain and the United States exposed readers to a range of diverse techniques and effects through which were created new and striking images, magical and yet omnipresent. Writing in 1929, Beaton tried to define the chic look: “we like no chins! […] we prefer high foreheads to low ones, we prefer flat who form the pivot of French Society, even when they belong to the wealthiest families in France, live in conditions of drab tastelessness” (Beaton 1951, 175). 31 After Whitney Davis, Keating explains the term as “an aspect of configuration as we see it,” a likeness or replication of style which is distinctive from style. Both are visible, yet style—unlike stylisticality—does not need to stem from the same historical origin (Keating 2017, 112). 32 And a writer Beaton hugely admired. In The Face of the World, he recommends him

thus: “A dry brilliance and a somewhat cynical but impeccable taste are Mr Quennell’s literary accompaniments. Add to this his extraordinary range of knowledge, a flawless style without a comma out of place, a wry wit and a great sense of fairness, and you have a very fine writer” (Beaton 1957, 63). Beaton, indeed, frequently comments on other writers, their styles, and their superior talents.

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noses and chests […] we like heavy eyelids; they are considered amusing and smart. We adore make-up and the gilded lily, and why not?” (Beaton 2012c, 154). Patrick Keating argues that viewers appreciated “playing games with pictoriality”; exposed to ever-more exciting artful shifts in, for example, presenting the star in new lighting and composition as well as printing (Keating 2017, 119), they gradually developed good critical viewing techniques. Viewers were becoming so visually alert that the omnipresent Garbo images seduced them not only with stunning closeups but “routinely tricked readers into mistaking various types of women for Garbo or tested readers’ abilities to recognize familiar stars pictured in unfamiliar ways” (Keating 2017, 124). Beaton’s scrapbooks document to what extent images of faces not only in the British and American press but also in France could captivate a master viewer. Though an admirer of the Edwardian good old days, and “the good clear photograph” (Beaton 1951, 181), Beaton did feel the need to experiment with new approaches in the emerging styles in the culture of portrait photography in the thirties. Ramifications of this interest may be found in his new approach to presentations of faces. Of special interest are his double portraits superimposing the same negative to create a single image. Mellor argues that Beaton’s system of portraiture gave a reflection of the face redoubled, thus inviting “enigmas of representation” (Mellor 2012, 17). Beaton elevates doubling to the photographer’s central theme,33 a widely recognized and emulated signature. When such double photographs became artistic currency, this “opened up an abyss of reflexive reference to media fame and the fictional self” (Mellor 2012, 29). For Beaton these photographs were “all very modern” (Mellor 2012, 19). In his introduction to a collection Beaton called Images (Beaton 1963), Christopher Isherwood ranks among very few critics who commented favourably on the images that featured writers and artists in particular. Beauty “has become bizarre, faintly sinister,” he writes. Distortion of the face achieved by multiple superimposition produces the quality Isherwood (writing autobiographically) associates with drug-induced hallucination: “some of these pictures give you an impression of intense vibration

33 Mellor acknowledges his own indebtedness on this point to Jean Sagne’s idea that doubling is Beaton’s “thème centrale de sa production” (Mellor 2012, 19). This includes the doubling of twins and sisters. Mellor also refers to press headlines from The Standard (dated 22 November 1927): “A Double Face Business / Young Artist Supplies Society with New Fad” (Mellor 2012, 28).

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and blurring, as though the originally known object was slipping off its wave-length to become invisible” (Isherwood 1963). He welcomes this disturbing effect as a challenge to the all-too established patterns of reading the human face, which he says often is “like a bill which has been wrongly added up. We glance at the total only, and the total is incorrect” (Isherwood 1963). Beaton’s “Auden” with five eyes, for example, hints at our possible “errors in addition” and Isherwood himself testifies to having discovered new values upon multiple considerations of this original portrait—one that in his estimation promises to resonate with its future sympathetic viewers. Beaton doubles but also transforms images by applying heavy alterations. He was aware, as he writes in his history of photography, that even the early daguerreotype artist did not hesitate to “invest his sitter with a little reflected glamour” (Beaton 1944, 11). Beautifying and embellishing images, he tried to make the picture coincide with the idea he had in mind. With an assistant retoucher, he frequently aided the subject by, for example, cutting, slicing, and darkening the facial shadows to make the subject appear younger. In one letter he gives the following directions for the beautifying steps: “We’ve got to make this wretched woman passable […] so put some life into her hair, and give her the semblance of the neck. God gave her no eyes, but see what you can do. Paint in lashes, cut off her dark mustachios” (Beaton 1951, 168). “From Charwoman to Dowager” presentation piece documents visually the range of changes he described. Such extreme “improvements” before the digital photography “are frequently not only unattainable, in some cases they are physically impossible – products of artistry and imagination, rather than biological reality” (Prodger 2021, 163). Some of Beaton’s Surrealist-influenced photographs were striking in their newness and exactitude, employing a repertoire of props to play with portraiture conventions. Yet he never goes as far as to conceal or to obfuscate the face as some Surrealists did. Instead, Beaton stages the mirrored subject’s narcissistic gaze, he stages the play of mirrors and the spectacle of a woman making-up as part of a recurrent theme in his powerful mythology of the supreme matriarch. The presence of mirrors reflects concerns about outward projections; the mirror images express his desire to create duplicate worlds. This interest is especially visible in his

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fashion portraiture set against the background of desolation.34 In 1926, there emerged images not only of narcissistic reflected doubles and disembodied heads under glass domes, but also of theatrical settings inspired by the spectacle and mentality of Orientalism.35 He boldly acknowledges, “there were no limits to which we would not go to create a dream world” (Beaton 1951, 73). The introduction of exquisite mannequins stirs the attention to the grotesque, Beaton’s structure of feeling competing with beauty. In his Photobiography, he remarks that he was the first fashion photographer to “pose mannequins in ballet attitudes of mock surprise, ecstasy or horror” (Beaton 1951, 163). Critics, however, failed to pay much attention to this novelty. Clearly, those modernist departures were mannered; he never meant to employ methodically any modernist strategies. Beaton’s sitters, notes Quennell, “bear no definite relation to the space they fill” (Quennell 1941, 23); Beaton did not care about sitters’ sense of belonging. Instead he persuaded models to adopt a variety of “attitudes,” he “made phantoms or dream-shapes of the friends he photographed” (Quennell 1941, 23). Classifying them as “imaginative quirks,” Quennell supposes that in an odd period an odd presentation may in fact be reassuring (Quennell 1941, 23), and suggests that of more interest than his use of space are the changes in the treatment of backgrounds in Beaton’s photographs. First, they were reminiscent of an early Russian ballet (“shimmering or gleaming surfaces”) and luminosity (Quennell 1941, 56). With the progress of the Surrealist movement, they grew more sinister. At the end of the thirties, Beaton turned to Surreal ruin and rubbish while during the mid-’30s there followed “the vogue of desolation.” Such surfaces activate all kinds of perceptual and emotional effects. Quennell concludes sceptically that Surrealism, with its worship of violence as an end in itself and its wit, cruelty and imaginative hardihood (Quennell 1941, 61), “has influenced our manner of feeling and seeing, and made a contribution to the repertory of the contemporary artist, without gaining any general hold

34 Beaton recalls, for instance, discovering an office building under construction and finding there “a fantastic décor of cement sacks, mountains of mortar, bricks and halffinished walls. Mannequins nonchalantly reading newspapers or idling elegantly in this incongruous débris, created an extraordinary effect” (Beaton 1951, 73). 35 In his letters to Beaton, his helpful patron Osbert Sitwell validated and celebrated their audacity.

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on the age it sprang from” (Quennell 1941, 62). For example, distortions on the human body, emotions both of horror and homesickness, Max Ernst’s collages and their poetic quality have found their destination in the pages of glossy fashion magazines (Quennell 1941, 67). Quennell laments the fact that it is the popular mass media that “have witnessed the disintegration of the Surrealist movement, its gradual disappearance into the octopus-embrace of High Bohemia” (Quennell 1941, 68). Beaton himself recollects, however, that indeed at the beginning of his career when he thought of his sitters as “lay figures in a fantasy,” he “coaxed them into uncomfortable attitudes and against artificial backgrounds” but as the years passed, he changed backgrounds into more characteristic ones, though, he says he always somehow believed that “the background nowadays really is the background” (Beaton 1951, 164), thus questioning claims of his strong if short-lived belief in modernist techniques. Sir Roy Strong defends as very British “our tolerance of eccentrics” as well as “our love of caricature” (Strong 1991, 73). In Beaton’s work, we find his caricatured celebrities (sometimes subsumed under visual gossip), and it is here that we see him as a vengeful dandy. For Mellor, such choices belong to a pastiche of Modernism, with their certain “masked aggression” and even “misogynism” (Mellor 2012, 38), if not “sadistic aggression” (Mellor 2012, 39). Indeed, Beaton recalls, for instance, that photographing Lady Astor, who found it difficult to maintain a still pose, “the effects were hardly human.” His assistants helped record all this fantastic display for “private perusal only” (Beaton 1951, 173) as they did with another client’s “diabolical grimaces” of spontaneous smiles (Beaton 1951, 174). Such images were never exhibited, only recorded in his autobiographical writings. One can agree with Mellor’s conclusion that, based on only episodic engagements, Beaton’s modernist sensibility and involvement in modernist photography should be seen as a contradictory affair (Mellor 2012, 31). Beaton used multiple exposure techniques only in spirit to engage in “Edwardian theatrical illusions and comic interpretations” (Mellor 2012, 31); also the objects used in his photograms from 1926 were not those of the avant-garde, but rather his own domestic and Bohemian signs (Mellor 2012, 31). Unlike the new photographers of the twenties, Beaton subscribed to the idea that portraits should show especially the decorous and the beautiful. In his portraits of Edith Sitwell, one of the champions of modernity, we experience both the old and the new in portraiture orchestrated to produce a memorable and beautiful façade. Likewise, portraits of other

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writers as well as public personae betray his efforts to beautify what he knew was not the individual, but was rather the transitional character of their faces. Cecil Beaton met Edith Sitwell in 1926, writing in his diary that she looked to him “like a tall, graceful scarecrow with the white hands of a medieval saint” (Beaton 2018, 189). He loved her “formidable aspect” (Beaton 2018, 190); her “forbidding appearance” (Beaton 2018, 207) appealed to his penchant for the grotesque. In Photobiography he considers “Edith” “the most remarkable and beautiful-looking human object I had ever seen to pose for me. With her etiolated Gothic bones, her hands of ivory, the pointed, delicate nose, the amused, deep-set eyes, and silken wisps of hair” (Beaton 1951, 42) she magnetized his photographic imagination. Sitwell was more than willing to participate in his sessions: She posed wearing a flowered gown like Botticelli’s Primavera; she sat on a sofa wearing a Longhi tricorne and looking like a Modigliani painting; she lay on the floor on a square of checkered linoleum disguised as a figure from a medieval tomb, while I snapped her from the top of a pair of rickety house-steps. At Renishaw Hall, the Sitwell house in Derbyshire, the ivy-covered ruins, stone terraces ornamented with large Italian statues, and the tapestried rooms made wonderful backgrounds for pictures of her. Here was the apotheosis of all I loved. With an enthusiasm that felt I could never surpass, I photographed Edith playing ring-a-ring-ofroses with her brothers, plucking the strings of a harp, and, wearing an eighteenth-century turban and looking like a Zoffany, as in a huge fourposter bed, she accepted her morning coffee from a coloured attendant. Suddenly I found myself busy taking all sorts of exciting photographs. All at once my life seemed fulfilled. (Beaton 1951, 42–43)

Images of Sitwell belong to the most praised portraits he produced. In her biography of Sitwell, Victoria Glendinning writes that their encounter, a “miracle,” led not only to years of fruitful collaboration, but also to fame. Beaton “unlocked in her a talent that complemented his own” (Glendinning 1981, 110). He managed to “release Edith – stiff, insecure, unused to expressing herself physically, and nearly forty – from her carapace, so that she was in front of his camera ‘a young, faun-like creature,’ and to enable her to be beautiful and uninhibited” (Glendinning 1981, 111). Beaton “helped her find the self that she wanted to be” (Glendinning

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1981, 112). In fact, abetted by his images, she expanded her eccentric singular self.36 Having Sitwell as a sitter, Beaton in turn came into contact with his future publishers and, most of all, with a new world of “Bright Things”: “one was never daunted by the intellectual discussions on poetry that followed, although,” Beaton recalled in 1928, “I have no ear for poetry and was quite incapable of playing a part in these debates” (Beaton 2018, 207). She would send him her poems and introduce him to her Pembridge Mansions parties with guests, such as Yeats, Eliot, and E. M. Forster. Beaton praises the discovery of an art of living Sitwell’s brothers enjoyed, the “patina of glamour” they imposed on events, their “aristocratic looks, dignified manner, and air of lofty disdain” (Beaton 2018, 207). All in all, contact with the Sitwells brought not intimacy but delight, a “whole new world of sensibility” (Beaton 2018, 207), and “extremely unconventional photographs” (Beaton 2018, 206). Beaton’s biographer, Hugo Vickers, confirms that Sitwell and her brothers were among “most important and most eager sitters” (Vickers 1993, 99) and that their social events took place “amid much jollification” (Vickers 1993, 99). Though the shock of originality Edith produced did mellow with the years, his personal admiration for her never ceased.37 It needs to be mentioned that Beaton did not pioneer the recumbent pose in which he photographed Sitwell. The first images of her were by Maurice Beck and Helen MacGregor, photographers known for the charming carelessness with which they captured, for example, Virginia Woolf. But, as Strong persuasively argues, Beaton surpassed these compositions (Strong and Conrad 2004, 11). Regarding his favourite photograph of Sitwell, the remarkable “Edith Sitwell Lying in State” printed in The Sketch, November 23, 1927, Beaton comments on several occasions about how she appears like a medieval tomb sculpture with closed eyes—between carved cherubs on a black and white linoleum floor—it is as though we are really confronted with an effigy without

36 On this point, see Susan Hasting’s “Two of the Weird Sisters: The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell.” 37 For example in his scrapbook The Face of the World, he inserts his 1928 photograph of the Sitwells with a note on this “ bizarre trinity” as “avant-garde of the twenties always having to withstand opposition” (Beaton 1957, 94).

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a relation to any existing self. The façade simulates monumental qualities and the static values of the past,38 its performative function of showing-off creates an aesthetic illusion fulfilling a desire for public visibility on terms radically opposed to what both Beaton and Sitwell felt was simply common and plain. Sitwell, who in her memoir Taken Care Of , complained about the modern vulgarity of women who no longer wear faces, allows Beaton to capture her utterly unlike any beauty, not even Edwardian. With her hands, which she believed to be her face, crossed on her breast, she synthesizes an idea of apartness. Ian Jeffrey writes that the photographs of Sitwell taken in 1927 “look like nothing so much as events from a theatre of marionettes. His subjects are often mirrored or mingled with figures and paintings, or lit in such a way that a face becomes a mask” (Jeffrey 1984, 198). Likewise, Susan Sontag reads Sitwell’s fanciful, Surreal(ist)-influenced photographs as “overexplicit, unconvincing” effigies (Sontag 1977, 58), and rejects their compensated humanity. An effigy39 as defined by F. David Martin is a “still-life.” Unlike the face proper, and unlike the mask, it is lifeless, it does not hide or conceal anything, it is not predisposed to act: “there is no suggestion of the shifting and shading of feeling, no simmering beneath the surface” (Martin 1961, 66). Confronted with Sitwell’s effigy portrait, we do not assume it will furnish us with an official version of the face, nor even with the face-like work of the façade. The sterility, also the religious connections of this unmoving form, guide our imagination away from resemblance towards a new allure. In its lack of self-consciousness and a seeming indifference of the model, we come close to the glamour of the photographic portraiture of celebrities to come. In the visual history of the twenties and thirties, the face of Greta Garbo constituted for Beaton the ultimate embodiment of beauty and his most important influence:

38 Stephen Spender in his autobiography World Within World remembered Sitwell as a woman impressing everyone, as “reaching beyond herself” (Spender 1966, 289). She “had something of a time-defeating quality of Yeats: that is to say, a power of invoking a massive and colourful historic past” (Spender 1966, 288). 39 F. David Martin says that the term, now used broadly, is “derived from the description of portrait tomb figures of the Middle Ages” where they feature as stills, not as lively characters (Martin 1961, 72).

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This marvellous gay creature had the sadness of Deburau, the clown – resemblance accentuated by her pale face, her deep-set darkened eyelids and skull cap. There was an incredible sensitivity about the modelling of the nose, as if she were able to savour exquisite perfumes too subtle for other human beings to enjoy. Her lips, bereft of lipstick, were like polished shells, and when she gave her big generous smile, her teeth showed square and shining. (Beaton 1979, 35)

In Persona Grata produced with Beaton, Kenneth Tynan notes that Garbo was a made up name. She chose “a Swedish word meaning spirit. It is also a Spanish word meaning pretty, or smart, or trim.” Beaton felt it to be an understatement, for Garbo was a “transcendent” woman.40 She was also an outsider. In Photobiography, he returns to her “pale Deburau face,” “the lunar beauty” he had never imagined was possible (Beaton 1951, 64), the beauty that with passing years acquired “a more chiseled sensitivity, and her expression a more touching nobility” (Beaton 1951, 178). She was “the only person with glamour” (qtd. in Ginger 2016, 118). Garbo refused publicity and this reticence only fuelled the frenzy around her. Beaton writes that at parties people talked about her “skin more ivory than ivory, teeth more pearly than pearls, and eyelashes which, when her eyes looked down, spread across her cheeks like a peacock’s tail” (Beaton 1951, 63). Because Garbo could not even have her passport photograph taken without it being appropriated by paparazzi, she asked Beaton—the “grand and elegant photographer”—to take it. He recalls the situation, saying that “it was as a passport photographer that I took photographs of the face of the century, thereby achieving my greatest ambition, and crowning my photographic career” (Beaton 1957, 178). As with the images of the face of Sitwell so with the images of Garbo’s face, we witness a transforming moment in his life. Beaton knows he has achieved the perfect representation of the quality that pleased him and that would dazzle viewers. While Garbo embodied the romantic and the mysterious—“that genuine, tragic soulfulness” (Beaton 1957, 168)— Sitwell shocked with her eccentricity.41 Both glamorous beauties affirmed 40 This book was conceived as an alphabetical anthology of “unique beings,” a portrait gallery in words and photographs of a hundred people both Beaton and Tynan said they admired for such qualities as energy and elegance. The book was published in London in 1953. 41 And continued to inspire Beaton. Some critics are of the opinion that her portraits produced in the later stage of her life were even more exciting than the earlier ones. In

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a state of being allowing Beaton to receive insight into his own experiences. Such a state of being came with the illusion of an enhanced life. Over the years, widely viewed, these images would sustain this illusion as well as his image as a bearer of glamour. His life-writing offers ample comments on the world of these images. And once Beaton begins to unmask the making of beauty and the working of changing fashions, he steps out of the role of a maker into that of an observer. This change entails mapping of shifts in physical ideals of allure. Beauty remains a major vehicle of glamour, attracting and persuading as well as liberating, but the appeal to glamour of the cynosure of all eyes also allows him to cross social barriers. Beaton worships his ideals, but at the same time he laments the fact they are becoming available to the larger public as a “valued commodity” (Beaton 1957, 168). A major disseminator of his images into the social sphere of public engagement, Beaton complains that we have accepted “mass production” looks, with natural beauty no longer being at a premium: “beauty has become a business rather than an innate asset. It is fabricated wholesale today” (Beaton 1957, 170). He dismisses beauties as clusters of traits produced and controlled by master photographers. For example, in The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places, Beaton explains that a photographic beauty is someone who photographs well—like the refined Grace Kelly. She is a beauty that, seen in a different context, would not be seen as a beauty. Beaton stresses the significance of the flat nose that does not show in profile as “protruding noses cast shadows and cause difficulty for the photographer”; also “there ought to be something behind the ‘nothing’ nose to make a face. It can be observed that all photogenic people have square faces, strong cheekbones and rather square jowls.” That is not everything, “in a photogenic face a big mouth is essential.” Both sides of the face should also be different, without “‘amusement’ puffs” beneath the eyes, and it should possess a certain expressiveness (Beaton 1957, 125). Even so, Beaton also emphasizes that deficiencies can be turned into advantages. He refers to Colette’s face: “though her lips were narrow as a miser’s purse and her hair like a mop, she projected more allure than most classical beauties” (Beaton 1957, 172). He adds that the non-artificial expression of individuality—as one Images we find a striking, though rarely reproduced image of Dame Sitwell multiplied five times with a change of an angle, suggesting perhaps her multifarious sides which only family and friends like Beaton got to know.

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sees in Hollywood beauties—like strangeness and imperfections, too, can be turned into assets. In all these instances, beauty is constructed, not magical. Aided by photographic images, he notes that viewers are not surprised to see new types of Venus constantly emerging from the “foam of fashion and society” (Beaton 1957, 171). Beaton thus recontextualizes the beautiful face: “we have altered our attitude towards the way people look. Strange countenances have become familiar, while faces which would be totally uninteresting in other contexts appear pretty to the eye of the camera” with the result that “we not only accept stark faces but find them beautiful, though they scarcely conform to pretty aesthetic notions” (Beaton 1957, 170). New dictates emerge, hailed by various figureheads or personalities and so “noses become aquiline or snub […] mouths grow thick or thin […] cheekbones rise high as an Indian’s” (Beaton 1957, 167). While in the 1910s Lilie Elsie was the embodiment of the new type of prettiness, with her died hair, picture hats and “broderie anglaise” (Beaton 1957, 166), in the following decades the “age of bones” ideals emerged, and sitters began to assume the cadaverous appearance of the “bean poles.” Beaton writes that in the years following World War I, women “underwent a complete change of face, developing pert little noses, tiny chins and goo-goo eyes; their heads dwindled to the size of a coconut, topped by a monkey-fringe hairdo” (Beaton 1957, 167). Surveying the new types, in his fluent cheeky, slangy way, he notes that in the thirties “the depression and its effects paradoxically brought about more artifice and the remarkable Marlene Dietrich who alternated her appearance in peacock’s feathers and rhinestones with a man’s top hat or grey flannel trousers” (Beaton 1957, 168). Greta Garbo brought with her “a whole new trend towards the romantic and the mysterious” marked by “the play of the northern lights in her eyes, the incredible anguish of her frown, or the moving bitterness of her mouth” (Beaton 1957, 168). Beaton considers her otherworldly presentation as an epitome of beauty. Sitwell possessed “a strange, gothic inscrutability, with her bony face and slitted eyes like an African mask” (Beaton 1957, 171) but the aura of mystery surrounding Garbo was subliminal. The hypervisibility and inscrutability of her face have been a subject of pointed interpretations. As ecstatic about her image as Beaton, Roland Barthes reads the mysterious face singled out by media as a “transition” between “two iconographic ages,” as an artefact. Focusing on cinematic images from Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1933), he renders

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the artefact of the face as both graspable and opaque. Situated at the juncture between the “awe” and “charm,” between the language of the face as an Idea and as an Event, Garbo’s face, writes Barthes, is a concept (Barthes 1972, 57) that, historically, emerges at “that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced” (Barthes 1972, 56). Barthes tries to seize the spell of clarity “of the flesh as essence” and of a move away from the reality of flesh to the “lyricism of Woman” (Barthes 1972, 57), of the stasis and abstraction, singular and plural. Garbo’s face works as a mesmerizing force capable of conjuring what Louise Hornby identifies as the close-up’s formal paradox. Barthes offers a reading of the face which reveals and conceals, which is “both an invitation to come closer and a barrier to intimacy” (Hornby 2021, 102). Judith Brown notes another important tension. Barthes’s radiant description hints at the nature of the lyricism that “rejects heterosexual models and the ideology they answer to,” producing a “lyric suspension that is, at the same time, subtlety and excess, sexual and sexless, moral and divine” (Brown 2009, 108). Very much like Beaton, Barthes celebrates the contradictory nature of Garbo’s face as both seeable and unseeable. In photographic images, Beaton will aim to deliver such a face tout court. In more measured estimates, refusals, withdrawals and inaccessibility of the face of Garbo are rendered as manufactured and calculated. Michelle Henning proposes to read her photographic portraits as “consistent with the ‘floating face’ style of portraiture, which bridged the divide between pictorialist and Modernist styles.” Henning identifies them as “masklike, blank and yet somehow legible and expressive” (Henning 2017, 162). According to this photography critic, the mask-quality should be linked to emerging conventions in the media as well as the enormous influence of Ernst Benkard’s 1927 book of death masks42 published in English as Undying Faces. Likewise, Beaton’s contemporary, Peter Quennell, reads Garbo’s face as a product of confectioned glamour at the

42 “By 1933,” argues Henning, “the floating face looming out of a dark surround had become a photographic cliché.” Among other features, this style “staged, as a hallucinatory vision, the promise of immortality offered by fame. The depicted subject is unaccompanied by the trappings of the age (by period objects and fashions), and becomes a ghostly floating countenance” (Henning 2017, 163).

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service of mass culture. Considering the faces propagated by the media, he observes that “during the mid-twenties two types were mainly predominant – Romantic Experience and Poetic Innocence” (Quennell 1941, 49). The first included the femmes fatales pictured by Aldous Huxley and the second by the “page-boy bob” (Quennell 1941, 49). In the thirties a new type of sexual romanticism came to being. To chart the changing tastes, he reaches for the potent word “glamour.”43 “Up to that time,” he says it had usually been associated with Celtic fairy stories, where it “denoted a particularly sterile and malevolent form of enchantment,” only to then become associated with “the incantatory names of Garbo and Dietrich” (Quennell 1941, 50). The attachment did not last too long, especially due to the operations of cinematic close-up, but it seems to have captured a quality of charm. Of Garbo, Quennell writes that she was “never a great actress and hardly a beauty, with her clumsy movements, undistinguished torso and large unexpressive feet and hands,” and yet she became identified with a “mysterious loveliness that gave every gesture an odd and compulsive charm. Even her gaucherie was strangely charming” (Quennell 1941, 50). More recently, Stephen Gundle has added that because “her front teeth were crooked, her hair was frizzy, and there was a hint of a double chin” she did not photograph well. It was only thanks to “the master of soft-focus effects, the cinematographer Henrik Sartov,” whose light effects and mastery applied to “clean out” facial surfaces, that “the iconic status of her extraordinary face” was established (Gundle 2009, 173). Quennell insists on seeing Garbo as a kind of “sacred prostitute” or “the world’s imaginary mistress” who could not remain a faithful lover. The cult of the one who “once warmed the pillows of millions of picture-goers” (Quennell 1941, 50) expired, to be followed by the cult of Dietrich—that more meretricious and more transitory beauty. In Morocco, a landmark of Hollywood romanticism, her “hermaphroditic elegance,” her mispronunciation of French songs, the “humid suggestive light that frequently befogged her eyes” belonged to

43 A 1938 guide—Glamour and How to Achieve It by Sali Löbel—distinguishes between

“photographic glamour” produced by the cinema and “the glamour of reality” available to all (Gundle 2009, 4). Stephen Gundle, in his discussion of this text, proposes that glamour be thought of as a word that “carries talismanic qualities. It has a sparkle and glow about it that enhance the people, objects and places to which it is attached” (Gundle 2009, 2).

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the spell of “her effect on contemporary ideas of beauty and desirability” (Quennell 1941, 55). Photographs of Dietrich preserved “glistening lips slightly parted to display the teeth and gums, eyes large and misty, eyes large and clouded with sensuous sympathy, the whole appearance as costly looking and as unreal as a corsage of fresh orchids fresh from the Frigidaire” (Quennell 1941, 55). Anticipating its inevitable demise, Quennell turns to glamour and finds it in a singularity of lines, in an “air of brooding, if unthoughtful, sadness. ‘The skull beneath the skin’ has become an important asset; and amateurs of the human face talk of the beauties of ‘bone structure’” (Quennell 1941, 55). Though Quennell discerningly identified negative features of glamour, he could not foresee its cultural potency. Perhaps, wonders Judith Brown, in the indifferent gaze of Garbo, in her distance and coldness viewers could detect “their own precarious subjectivity that seemed tied to the relentless momentum of modernization” (Brown 2009, 117). Glamour marked a shift in the presentation of the individual; Garbo’s inertia and deathliness, features defining glamour, worked as a “corollary to the mental states of her audience, each in isolation” (Brown 2009, 118). Moreover, glamour was not only visible but also copiable as a self-styling option. Magazines like Vanity Fair revealed glamour as an option for the interested reader to pursue: “the magazine trained its readers to think of glamour as an aspect that could be replicated with the right tools” (Keating 2017, 115). Alienated in the urban universe, guided by photographers and writers, consumers could experiment with a style that resisted insistent subjectivity. Identified with Garbo, glamour features as the most generative style and imaginative norm in Beaton’s work. As artifice and as a way of looking, glamour became synonymous with image-making power and, as the next section will show, this was key to his transgressive forms. In his autobiographical writings, he upheld it as a viable life ideal. These two interlocking areas—portraiture and self-portrayal—secured his position in the dominant style of the thirties.

5.2

Dividual Face

Beaton’s first exhibition in November 1927 at the Cooling Galleries in London, his appearances in the newspapers, in the publicity networks, in the gossip surrounding the Bright Young Things, and as the fictional version of David Lennox in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928),

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all no doubt fed his fascination with the dominant theme of Narcissus explored by his critics in connection with his practices of self-presentation. In a great many of his portraits, viewers can often see Beaton as the photographer or as the other “face” next to that of his subject. For example, in a street snapshot from New York, he photographs a poster representing an enlarged face of a sports champion. In the left-hand corner, most likely using the double exposure technique, Beaton makes his eyes and nose visible. Such a double-take is both amusing and revealing. Viewers’ eyes slide across the uneven surface of the winner’s solemn face to focus on the photographer’s eyes, diminished in scale, but expectant, and averted from them. In the well-known “Self-portrait in Mirror with Picasso” from 1933, he frames his face cleverly behind Picasso’s, but in such a way that the back of Picasso’s head is reflected in the mirror behind Beaton. Through this combination he manages to inscribe himself alongside the figure of Picasso, while also gesturing towards a bust of an ancient jester next to his face. Beaton never tired of performative self-styling. Mellor recounts Beaton speaking of his “aspiration to masterful spectatorship, to a condition of becoming all-seeing within the picture itself through self-inclusion” (Mellor 2012, 20). At the end of the twenties and ’30s, Beaton also designed and acted in pageants, his genre “of the costumed and staged self” (Mellor 2012, 24), participating in a “shifting meta-theatrical universe” (Mellor 2012, 24), inventing the throne motif to relate to his acquisition of “an exalted position, a throne; an authority” (Mellor 2012, 24). Beaton was concerned about his non-aristocratic name—he fantasized about aristocratic ancestry, and even devised the fictive identity of “Carlo Crivelli.” Mellor also notes the centrality of his large quasi-oriental signature placed in frames (Mellor 2012, 24–25). Based on such revealing facts Mellor supports the viable claims that Beaton was an epic self-construction, always aligning himself with the claims of photographer-as-artist. Also as a writer, Beaton relies on both narrative and visual tools to amplify and multiply his own presence. He does try to deny his shortcomings as when he says “I have no talents. I merely have character and it’s the seriousness and determination of my character that has made me continue – not my flippancy” (qtd. in Ginger 2016, 314). He records critical comments made by friends about his gaps in knowledge and superficiality. Yet Beaton’s writing is not designed to be self-revealing but self-gratifying. My Royal Past, his spoof celebrity memoir published in 1939 as a narrative of Baroness von Bülop, sets the stage for literary

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impersonations of Beaton’s aspirations to high social status.44 It is an “astold-to” comic exercise based on the life of Beaton’s imaginary friend, the photography-loving Baroness von Bülop, née Hilda von EckermannWaldstein. Hers is a life fit to claim exalted ranks, though is not free from “the acrid dung-hill smell of life” (Beaton 1960, vii), an acknowledgement which makes us realize that Beaton, contrary to many accusations of snobbery, could see through such elevated lives and understand the mechanisms of their collapse. In his introduction, Beaton expresses the belief that his comic story will answer the growing demand for biographies in the “stream-lined, jet-propelled age in which we live” (Beaton 1960, xii) and will also promote the life-writer, whose renewed memoirs in volumes with the intriguing titles A Little Bit More of Me and What I Left Out Before are about to be re-published. Beaton’s unfailing awareness of changing currents in celebrity culture but also his fluent command of life-writing forms shows in his play with references to diaries the princess keeps, her “tiny paper boat on the tumultuous sea of literature” (Beaton 1960, 33), use of an index, the insertion of visual images and the clever ending—the downfall of the princess owing to a newspaper photo. There are twenty-one fun pages of photos, among which readers find portraits of the princess at various points in her life, along with pictures of her husband, some group portraits of friends, and an amusing gallery of six portraits of the princess as a widow captioned “My lonely days of widowhood and exile” which feature Beaton himself dressed up as the princess. Drawings represent the princess but also her interiors and various accessories. The narrator reveals how much trouble the aunt of the princess went to prepare the princess’s face: “first a mask of raw veal, onto which was applied a liquid enamel, to be finished with the ‘plain poudre de riz, and rambouillet’s rouge” (Beaton 1960, 12). She frequently posed for the court photographer “an affected little man of common stock whose ‘art poses’ as a side line had an unwarranted popularity in certain circles” 44 The book was also proof, as Hugo Vickers notes, that “nothing was ever wasted” as far as Beaton was concerned. He quotes Peter Watson, who praised it for its playful concealment of dirt and perversion and suggests that it was revenge on horrible memoirs by the royals (Vickers 1993, 230–231). In Photobiography Beaton says that no other work he ever produced was so lighthearted: “I spent many congenial weeks pasting differentsized faces of Tilly Losch and Don Antonio Gandarillas on to old illustrations cut out from Figaro and Le Monde.” He used diverse settings, “the tremendous period wardrobe,” and he followed procedures concerning the dress codes for royals, old backgrounds, and properties found in the studios of his photographer friends (Beaton 1951, 89–90).

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(Beaton 1960, 58). The narrator presents her as a subject of many international portrait painters, some like Beaton working in the genre of society portraiture. The princess complains about the decline in elegance and especially the degradation of royal forms of representation, which can be identified with Beaton’s views: “it horrifies me to see royalty allowing its likeness to be sold on picture postcards, biscuit-tins, and chocolate-boxes” (Beaton 1960, 58). She also complains about publicity. Even though she changed her name, publicity followed her everywhere she went. Beaton explored many sides of what he identified as “the riotous pleasure of the performance” (Beaton 2012b, 31), constructing new modes of (auto-)biography, for example, by attempting to “revise portraiture into a kind of comedy of egoism, narcissism and shifting identity” (Mellor 2012, 20). Mellor agrees with Miles F. Shore that this “new biography” was “a major literary form at least in terms of sales” (Mellor 2012, 20). Stressing the significance of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) as a model for Beaton, Mellor rightly highlights the importance of his parodic historical biographies, his dressing in drag, the figure of the androgyne, unstable gender and identity, and time-travelling females—all very present in his work. Beaton liked the “ historical costume in those comic, over-abundant tableaux vivants that sustained his framed women” (Mellor 2012, 23). He refers also to illustrations in Orlando and their similarity to some of Beaton’s “conversation-piece-pastiche portrait photographs of the late twenties and early thirties.” Photography, under Woolf’s and Beaton’s authorship, appears to devolve into a game of allusion and citation of historical signs and styles, revived for the purpose of dethroning seriousness. Beaton, like Woolf, was a master of private fancy dress jokes, where “signs of the past and present are collapsed into ‘costume,’ and metafictions proliferate” (Mellor 2012, 23). In his autobiographical writing, his satiric persona was given full rein, supported by irony, pastiche, satire and caricature—his favourite narrative devices (Mellor 2012, 38). Though in photography Beaton conceals his sense of humour from his sitters. He does not want them to know that glamour was also an implied social comment. His autobiographical mock treatment of himself is a teasing comment on his precarious social position, and, we need to agree with Mellor, a certain “triumph […] over the society which blocks his progression to his goal” (Mellor 2012, 38). A photographic montage from his scrapbook in which he shows himself kicking a royal crown visualizes this dream, while, paradoxically, his acclaimed royal portraits testify to its fulfilment.

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Analysing a portrait by Paul Tanqueray “Cecil Beaton” (1937), the art critic Stuart Morgan notes its suggestive qualities of renewal. Beaton “who exists by virtue of a process of constant renewal” (Morgan 1986, 111), an artist whose extraordinarily fecund career is marked by “picaresque” adventures with the ever-changing parts of his selves, is represented in this revealing image as a confident-looking model with numerous pages of printed photographic portraits stuck onto him. Beaton drew aesthetic and social gratification in transformations orchestrated through his improvised tableaux vivants —personal forms of entertainment captured by his camera. Their secret, argues Morgan, “lay in that sense of heightened possibility experienced in play” (Morgan 1986, 113). Not only did the activation of play appeal to Beaton—like moments of photographic intensity—but so too did the embodiment of the select and carefully designed sense of the group or the community.45 The artist seemed to have always been “submitting to perpetual metamorphosis” (Morgan 1986, 114), informed by the artificiality provoked by the welltrod path of its excessive cult of stylization paved by fellow homosexuals. Yet unlike many, Beaton was choosing both the path of revelation and the path of concealment. While for critics like Morgan such choices in the end were responsible for Beaton’s compromised moral stance and a sense of split personality (Morgan 1986, 119), for Beaton himself they were productive forms of self-identification. Revelation and concealment characterize not only photography, which he understood as an autobiographical medium, but also the ways and figures through which Beaton chose to represent himself in his large-scale autobiographical projects. He ranks among those scrupulous professionals who left behind substantial traces in writing, participating in what François Brunet identifies as a “peculiar English tradition, marked by a consistent conviction of the poetic, fictional, and humoristic powers of photography” (Brunet 2013, 89). Invited to a party commemorating Proust’s birthday in Paris in 1971, Beaton came dressed as Nadar, the remarkable French photographer and author of numerous autobiographical texts, the photographer known also for his “Pierrot” series using

45 Morgan shows that community was the central focus in the tableau as in the masque, its heir (Morgan 1986, 113).

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photography as a form of theatrical46 mime. Beaton seemed to have identified with Nadar’s range, ambitions, and fictions presented to him by his age. Evoking his famous “Debureau” faces, Beaton seemed to have kept the mime allegory of photography close to his heart. Like his predecessor, he was constructing rich and serialized narratives making extravagant claims on the importance of the photographer’s self-expression and theatrical performance. His writing, always in the first person, should not be treated as a substitute for his creative eye, but as its auxiliary, in a way that it was also becoming for a growing number of other modern photographers. In 1937, Beaton found a publisher for his Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, a collection of drawings, photographs, and essays. The book was designed by Brian Cook, and carried an elaborate dust jacket and wallpaper endpapers. In the preface Beaton notes: On the shelves at Ashcombe, I have now over fifty diaries & scrapbooks, memorials of many violated magazines, repositories of museum picture postcards, theatrical programmes, letters, photographs & pictorial miscellanea which have accumulated since childhood. Christian Bérard suggested to me that a similar scrapbook might be distilled from my own work during the last five years; & that is what has been done. (Beaton 1937b)

Danziger observes that in the cluttered scrapbooks published in revolutionary dust-jackets, viewers can detect in Beaton’s “wide-roving eye and propensity for high-low pairings” the familiar processes and strategies used in our own digital age of clippings and mashed-up samples (Danziger 2010, 58). These albums not only anticipate more recent forms and habits of self-collecting—they are also sites for the development of the artist’s “curatorial and curious eye, finding visual rhymes and thematic resonance” (Danziger 2010, 58).47 Testimony to his omnivorous practice, the 2010 volume The Art of Scrapbook offers a glimpse of subjects Beaton pursued, like ballet, royalty, gestures, people, interiors, and faces. This elaborates edition documents as well traces of the original image

46 On this point see Brunet (2013, 92). 47 Face of the World is another scrapbook containing his work of the 1940s and ’50s.

It was designed by Mark Boxer.

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presentation. There are forty-two volumes of his scrapbooks48 ; Beaton may have worked on multiple volumes simultaneously. Certainly, the sanitized 2010 publication gives a viewer a sense of plenitude and the degree of his attachment to this artwork. Most of all, scrapbooks assembling collections of distinguished and of ordinary sitters are like “grangerised”49 galleries of beautiful faces. Beaton was introducing them as potpourri combinations of text and pictures that became “relics of every stage of my life” and, in a characteristically apt phrase, “not so much […] a record of change but […] a dossier of delight” (Beaton 1937a, 108). He felt it was fitting that a scrapbook of a photographer and painter would be an “optical” one. He based its form on juxtaposition of pictures culled from the photo media, connecting his private desires with public images. He took pride in producing a dense and lively dossier of distortions and re-compositions that for decades entertained him and his friends. For a collector of images, Beaton says scrap albums are as much a joy in the making as to look back on. Those people have missed much who have never known the pleasure of sitting inside on a glorious sunny day, with a smell of adhesive and pages to fill, and the reckless abandon of violating the magazines which lie in piles in the corner. And for the collector’s friends, the scrap albums are always intoxicating, with limitless discoveries to be made and explanations to be found. (Beaton 1937a, 140)

The Book of Beauty, his first publication, was dominated by the scrapbook form operative in many of Beaton’s work based on montages of images and re-makes of magazines. In an exhibition Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook (1937) launched in New York, Beaton’s photographs were not even “framed, but pinned instead to the gallery walls as a large environmental version of a scrap-album” (Mellor 2012, 13). The practice of collecting images and producing such albums is a form of life-writing and Beaton himself consistently situates his practice in the province of frivolity and private history making. Unlike an archive, a scrapbook rests on the importance of practices or gestures of cutting, 48 Now owned by The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s London. The Art of Scrapbook in its 392 pages consolidates images and quotations from this massive collection. 49 A word referring to practices of inserting illustrations taken from other books. It is used by Sir Roy Strong with reference to the British obsession with collections of portraits (Strong 1991, 10).

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arranging, pasting, and sharing the final product. Garvey writes that the performing subject is the one who testifies to having found something worth preserving and being part of transmission (Garvey 2012, 20). Critically, this position involves also the breaking down of the unity of photography. Images of faces in Beaton’s scrapbooks are taken out of context, ‘cuttable,’ movable and sortable entities, not unified items. Their plenitude is a metaphor for the visual glut and loose unity of face forms in press. Beaton manages this surplus by selecting the photogenic ones and orchestrating them for both personal enjoyment and exploration. Such photographs thus lose their status as inert objects and become conduits of ephemeral experiences. While scrapping may appear as an unserious habit identified with “the photophilic’s erotic desire for possession,” as Mellor sees it (Mellor 2012, 12), at the same time, once images become shared and re-circulated, they lose their property value. They invite new connections, furnishing Beaton’s world as “means of captivation” in Thrift’s terms, technologies providing “affective senses of space, literally territories of feeling” (Thrift 2010, 292). It is such qualities that Beaton defends. Likewise, images of faces in his travel narratives and diaries intersect with qualities of pleasure but also territories of emerging perceptions. In 1928, he declared: “always to be moving, that is the thing” (Beaton 2012b, 31). New York was striking with its smartness and “all-thereness” (Beaton 2012a, 214); its seductive visual festival of faces bore on his identity. Portrait of New York catalogues impressions, lists, facts, and anecdotes, along with his drawings of the city, his photographs and photographs by other photographers (altogether a hundred) taken in hospitals and detention centres, parks, theatres, galleries, and the opera. Walking provokes excess and transgressions. Unlike the flâneur, he bypasses the marvels of the city to apprehend the assault of unattractive faces: “the vibrations in the atmosphere jerk and toss the inhabitants of the city like marionettes. In the electrical tornado that engulfs them, the New Yorkers are no more their own masters than marionettes at the mercy of the strings that motivate their behaviour” (Beaton 1948, 19). The urban ephemera of drab faces rhymes with the misery of the city. After they turn twenty-five, the average New Yorker’s “foetus face” and rubbery red complexion lose appeal (Beaton 1948, 20). On the floor of the Stock Exchange Beaton looks at “financial robots.” He sees “the respectablelooking ants, with grey hair and spectacles, who feverishly chew gum” as “poker-faced ants” (Beaton 1948, 77) who after hours turn to respectable citizens and family men. Smaller ants with “eyes impersonal but bright as

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buttons” lead him to imagine their mechanical tabulating lives (Beaton 1948, 78). A manager of one hotel “confessed that he was appalled by the sadness of the lives of those living in the honeycombs between the walls of his hotel” where “jealousies, rowings, drunkenness and loneliness” are common (Beaton 1948, 36). Strolling in the city, Beaton notices the lives of diverse racial groups and their tragic courses; he notices a prostitute, a “girl in purple cheeks, with viridian spotted veil and gardenias, blue lips and a voice like a bell, a lady with a face-do” (Beaton 1948, 103). The faces in visual images communicate various modes of engagement with life. He focuses on photographers busily taking criminals’ mugshots in police headquarters, full face and in profile, with and without hats: “only the most serious cases warrant a full-length portrait. These relentless camera studies reveal female traffickers in drugs with untidy hair, men masquerading as clergymen snapped in and out of disguise, female impersonators favouring matinee hats and clothes that were fashionable in 1918” (Beaton 1948, 62). In Harlem, he is interested in a photographer whose shop displays images of life’s joys and tragedies with equal detachment. His “apotheosis” images show corpses with “incorporated sentimental views of the victim taken at various times in life,” and reproductions of religious images. There are other shots of autopsies—one with a scull cut off and turned towards the face to look like some “ghastly bearded joke” (Beaton 1948, 105). In the Metropolitan Opera “the harassed faces are continuously lit by the flash of photographers’ bulbs. Groups of old ladies in mustard wigs, chutney wigs that cover a web of skin-stitches over the temples” (Beaton 1948, 123). On Broadway, “the faces on the sidewalk are empty, striving, seeing nothing” (Beaton 1948, 132); but at the same time “some Broadway faces have breath-taking beauty and all possess that American poise which gives each face its individual character” (Beaton 1948, 81). He notices striking visual novelty, an advertisement: “HAVE YOU DONE YOUR BEST BY YOUR DEAR DEPARTED? TRY OUR SPECIALTY DEATH SMILES” (Beaton 1948, 56) but passes it without comment. This spectacle staged in the urban universum of New York, like De Quincey’s London, is not only “the heart in the centre of faces never ending” (De Quincey 2003, 77). It is also a phantom-like repository. Walking, Beaton snatches its eddy of unattractive faces, experiencing a maladjustment that abstracts him from this demythologized centre of the world. Once abstracted from it, in possession of a “cruel-eye” and his freedom, he can feel empowered.

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In his first volume of diaries, The Wandering Years 1922–39,50 Beaton’s face “without too much expression in it” (Beaton 2018, 15) is but another face. Taking ruthless stock of himself while “keyed up to observe everything” (Beaton 2018, 237), as he is keen to emphasize, Beaton records obsessively the theatrical spectacle of faces. For example, he notes the face of the glass-eyed woman he photographs with kindness, Tanis Guinness’s “fat face, her enormous eyes with tulip-petal lids” (Beaton 2018, 192); the niece of Oscar Wilde, Dolly Wilde “raven hair shingled, and oyster face plastered with powder” (Beaton 2018, 195); old Mrs Belloc Lowndes with “dough-coloured face” (Beaton 2018, 208); Warner Rex Warner’s “pale, unseeing eyes” (Beaton 2018, 209); Miss Marbury and her “face of a parrot.” In Dubrovnik, there are “eyes keen for love.” Mrs Pat, his sitter and a mature actress, “disintegrating” under hot lights, possesses “fallen chins and the tragic impedimenta of age” (Beaton 2018, 397). In Russia, he records a “bloodlessly pale and drawn woman with an expression in her eyes of a whipped dog” (Beaton 2018, 406) around “unhappy colourless faces which showed the beaten acceptance of a life only a degree above that of animals” (Beaton 2018, 407). He sees the head of Christ on a canvas curtain “dazzling in the transcendency of its colours, subtle and sensitive beyond all imagining in the drawing of the face” (Beaton 2018, 422). He looks at mosaics, isolating painted ladies like a Hungarian empress with “enamelled face” (Beaton 2018, 423). Faces of whores were “like gazelles; their eyes, glistening with excitement and belladonna, seemed like the eyes of strange birds” (Beaton 2018, 298). Beaton, the man of dinners, fêtes champêtres, teas, fancy dress galas, celebrities, hangers-on, beauties, friends, rich and sought after, attends relentlessly to faces. His diaries contain diverse repositories of facial forms waiting to be sublimated. A master of self-promotion, Beaton did anticipate that his critics would write in his obituaries that “he never really delved deep enough” (Ross 2012, 16). Though some like Quennell find that Beaton’s photographs belong to a period album of the twenties and thirties, still the interest

50 This first volume of his diaries was first published in 1961 to a very favourable

reception. The Years Between 1939–1944, the second volume, was published in 1965, The Happy Years 1944–1948 appeared in 1972, The Strenuous Years 1948–1955 in 1973, The Restless Years 1955–1963 in 1976, and the final The Parting Years 1963–1974 published in 1978. The composite volume of Beaton’s diaries Self-Portrait with Friends was published in 1979 and edited by Richard Buckle.

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in Beaton’s photographs survives. Clicking and clicking for six decades, and writing, tirelessly, over the course of half a century, he responded with devastating talent to the public craving for fantasy. Beaton harnessed life writing forms to expose the possibilities of turning life into a spectacle. Beaton used both arts to fashion himself within the alluring and enchanting force of glamour and to act as a mediating power of glamour. Life, he believed, could be enhanced by means of a glamorous façade. His captivating cosmopolitan career shows that at least this kind of personal transformation was within the reach of our imagination and possibilities. Contrary to earlier predictions, developments in media in the twentyfirst century continue to enshrine glamour. When Victoria Beckham, the glamour figure of this century, identifies Audrey Hepburn as her image-for-all-seasons model,51 she acknowledges and pays tribute to her glamorous portraits captured by no other than Sir Cecil Beaton.

References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Batchen, Geoffrey. Negative/Positive: A History of Photography. London: Routledge, 2021. Beaton, Cecil. “Good-Bye, New York.” In Beaton in Vogue, edited by Ross Josephine, 214–215. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012a. Beaton, Cecil. “Scrap Albums.” Vogue. 15 August 1937a. Beaton, Cecil. Scrapbook. London: Batsford, 1937b. Beaton, Cecil. “The London Season.” In Beaton in Vogue, edited by Ross Josephine, 30-32. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012b. Beaton, Cecil. “Modern Chic.” In Beaton in Vogue, 154–155. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012c. Beaton Cecil. Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease. London: B.T. Batsford, 1949. Beaton, Cecil. British Photographers. London: William Collins of London, 1944. Beaton, Cecil. Images. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963. Beaton, Cecil. My Royal Past: The Memoirs of Baroness von Bülof. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960. Beaton, Cecil. Photobiography. New York: Odhams Press, 1951. Beaton, Cecil. Portrait of New York. B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1948.

51 On this point see: Mail Online October 5, 2019 (dailymail.co.uk), also Gundle (2009, 394–395).

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Beaton, Cecil. Self-Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, edited by Richard Buckle. London: Pimlico, 1979. Beaton, Cecil. The Art of the Scrapbook. New York: Assouline, 2010. Beaton, Cecil. The Book of Beauty. London: Duckworth, 1930. Beaton, Cecil. The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957. Beaton, Cecil. The Wandering Years 1922-39. London: Sapere Books, 2018. Beaton, Cecil. Time Exposure. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941. Beaton, Cecil, and Kenneth Tynan. Persona Grata. New York: Putnam, 1954. Beeston, Alix. In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Brown, Judith. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “From Faktura to Factography.” In The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, 49–81. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Cameron, Julia Margaret. Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. London: Hogarth Press, 1926. Danziger, James, ed. “Introduction.” In Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook. New York: Assouline, 2010. De Quincey, Thomas. Autobiographic Sketches. The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 19. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fry, Roger. “Mrs Cameron’s Photographs.” In Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, 23–29. London: Hogarth Press, 1973. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ginger, Andrew. Cecil Beaton at Home: An Interior Life. New York: Rizzoli, 2016. Glendinning, Victoria. Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Gundle, Stephen. Glamour: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Henning, M. “The Floating Face: Garbo, Photography and Death Masks.” Photographies 10, no. 2 (2017): 157-178. Hill, Paul, and Thomas Cooper. Dialogue with Photography. New York: Farrar/ Strauss/Giroux, 1979. Hoole, John. “Foreword.” In Cecil Beaton, edited by David Mellor. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1986. Hornby, Louise. Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

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Humm, Maggie. “Cinema and Photography.” In Virginia Woolf in Context, edited by Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, 291-302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Humm, Maggie. “The Story behind the Pictures.” The Guardian, 15, November 2003. Accessed 17 September 2019. www.theguardian.com/books/2003/ nov/15/classics.virginiawoolf. Isherwood, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Cecil Beaton’s Images. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963. Jeffrey, Ian. Photography: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. 1984. Kalaga, Wojciech. “Twarz, maska, fasada” [in Polish]. Accessed 18 March 2019. www.nck.pl.pp. Keating, Patrick. “Artifice and Atmosphere: The Visual Culture of Hollywood Glamour Photography, 1930–1935.” Film History 29, no. 3 (2017): 105– 135. https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.29.3.05. Leibovitz, Annie. “Cecil Beaton: The Artist of the Portrait.” Financial Times. 28 August 2015, accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.ft.com. Martin, F. David. “On Portraiture: Some Distinctions.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 1 (1961): 61–72. Mellor, David Alan. “Beaton’s Beauties.” In Philippe Garner and David Alan Mellor. The Essential Cecil Beaton, 9–58. Munich: Mosel, 2012. Mellor, David Alan, ed. Cecil Beaton. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1986. Morgan, Stuart. “Open Secrets: Identity, Persona and Cecil Beaton.” In Cecil Beaton, edited by David Mellor, 111-119. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1986. Quennell, Peter. “Commentary and Captions.” In Time Exposure. Cecil Beaton. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941. Prodger, Phillip. Face Time: A History of the Photographic Portrait. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2021. Ross, Josephine. Beaton in Vogue. Thames & Hudson, 2012. Siemens, Jochen. “Cecil Beaton: A Beautiful Game of Light and Shadow.” Spezial Fotografie Portfolio, No. 40. Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999. Sitwell, Edith. Dame. Preface. Cecil Beaton’s Images. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Spender, Stephen. World Within World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Strong, Roy. “The British Obsession: An Introduction to the British Portrait.” In The British Portrait 1660–1960. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1991. Strong, Roy, and Peter Conrad. Beaton: Portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004.

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Thrift, Nigel. “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Vickers, Hugo. Cecil Beaton. London: Weidenfeld, 1993. Waugh, Evelyn. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Donat Gallagher. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986. Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies. London: Penguin Classics, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. III, edited by Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, 428. London: Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

CHAPTER 6

Massification of Faces in Lilliput and Picture Post

6.1

Introduction

The phenomenon of massification of images defined by the unprecedented increase in the number of photographs originated in the twenties and thirties and was launched by radical changes in their production and circulation. Geoffrey Batchen, like other commentators on the effect of massification, proposes to contextualize the impact of the expansion of photographic images in terms of modification in “the way we experience both the photograph and the world around us,” and though the change for an individual observer was only one of degree, it was still perceptible enough to make them aware of the workings of the “economy of repetition” (Batchen 2021, 253–254). In the interwar period, mass advertising and the increase in the number of illustrated magazines resulted in an unprecedented proliferation of photographic images, a “blizzard” or “onslaught” noted, and lamented, among others, by Siegfried Kracauer. In his opinion, “multiplicity,” and especially the “juxtaposition of images,” should be regarded as a symptom of the decline of knowledge, individual and communal. Writing about mass media and illustrated magazines, which in the twenties were a phenomenon typical of Germany, Kracauer claims that multiplicity occludes and even abates the meaning of the original and its history; the “fear of death” driving the appetite for the eternal present of the “weekly ration” of images dispenses © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_6

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the present moment not to life but to death (Kracauer 2014, 40). Even though the endlessness of photography becomes so well impressed on the age of mass culture, so powerfully exposing the economics of photographic practice, its preeminent thinker directs his critique at the cumulative and alienating effect of the plurality of images. Kracauer is certain that “the features of human beings are contained in their ‘history’ alone” (Kracauer 2014, 38). Draining individual images of their powers of expression, illustrated magazines cannot grant access to real subjects. Yet, despite a long record of resistance to the actions of media directed at deceived subjects, the rich visual ephemerality of newspapers and magazines and their textual features continue to be directed towards an individual in the mass. They trigger responsive experiences, among many things, they provide insights into the communicative values of photography, especially the ways of organizing and configuring growing demand for the visibility of subjects. In this chapter concentrating on social observation, I consider Lilliput and Picture Post , aiming to give way to identification through novel visualizing practices facilitated by new cameras. By turning them both towards those-who-see and those-whoare-seen, and giving priority to dynamic pictorial narratives with a forward movement, the magazines put in place subjective experiences to kindle a mode of knowing on the side of shared elements. Creating sites of interactions on their pages, artists showed the all-powerful photographic impact of face forms. In this chapter, I focus on the eruptions of composite portraying practices in Lilliput and Picture Post which I regard as two major conduits of photographic images of faces in the public sphere in England in the thirties. This sphere may be pictured, after Habermas and W. J. T. Mitchell, as a “theatrical/architectural imagetext, an openly visible place or stage in which everything may be revealed, everyone may see and be seen, in which everyone may speak and be heard” (Mitchell 1994, 364). It is not surprising that in the culture “which was well endowed with, even overrich in, pictorial traditions” and “pictorial formulae” as well as marked by an “especially vigorous tradition of cartooning and caricature” (Jeffrey 1984, 198), magazines providing rich sustenance for the eye were enthusiastically supported. Lilliput and Picture Post were keen to respond to artistic sensitivities as well as the documentary and sociological interests of their contributors and readers. For these purposes, they relied on the logic of seriality, the central aspect of photography. They experimented with word-image forms of argumentation. They attended to the culture

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of critical examination of the face, reviving physiognomic observation and the growth of its social and popular significance. Lilliput and Picture Post framed faces in a network of equivalences, doubling faces with faces, faces with objects, human faces with animal faces, and, critically, associating the faces of the ordinary onlookers with the key figures of the times. By juxtaposing them, they tried to disturb habitual ways of looking to play with possible versions of collective identities. The role of the optical imagination of Stefan Lorant (born István Lóránt), the editor-in-chief of both these magazines, was crucial. A Hungarian Jew and an exile in England, Lorant tried to educate viewers how to become figures of modernity, how to look, how to observe and appreciate extended fields of vision and diverse forms of observation, how to see and become conscious of being a viewer and a subject of viewing among growing numbers of viewers. A refugee from Germany, like other German refugee photographers he worked with, Lorant hoped that engagement in participatory viewing experiences, in collaboration guided by cross-cultural camera artists, would make visible invisible social and cultural relations in order to carry social ramifications, especially in the areas of class crossings. Hence, the composite faces staging in both magazines the idea of visual cohesion of classes. As Stuart Hall notes, the democratizing impulse of “the social eye” of Picture Post depended on the very carefully orchestrated “syntax, style, and rhetoric” of photography (Hall 1972, 83). And in this social project, massification emerged as a necessary approach. It was additionally buttressed by frequent emphasis on “sincere” and “simple” processes of recording, and on both—seriousness and humour. In the thirties, the interest in the mass of people defined Mass Observation, which many Lilliput and Picture Post contributors supported. Tom Harrison, one of its founders, explained his cause as driven by “dislike for […] authoritarianism” and “sympathy for the mass of people […] (a factor) present in the whole origins of MO” (qtd. in Frizzell 1997, 25). Mass Observation (MO), like Lilliput and Picture Post , showed how the project of searching for the identity of the mass-man was related to newspapers, how many of their surveys were triggered in response to newspaper stories, and how much interest in shaping social consciousness determined their strategies. Mass Observation turned subjectivity into a matter of visibility and an image into a form of social sublimation into mass. In December 1936, glossy and lavish American Life magazine initiated its first column “Faces,” proclaiming the shift from the verbal to

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the photographic texts and inaugurating the entry of new “notable faces – notorious faces ” (Belting 2015, 216). Life’s professional production of photographic faces was consumed weekly by over 30 million readers. Both Lilliput (founded in 1937) and Picture Post (founded in 1938) developed a style based on priority given to high-quality photographic images, and like Life and Vu in France, foregrounded photographic messages and photographic experiences. Their dissemination and increase in media was made possible by new printing procedures in relief (half-tone) engraving, used for the first time in 1880 in the New York Daily Graphic, and transmission of photography by wire (phototelegraphy), made possible for the first time in 1904 in connection with the magazine L’Illustration. High-quality rotogravure, in turn, made it possible for magazines like Lilliput to reproduce photographs with dense blacks and mid-tones which came to characterize the approach of some of its camera artists like Bill Brandt. Emphasizing new links between images and words, and also new reader-oriented uses for them, Lilliput and Picture Post highlighted the photograph’s language, its own syntax, associations, and meanings. In the early decades of the twentieth century, inventively laid out, still sequential images and picture-led stories, spreading important pieces over six, even eight, pages were used where previously subjectively interpreted concepts were applied, as Moholy-Nagy writes in “The New Typography” (1923). Moholy-Nagy’s concept of “typophoto,” a combination of photography and typography with the information divided between the two, was one of many attempts to improve the clarity and legibility of the message for the reader’s benefit. New type face and type setting were designed to “establish a correspondence with modern life” (Moholy-Nagy 1973, 39). This multimedia kinetic artist believed that “the objectivity of photography liberates the receptive reader from the crutches of the author’s personal idiosyncrasies and forces him into the formation of his own opinion” (Moholy-Nagy 1973, 73). It was not an accident that Moholy-Nagy’s abstract street view appeared in the first issue of Lilliput . As circulation numbers of the magazines confirm, readers and viewers responded to the novel strategies with enthusiasm and loyalty. The extensive range of these strategies should be acknowledged. In “Metamorphoses of the Image: Photo-graphics and the Alienation of Meaning,” Michel Frizot observes that “[a]t the end of the twenties, the growth of the illustrated press and its increasing use of photographs meant that novelty of presentation was the only way to reach a new public. The graphic arts brought a greater flexibility in the relationships between the

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page, the text, and the image” (Frizot 1998, 440). The new solutions often implemented by artist photographers included unusual layouts, text framed in vignettes, overlapping illustrations, rules and boxes, novel arrangements of textual graphics around the illustrations, also oblique angles, and diverse impositions, inversions, and manipulations (Frizot 1998, 441). Frizot also highlights avant-garde features departing from concentration on the pure image: “this was a period rich in ideas for ways of subverting the image” (Frizot 1998, 448). Its destructuring and distortion were achieved, for example, with “the use of an intermediary between the camera and the subject, so that the sensitive plate perceived the image as though reflected by a distorting mirror” (Frizot 1998, 448). Additionally, images were “diverted”: introduced around 1927, writes Frizot, this way of seeing was meant to extend the field of vision by “distancing the photographic image from its inevitable referent. The link with real life had become more elastic, increasing the discursive space within the image, between what is shown and what can be understood” (Frizot 1998, 449). Yet, while Moholy-Nagy emphasizes the importance of the rhetorical and aesthetic efforts to make the image more available for imaginative explorations of the viewer, other photography critics recognize its significant political implications. When “all borders” shift, arbitrariness rules: “anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently,” writes Susan Sontag (1977, 22). History itself can be turned into a “set of anecdotes and faits divers ”; other photographic objects just as easily become subject to playful reproduction (Sontag 1977, 23). Sontag here echoes Kracauer’s early critical perspectives on the “photograph-able face” of the world in which “the original […] tends to disappear in […] multiplicity” and in the “oddness” of new conceptions (Sontag 1977, 39–40). In a short essay published in Frankfurter Zeitung in 1933 under the title “A Note on Portrait Photography,” addressing manifestations of the “oddness,” Kracauer expresses concerns about disturbing departures from the visualization of physiognomy. He comes to the conclusion that by removing physiognomy from the subject and applying it to different ends, photographers “strive from the beginning not so much to reproduce their subject as to demonstrate all the effects that can be teased out of it” (Kracauer 2014, 59). Likewise, Roger Fry observes that “the fashionable portraits, photographed or otherwise, […] are not like any individual human being at all” (Fry 1973, 23). Thus a medium devoted to multiplicity becomes a provider of

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popular qualities directed to the mass instinct in the public. By instituting a defined set of effects—poses and conceptions about the subject, photographers compromise identification. The poses and effects, when applied like some dressing to parts of the body, render it unnecessarily embellished (Kracauer 2014, 60) and much reduced in stature. In Kracauer’s estimate, the photographic portraits cease to perform the function of “commenting on the text of the face” (Kracauer 2014, 61). Lilliput and Picture Post photographers show, however, that mass reproduction of images can exploit “the effects” without compromising identification. For example, within their economy of album forms adopted to a wide range of photographic genres including celebrities, occupational, ethnographic types, reproductions of paintings and sculptures, sameness in subject presentation indeed dominates over difference; it is foregrounded. However, in Batchen’s terms, the “predictable and comforting sameness,” adopted also by fine artists, does not invalidate the photographically captured faces but rather situates them in an “economy of conformity” which can “allow the photography to certify that we are part of a community for whom such gestures matter” (Batchen 2021, 188). Batchen has no doubt that the mass produced representation of a subject, established already in daguerreotype, engages the viewer’s imaginative response, paradoxically, through the banality of poses and expressions: “the more banal the photograph, the greater its capacity to induce us to exercise our imagination” (Batchen 2021, 208). Illustrated magazines privileged identification through sameness as a strategy of building social connections.

6.2

Photography

Before he started Picture Post , in 1934 Stefan Lorant launched Weekly Illustrated—the first popular English pictorial magazine and a model for Life and Look, selling for 2 d. and offering 24 pages. In 1938, Picture Post under his management offered a 500% increase in its number of pages. Though Lorant himself never produced a coherent body of photographic or literary work, his influence, as Lorant’s biographer Michael Hallett stresses, goes beyond commercial successes. Lorant developed a “picture-based journalism” relying on a unique integration of images and words to “both subtle and devastating effect” (Hallett 2006, 187–188). Lorant himself writes that his plan was to “appeal to the common man, to the workers, and to the intelligentsia […] to tell truth, to enlighten the

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readers of subjects on which they have little knowledge; not to underestimate them or disregard their intelligence; but share with them a common knowledge, to learn together” (qtd. in Hallett 1994). Readers valued the topical and typical narratives, their “English aroma” and their appeal to English decency and common sense. One of the faithful readers, Keith Waterhouse, compliments Picture Post’s exposition of “the fascinating range of small social foothills – commercial travellers’ dinner dances, anglers’ outings, amateur dramatic nights, street parties, mystery coach tours, mock parliaments, flower shows, market days, jumble sales, pigeon races, whippet races, brass band contests, dart matches, tennis matches and all the rest of it” (qtd. in Hallett 1994)—carefully arranged in Lorant’s visual theatre in which photographs were displayed to their best advantage. Prior to his first visit to England in 1931, Lorant was already an established cameraman, well-known in the film world. He wrote for German magazines, he worked in Germany transforming its media, as, among others, the chief editor of Münchner Illustrierte Presse (1928–1933), and as a visual and literary editor, one of the most revered editors in Europe. Such a role as one who establishes an order out of diverse media was new. Lorant, an émigré editor, an Anglophone, working with the staff of five assistants only, became the driving force of the entire Picture Post , overseeing all stages of production and completing its extensively long layouts himself. These were significant, as Deborah Frizzell explains: His layout technique guided the reader’s eye by varying the scale of photographs according to significance of subject matter and formal qualities; he inset and overlapped photographs sometimes employing cropped circular formats within rectangles; he rhymed visual rhythms by the repetition of patterns, textures, and tonalities at intervals; and he created montage-like effects within gridded symmetrical frameworks, privileging the visual story over the text, which was minimal and occupied a fraction of the page. (Frizzell 1997, 36)

The photograph, not the text, came to determine the overall design, including the length of the text. It was complete in itself; it was dynamic and could enter into different relationships and movements. Additionally, to create a sense of interaction, complex layout techniques made it possible to include images of facial expressions of spectators as they responded to the scenes presented.

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Accomplished in image linkage and recall, Lorant was interested not in documenting stories but in composing stories in photographs. He promoted images that were appealing, dramatic, and eye-catching. He encouraged night and full colour photography. Published in the 1938 Modern Photography Annual (Holme 1939), his photographic tenants make it clear that he favoured realistic, and simple images of people. Lorant, writes Giséle Freund, “refused to accept any posed photographs” (Freund 1974, 124). The German Leica camera used by him and by most photographers working for both magazines was crucial. It was an apparatus of “bonding” between British and new German photography allowing dissemination of new values, as Mellor argues, and a “precondition of much of the informal photo-reportage of the time (Mellor 1978, 115). In a delightful collection of autobiographical essays My Leica and I (1938), its users praise the ease with which this camera facilitated the capture of images of hitherto unknown simplicity and spontaneity. Picture Post under Lorant became a site of multicultural photographic experiences, transforming the photographic culture in England. Lorant had worked with many talented photographers in Germany, among whom were Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Munkácsi, and Salomon. Edith Tudor Hart and Wolfgang Suschitzky, who came from Vienna, joined the magazine with other voluntary exiles like Bill Brandt. Supported by the publisher, Hulton Press, Lorant also created work opportunities in England for his ex-colleagues from Germany, photographers very different in outlook and talent. Because they were German refugees with no work permits, their images were left unsigned in the magazine. Nahum Tim Gidal (who changed his name to Tim Gidal), Hans Baumann (who changed his name to Felix H. Man), and Kurt Hübschmann (who became Kurt Hutton) worked hard and appreciated the opportunity, though work conditions were not always satisfactory. In his autobiographical narrative, Felix H. Man recollects that “While I was, on the one hand, very glad to have been able to continue working during the war […] it was to be said, on the other hand, that the Hulton Press had taken full advantage of the fact that I was an alien in a foreign country. I had to accept what was offered me, hand over all my negatives – something I had never done before – and accept payment below my usual rate”—and all despite flourishing business (Man 1984). Other photographers worked on contract basis. John Heartfield (Helmut Hezfelde), whose montages originally published in Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung Lorant admired, was invited by him to contribute his montage work to both Lilliput and Picture Post . These were his first

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influential publications in England. The famous montage, “Keiser Adolf: The Man Against Europe” showing Hitler in a military helmet with huge feathers against the backdrop of a map of Europe, was placed on the cover of Picture Post on September 9, 1939. It brings home the political situation with force. Like his other posters and cartoons, it demystifies. In the magazines, cartoons by David Low, one of the most famous cartoonists in the world, played a similar role. Stefan Lorant was the editor-in-chief of Lilliput between 1937 and 1940. Its first year was one of unprecedented and record-breaking growth in the history of English publishing. Readers congratulated Lilliput on its first birthday, noting especially its vigour and originality. Upon their enthusiastic recommendation, Lilliput Annual was issued, earning in 1939 the title of the “wittiest book of the year.” So popular was it that Hulton Press followed it with other Lilliput bound book publications like The Lilliput Pocket Omnibus and The Bedside Lilliput. The first-year issue of Lilliput contained 1400 pages and was advertised as best for the home or for holidays. Lilliput readers were especially appreciative of photographs. According to polls, as many as 85% of them owned cameras and 72% were male (Lilliput 1938, no. Oct. 3.4, 451). Clearly, readers’ demand for images was very high and exceeded supply. Lilliput responded to the demands, reproducing images ranging from conventional to mildly erotic, to experimental. It explored images of types and engaged with typology as a mode of photographic practice. Images of the rich and the poor, clowns, film stars, beauties, models of photographers, and photographers themselves as clowns and as caricaturists invite viewers to adopt attention to similarities and differences. For this purpose, Lilliput explored the consolidating form of the album. A way of arranging images under a shared theme is visible, for example, in a feature “When the Great Men Were Small: Family Albums of the Famous.” The album offers the opportunity to frame portrait images and at the same time shift, in Batchen’s terms, “the burden of imaginative thought” away from the photographer to the viewer (Batchen 2021, 208). Appealing to a sense of intersubjectivity as a value, albums prompt viewers to explore portraits of diverse subjects, living, and gone. Retrospectives in forms of albums revive, for example, “the momentous period” of the Victorian Age through photographs by its acclaimed artists like Margaret Cameron— “the greatest amateur photographer of her own – perhaps of any – age” (Lilliput 1939, no. April 4.4), David Octavius Hill, Fox Talbot, and photographs by unknown makers. “Queen Victoria” opens “An Age in

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Photograph” series with over 30 images representing the long course of Victoria’s life, which, the historian Philip Guedalla writes in his article accompanying this approving album, “like all the rest of us, has had her ups and downs” (Lilliput 1937, no. Oct. 4, 51). The album subjects the Queen to viewers’ gazes, showing her in the earliest to last photographs; in diverse configurations of poses and expressions, also, as is fitting for Victorian photography, through suggestive settings. One page with four images and the “The Life of a Queen” heading in the middle balances the images in two halves, encapsulating the stages of royal life, from the private to fully calculated presentation. These are also four distinctive genres of photographic portraits. In a casual portrait, the Queen smiles— a striking feature in a Victorian image, as is the out-of-focus face of the monarch. Placed next to the most formal portrait, it offers the Queen as less than sharp and clear, as ordinary. This four-image page is enough to stimulate viewers to discern differences and rhythms on the page and to invite them to speculate about contrastive variants of Victoria’s appearances. There was also pleasure to be derived from the very capacity of discrimination. Additionally, in other images, portraits of family members connect Victoria to the lives of other subjects. Lilliput also draws attention to Victorian ways of thinking about photography and Victorian ways of using photographic cameras, reminding viewers what “an extraordinary affair the camera was, to be sure, with reflectors and scaffolding, and black cloths and all” (Lilliput 1938, no. Jan. 2.1, 96–97). Undeniably, the romantic esteem for photographic practices of the Victorian Age was very pronounced in the magazine. It was thanks to photography, as Cecil Beaton notes, that this age was “more real to us than any previous period […] down to very smallest detail” (Beaton 1944, 13). In a similar vein, Roger Fry credits the power of Cameron’s portraits with the force able to transmit the period (Fry 1973, 25). Victorian images represented Lilliput’s readers’ overall longing for stability and unity. Albums and family photographs symbolized and projected this longing and, through the portraits of the monarch, certified a presence of collective identity. More experimental representations balanced the sameness and difference. Images taken under water or at night, photographs clearly inspired by surrealism, and images exploring odd reflections and light effects with titles like “Rain on the window pane” or “Profile on glass” work against the replication of clarity of identification. Humorous images “Through the Distorting Mirror” of the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein by Henry Ponting (Lilliput 1938, no. March 2.3, 293) engage distortions,

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projecting friendliness and openness of the subject. Dorien Leigh’s four images of “Winston Churchill at the Funfair” (Lilliput 1937, no. Dec. 6.67, 1937, 67) also extend the subject’s appetite for disruption. The camera artists featured in Lilliput like Dorien Leigh, Erwin Blumenfeld, Ylla Camilla Koffler, John Everard, and Augus McBean are contemporary experimenters. Cecil Beaton, “the fashionable young English photographer” of surprising backgrounds and surroundings, features as the maker of new glamourous portraits (represented by “Self-portrait,” “Young Negro,” “Tilly Losch,” “The Famous Dancer,” “Ruth Ford, the American Actress,” “Able Seaman,” “Naboukoff, the Russian Composer,” and “Marlene Dietrich,” “Street in Relief”) (Lilliput 1939, no. Jan. 4.1). Mixing convention and novelty, Lilliput was thus writing its own history of photography, asserting the centrality of its experience in the English lives in the present, while considering its evolution and its astonishing diversity. Picture Post , likewise, hones in on photography, as technology and as art, most of all pressing the arguments for the power of the photographic camera as “the central instrument of our time,” in James Agee’s words (Agee and Walker 1988, 11). In its pages Picture Post explains its working for the benefit of its readers. Great capacities of the slow-motion cameras and the rapid-motion cameras, portrait cameras and x-ray cameras, and, of course, the candid cameras are often noticeably illustrated (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). For example, though not exactly an image created by light waves, a juxtaposition of a close-up of E. Allan’s face taken with a portrait camera against an image of her facial bone structure taken by an x-ray camera, merits a mention. It introduces an inversion, an alternative model of the face, a face à travers. Such an x-ray image would be appealing as an example of images popularly referred to as a product of the “new sight” (Marien 2014, 212). Its dualism of tonality, the positive/negative polarization, negates the classical model of beauty and challenges the conventional sexual relation between the viewer and the viewed, affecting perception in a new way. Also, as an inversion it demonstrates the critical power of photographers to activate the passive (negative) qualities in the image and to subvert cultural codes. An image taken in Café Royal at Regent Street, showing the camera taking camouflaged images through a whole in a briefcase (the way the remarkable photographer Erich Solomon had taken the first reportage pictures in Germany), sends a clear message about changing conceptions

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Fig. 6.1 A young and lovely actress as the X-ray camera sees her. Picture Post, Dec. 31, 1938, p. 54

of attractive objects of visibility and ways of taking unposed, unobserved images. Readers are also instructed on night photography and the power of the camera to watch and to record even though there is nothing to watch. To look, is first of all to want to see. Picture Post is clear about its goal to stimulate new viewing habits. The magazine provokes active responses through the use of intriguing images captioned, for instance, “what do you think they are looking at?” (Picture Post 1938, no. Oct. 8). It provides answers many pages later, after viewers would have seen other arresting photographs. Viewers were also trained to develop a sense of perspective with photographs from the air,

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Fig. 6.2 Lovely actress as the portrait camera sees her. Picture Post. Dec. 31, 1938, p. 55

and from the bottom-up, or simply straight-on. Readers were rewarded one guinea for every photograph sent and published in the magazine. As an arena of exchange, Picture Post educated about the mass production and mobility of photographic images, presenting, for instance, a story of the circulation of one photograph published in three distinctive newspapers, and news stories, and a picture story (a form of its own). On its pages photography featured as a dynamic and powerful medium, as compelling as it was accessible to all. Like Lilliput , Picture Post conjures up collective identities in albumlike arrangements of portrait images. Zoo visitors, park walkers, mothers

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and children, mannequins—women whose job it is to look good as they model clothes to wealthy customers in fashion houses (with two of London’s best-known mannequins Kay Lendrum and Susan Tate), buskers of London, the unemployed, the employed, onion sellers, jazz players, coal miners, charladies, authors, the suffragettes, and the tramps are identified with extensive captions and submitted to an enlivening representation of collectivity. For common readers, albums are also autobiographical combinations of words and pictures. One such biopic documents a shared experience of a teacher who took 2,150 children out of London during a crisis week. This particular album is captioned by a dedicated teacher who in subjective and explanatory captions narrates the ordeal, shifting attention away from her anxiety to the children’s joy. Its author enlivens the pictures with their names and various details of their new experiences. The atmospheric narrative and the snapshots turn the crisis into a rewarding adventure for readers to follow (Picture Post 1938, no. Oct. 22, 55–57). Because Lorant maintained a special professional relationship with Winston Churchill, and assemblages of his portraits featured frequently in Picture Post . Churchill exceeds anyone in terms of his rare qualities; in the “life-story” presented in February 25, 1939, issue, he emerges as a celebrity, at the age of 64 with his greatest moments still to come, a man who has “seen and done more than enough to fill half a dozen ordinary lives” (Picture Post 1939, no. Feb. 25, 16). While the narrative presents his life with a focus on the major points of his acclaimed public life, anticipating in 1939 his role in saving Britain, the Empire, and the Commonwealth, photographs show him “as the public does not see him,” a private man, roofing his dream Chartwell cottage and laying other important foundations. Following the storyline, Churchill’s captioned family album provides a sequential visual narrative, taking the viewer to the present moment. The story of Churchill’s life and the rich album both confirm the presence of a gifted leader, protecting and carrying for his people and serve as a prompt for viewers to reinvent this singular biography. In a large network of relationships, a feature, “Back to the Middle Ages,” presents scenes from attacks on the Jewish population in Germany, isolating portrait images of German artists and Jews driven from Germany (Picture Post 1938, no. Dec. 17, 10). Brought together in the form of an album are the faces of notable Germans as a single coherent object with the same family genealogy. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud,

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Louise Reiner, and Elizabeth Bergner are grouped as “some of the worldfamous Jews for whom there is no room in Nazi Germany today.” Pictures of “some of the Jews whose work made Germany great” include Heinrich Hertz, Fritz Haber, Paul Ehrlich, Albert Ballin, Max Liebermann, Henrich Heine, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and Gustav Mahler. Another group arranges “some of the artists driven from Germany”: Ernst Troller, Ernst Lubitsch, Bruno Walter, Stefan Zweig, and Max Reinhardt. And a fourth set comprises “some of Germany’s Jewish Nobel Prize Winners”: Karl Landsteiner, James Franck, Richard Willstätter, Alfred H. Fried, Otto Warburg. They appear on two pages following a page on which German leaders (Goering, Streicher, Hitler, Goebbels) feature in ferocious enlarged portraits as “the four guardians of German culture today” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 26, 16–18). We know from Tom Hopkinson, Lorant’s assistant editor, that the idea was to “hit back at those bastards” (Hopkinson 1982, 166). With only ancillary captions, it is the photographs that carry the identification and full political effect. In these arrangements of faces, we can recognize taxonomic photography—consistent, ordered, and aesthetically neutral standardized pictures. Archival configurations appealed to modernist photographers like Walker Evans detailing the observed countenances. The archival model of photography was also employed according to the original principle used by Alphonse Bertillon for the purpose of classifying criminals, a system, Batchen explains, which “depends on the serial repetition of a standardized form of representation, making photography its perfect mechanism” (Batchen 2021, 180). Framed and selected to “eliminate individual variations and identify common elements,” as Batchen defines taxonomy, images become subjected to “the insidious exercise of disciplinary power that is such a distinctive feature of modern life” (Batchen 2021, 180). Batchen warns that to subsume portrait images into typology is to secretly conceal strategies of construction and deployment under the pretence of the system of ordering. And as a “system of order (a uniformity of presentation) imposed by the act of representation, not a faithful trace of the world as it is,” taxonomy calls for very careful handling for reasons that are undeclared (Batchen 2021, 184). We should read differences where sameness is favoured and naturalness presumed, urges this influential photography historian. Lorant, relying on his photographers working as detectives, selects the elite to stand for a whole nation, erasing the faces of ordinary Jews from the gathering, almost as if they were already lost to us. For obvious reasons, he does not picture Jewish

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photographers and artists he knew and worked with. Lorant, as a very successful Jew, like some of the members of the gathering, also had to leave Germany. Looking into the future, fearful and conscious of the lifethreatening dangers, he does not show those who had to remain invisible and whose numbers were growing. Some readers wrote that the images “stirred the heart and the mind” that they showed the faults of civilization in 1938 (Picture Post 1938, no. Dec. 17, 10); a few objected to their propagandist energy. Juxtaposing villains and victims in the same photographic arrangements was a bold strategy but Lorant was convinced that it carried a sufficient force, a warning. Lorant himself recollects that his name was often erased from public conversations. He frequently remembered the Savoy hotel in London where a waiter who knew him well as the editor of Picture Post and Lilliput but who refused to use his name with other guests and referred to him as “the foreign gentleman.” Lorant grew tired of being treated as an enemy alien and finally left England for the United States in July 1940, never to return (Lilliput and Picture Post did not fold till the late 1950s).

6.3

Illusionism and Realism

Lilliput was a monthly pocket-sized magazine (7 ¾ × 5 ½ inches). While the paperback format itself was not new, the magazine became associated with this format and is assumed to have influenced other magazines in England, like Opinion. The Lilliput’s first issue appeared in July 1937 with a front cover designed by Walter Trier, a Czech-German illustrator. The magazine introduced him as a “fine painter with the heart of a child” (Lilliput 1939, no. 4.1, 56). His consistent use of simple shapes and fairy-tale colours, his friendly couple, their dog and various accessories, invited fantasy and irony, qualities which became identified with the magazine. Like the German Der Querschnitt, publishing paired photographs and eminent writers, Lilliput set as its goal to introduce good and, as some of their ads note, “fearless” and “unbiased” writers of the world and of Britain. The list of noted contributors was seemingly endless. Among others, it included writing by: Arkadi Averchenko, Karel Capek, Liam O’Flaherty, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Leacock, André Maurois, Ogden Nash, Hjalmar Söderberg, Michael Zoshchenko, Julian Huxley, Stephen Spender, Robert Graves, and Walter de la Mare. Also, the magazine editors believed “that all kinds of well-known people who don’t

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normally write articles – archbishops and admirals, sportsmen and scientists, film stars and prime ministers – have some personal interest they will be happy to write about if asked” (Hopkinson 1982, 227). Over the years, Kaye Webb was instrumental in procuring impressive and unique contributions; Lorant succeeded in providing photographs by the world’s most outstanding photographers. Picture Post , in turn, promoted mostly British writers like Jerome K. Jerome, Naomi Mitchison, and Evelyn Waugh, with occasional articles and short stories by international authors, such as Mark Twain. Picture Post was clever but also, Ian Jeffrey rightly notes, “not above titillation and exploitation. In its pages, photography […] was often reduced to cartoon level by flippant caption writers” (Jeffrey 1997, 14). Jeffrey adds that “In October 1945, its editors, looking back over the first hundred issues, counted around one thousand pictures ‘including or concentrating on girls’, though not all, admittedly, submissive to the male gaze” (Jeffrey 1997, 14). The truth is that Picture Post was created to satisfy the growing demand for images of all conceivable genres. It was a weekly and since its first number in October 1938 the magazine sold out as fast as it was printed. Its unheard of 705,954 copies of the first issue climbed to 1,700,000 copies within the first six months. At the time this was a record in European journalism. In one of its promotional blurbs, we read that many copies “go round three or four families, each of which would buy a copy of their own if they could get one from their newsagents” (Picture Post 1939, no. Feb. 4, 12). It was estimated that half of England’s adult population read each issue. Many factors contributed to the success of Picture Post : the inclusion of candid and interestingly arranged, informal, often unflattering photographs of political figures, captivating series or themes including political world events; pattern, texture, and balance skilfully entwining texts and images, and also the prominent and highly appealing photo-essays. The younger brother of Lilliput , Picture Post , a full-size fifty-page long paper, was also praised for the “the same wit, the same penetration and the same respect for your intelligence that you find in Lilliput.” It promoted the type of humour invented in Lilliput’s irresistible comparison photographs “new, arresting, startlingly funny” for a “generation which wants its visual humour concise, apt and astringent” (Lilliput 1938, no. Oct. 1, 73). I will consider the place and position of these arrangements later in this chapter. Lilliput included several comparison photographs in each issue and was praised for its flashes of wit, entertainment, and fun poked at everything

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and everyone, including celebrities. Its unique and masterful photographs and mischievous captions turned everyone into a victim. With the circulation of 200,000 copies a month in 1939, Lilliput was “planned on the assumption that magazine readers want good pictures, short stories that have plot, form and character, humour that is really funny, satire that is pointed and witty; above all, that there is a demand for good value” (Lilliput 1938, no. Oct. 1, 73). And for the price of 6 p the magazine presented its issues each with over 50 pictures by the world’s finest photographers as well as coloured plates, and twenty short stories. Picture Post , the alter ego of Lilliput , addressed the common man, unlike Illustrated London News, The Sphere, The Tatler, and The Sketch, which were dedicated to the upper classes. The magazine declared that it “has no class feeling” and that it is built on a “foundation of sincerity; belief in the good sense of others” (Picture Post 1939, no. Feb. 4). Lorant, like his friend Allen Lane—the founder of Penguin— was convinced that “vast untapped audiences existed, and between them they revolutionized the very nature of books and magazines” at the time when cinema was becoming tremendously popular and the radio “indispensable” (Hallett 1994). These untapped audiences were not traditional readers of the text but the projected empirical individuals who would need to be reached and developed. Acutely aware of menacing audiences being formed and harnessed at the same time in England, Lorant embarked on a project of forming his audiences through accessible language and a mixture of conventional and novel visual strategies. And so, Picture Post invited its readers to participate and send not only samples of their pictures but also diaries, and letters, imagining that these materials “constitute one of the most lively, racy, and entertaining cross-sections of English life that has been published” (qtd. in Hallett 1994). Some readers were taken by surprise. In one such letter signed by a William Freeman, we read: “as a journalist and author of 35 years’ experience, I am moved to astonishment at the presentation week after week of pages and pages of totally unknown, totally undistinguished and, worst of all – totally uninteresting people, plus the added infliction of the photos being repulsively inartistic” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 19, 4). Lorant replied that it was “a pivotal point at issue. Picture Post firmly believes in the ordinary men and women; thinks they have no fair share in picture journalism; believes their faces are more striking, their lives and doings more full of interest than those of the people whose faces and activities cram the ordinary picture papers. This goes for dictators and débutantes equally”

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(Picture Post 1939, no. Feb. 4, 12). Followers wrote that they expected to be instructed and entertained, they did not want tribulations nor were they interested in affectation: “I should have thought that a journalist of 35 years’ experience would know how tired hundreds of people are of ‘artistic photographs’ and ‘distinguished people,’” wrote Erica Spender (Picture Post 1939, no. Dec. 3, 4). A John Quinn welcomed a “unique break from that ghastly Snobbery which is the curse of our weekly illustrated press” and praised “the space […] utilised to show the living pulse of the world as it throbs” (Picture Post 1938, no, Dec. 24, 4). Picture Post flaunted its candid images showing common places and “the kaleidoscopic scenes of life, about which a great majority of us would otherwise know little” (Picture Post 1939, no. Dec. 24, 4). Images showing the production of the magazine (e.g. Picture Post 1938, no. Dec. 24, 44–52), the economies of the photographic practice, the collective labour involved in the production, as well as stories about its pains and struggles, were meant to strengthen the message that, indeed, with human interest came sincerity and intimacy. In Lilliput and Picture Post looking at and observing the unfamiliar life were encouraged as strategies of mastery. Picture Post ’s chief photographer Felix Man (Hans Felix Sigmund Baumann), introduced earlier in the chapter as a photographer whose career Lorant helped promote, recognized that not everyone knew how to see what is out there, yet he continued to motivate the audience to look: “even the simple happenings of everyday life could be rewarding if freshly depicted with open eyes” (Man 1984), and to remember the experiences of others. He shares many episodes from his professional life, for example: “one simple opportunity I had,” he writes, “was based on observation. When a big building was going up in London, with a lot of machinery involved, people of all types stopped to peer through a peephole in the fence surrounding the building-site. A study of the various faces and the different expressions furnished the material for a most successful series of pictures” (Man 1984). Man became a popular photographer with over 80 photo-stories between 1929 and 1933 and the general public, writes Freund, “recognized their concerns and their pleasures” in his extraordinary work (Freund 1974, 126). Other Picture Post photographers also worked to encourage such active acts of observation by entertaining viewers with stories of the everyday, experimental images, and identification games. No wonder that readers needed several hours to read and look through a single copy of the magazine.

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When over a decade earlier Virginia Woolf thought of “the common reader,” in the manner of Dr. Johnson, she imagined a subject driven by pleasure, someone who “is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing” (Woolf 1925, 11). Woolf acknowledges that, despite obvious shortcomings, the open decisions about points of interest belonged to the common reader and because they expanded experience, they deserved validation. Random choices, she writes, “allow of affection, laughter, and argument” and in the long run can contribute to what Johnson imagined would be a “distribution of poetical honours” (Woolf 1925, 12). Woolf proposes a self-selected, receptive model of reading, one that is not tied to social class. Likewise, Lilliput and Picture Post appealed to what people have in common and to the ordinary. Their underlying premises were grounded on the belief that “common” readers should be acknowledged, persuaded, and entertained by interactions of images and texts to acquire certain authority and competence. Lorant hoped that, encouraged to make free choices, keener-sighted readers and viewers would become, in the end, capable of thinking the real, and distributing their political favours on its behalf. The photographic essay, rooted in magazine and newspaper culture, became one of the platforms of visual-verbal instruction and entertainment, a provider of mixed points of interest. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, the ephemerality of its materials and its spontaneous, impure, and “unpredictable” handling of the visual-verbal relations make the photo-essay antithetical to modernism (Mitchell 1994, 321– 322). Thinking about the thirties as “moments of inadequacy,” Mitchell strongly defends the decade’s role among representational practices. He refers to the famous photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans to claim the photo-essay as a “historical necessity,” a form “both indispensable and disposable” (Mitchell 1994, 321). Contrary to what we may expect, the photo-essay can consist of “photographic series or sequence, even without a text” (Mitchell 1994, 286) but, most typically in documentary journalism and in magazines, it includes rich textual material independent of the images. The nature of the links between the essay and photography may vary, of course, but Mitchell chooses to isolate three such links: essays frequently appear around images in magazines and newspapers because, like photographs, essays connote non-fictionality, the “presumption of a common referential reality”; the

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personal essay and its intimate explorations of identity and memory and photography with its “mythic status as a kind of materialized memory trace imbedded in the context of personal associations and private ‘perspectives’”; and the essay, etymologically, as an attempt or exploration is always partial or incomplete as are photographs “in their imposition of a frame that can never include everything that was there to be, as we say ‘taken’” (Mitchell 1994, 288–289). The image-word dynamic is complex and in the photo-essay will, however, restrain the text and, as Mitchell emphasizes, will allow the photographs to “speak for themselves or ‘look’ back at the viewer” (Mitchell 1994, 289). Mitchell implies here that their mobility and dominance, their power, orient to proximity with the world. Life and experience are the prime motivating forces of the essay. In Picture Post life features as a non-conflicted site giving rise to diverse forms: “A tulip shows its face,” a “bean breaks out,” “a daisy opens its eye,” “this is how a poppy blooms,” “a day in a life of a plant” are flippant captions of miniature, four-to-five picture photo-essays communicating some basic and shared understandings of phases of organic life. These features are rhymed to picture stories and narratives about changes in “the life of” places and humans, courses of which are marked by years of effort and full maturation. The picture story of Neville Chamberlain, for instance, is determined by patterns of growth culminating in negotiations with Hitler. “The Other Neville Chamberlain,” a story of the life of a man who has the same name as the Prime Minister, though incomparable, is a pretext for two distinctive identities to meet on the pages of the magazine. Discussing illusionism as one of the traditions in thinking about the power of images, Mitchell proposes to connect it with “the sphere of nature.” Illusionism is “the capacity of pictures to deceive, delight, astonish, amaze, or otherwise take power over the beholder […] trigger a responsive experience in the beholder” (Mitchell 1994, 325). The “sphere of nature” for Mitchell is that of the viewer’s body “with sensory, perceptual, and emotional automatism – ‘buttons’ that may be pushed to activate the individual beholder” (Mitchell 1994, 328). Visual tropes exemplifying plant behaviour, animal behaviour, and human bodily responses appear frequently in life stories presented in the magazines where their function is to increase a sense of good feelings of togetherness. In Lilliput , they are enhanced by personal narratives of well-known writers, for example, “The Beauty of Life” section (Lilliput 1939, no. 4.6). James Agate, Margaret Lane, Peter Fleming, Ellen Wilkinson, Frank Swinnerton, and Hubert Phillips explore themes of love and friendship, the pleasures of travel,

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books, food, and wine to arm themselves against political and social anxieties. In snapshots, short humourist exchanges, the magazine develops a flair for details and peripheral vision. The editors thus introduce the series: “Hitler, Mussolini, gas masks, crises, jitters – yes, but there are still things worth living for” (Lilliput 1939, 545). Photo-essays by the camera artist Bill Brandt, who worked regularly for both Lilliput and Picture Post until the 1950s, navigate between the two poles of illusionism and realism, exploring proximity but also, in the accurate words of Ian Jeffrey somehow “always exceed[ing] visibility” for some theatrical orchestrations (Jeffrey 1993). The assistant editor of Lilliput , Keyne Web, introduces Brandt as a photographer who “thought lyrically and in a series that hung together well” (Hayward 1986). In 1938, Lilliput ran eight photographs from Brandt’s book A Night in London and it was the first time when a photo series on one theme by one photographer appeared in the magazine. Growing even to ten photographs, Brandt’s photo-essays were used for over ten years and took as their subject English society, its well-stratified types and groups, progressing often in response to the outsider’s desire for the fullness of the experience. Giving readers a taste of his “improvisations,” Brandt rehearses personal expressions of giving the face of the Other at least a provisional chance. For example, in “Twenty-Four Hours in Piccadilly Circus,” published in Lilliput in September 1939, Brandt presents eight pictures from the same vantage point, “the place everyone knows” in London, at regular intervals between 7:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. The pictures show preoccupation with the continuous movement and change, with rhythms of the quotidian time where things begin and come to an end. The pictures illustrate the changes, rhyming presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, comings and goings. Pairing thus the motif of motion, this “well-known London photographer,” as he is identified in captions, represents the social time in “full swing”: “life is exciting, life is full of fun.” It is also obscure, as “Invisible Mending”—an interesting sign in the upper right foreground shows. In “London Night,” another photo-essay consisting also of eight pictures, Brant applies his fundamental unit—a juxtaposition of pairs to show with uncertain lights and strong contrasts, the innuendoes of class-based nightlife in London. Jeffrey points out that subjects for Brandt were “too intuitive to be established in any single picture, no matter how analytical” and that “there was no point in strict authenticity, for the pictures were never meant as documents” (Jeffrey 1993). For example, his portrait “Poor Man’s Child”

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paired with “Rich Man’s Child” in the Lilliput September 1939 issue shows the added dimension of some mystery in this unsettling composition. The poor child’s vulnerable face does not smile (Brandt excluded such vulgar expressions); it stares at us, unaware perhaps of the dirt covering its nose and cheeks, and its clothes. Sadness in its dark eyes conceals some secret to which we gain no access. Brandt seems interested in recognizing this child’s autonomy. Though standing on a chair at a table with empty plates and bowls, we can see that the child is trapped between the vacancy in front of him and the hard wall behind him. Coercive blackness defines his surroundings, as purifying whiteness does for the child “taken” by another photographer in the juxtaposing picture. Brandt, the intimiste, takes us through the obscurity of contemporary experience, manipulating the light of his camera to write this child out of its shadows, and through the dreamlike intensity of his light, make it less strange, make it familiar. Despite a clear quality of intimacy, by emphasizing so strongly inertness, this portrait objectifies the child; we cannot grasp its full subjectivity. Forced to symbolize, the child is a means of aesthetic contemplation of poverty and the portrait appears to be only an essai of visual re-figuration. Another popular photo-essay, “Life in the Lambeth Walk,” gives us a view of the “real life” in “full swing” at the end of December 1938, and as in the previous essay, images dominate and dictate meanings. This photoessay was published in Picture Post with 19 unsigned photographs by another remarkable photographer—Humphrey Spender. His photographs are surrounded by extensive captions and a personal story by a local resident named Ada Barber. Spender was by then an experienced human interest photographer. Given freedom to explore the series as he pleased, Spender was at pains, as he often mentioned, not to caricature his subjects. Deborah Frizzell writes that he “was aware that the images produced would be open-ended enough to encourage multiple readings, that one could ‘interpret photographs of people in so many different, so many more ways’” (Frizzell 1997, 37). Frizzell, who had the opportunity to interview Spender, reveals that he would take the photographs to Lorant who, after reviewing their prints developed by Edith Kay, after designing layouts, submitting the originals to enlarging, cropping, and diminishing, would forward them to his assistant editor Tom Hopkinson, who in turn would “often hire a writer to compose a text in response to the images” (Hopkinson 1982, 37). And Hopkinson made it clear that the stories were driven by images: “I want to learn from you,” he would say to

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Spender, “not you from me” (qtd. in Frizzell 1997, 65). Hopkinson, like Lorant, clearly recognizes the power of images but his comment reveals also complex realities of image production. The photo-essay is a product of the division of the photographic process, a complex collaborative activity, often raising questions about the identity of the photographer and even photography’s identity. Picture Post , interestingly, does not identify Spender as a single author, recognizing, perhaps, the social implications of the involvement of many subjects, most of all, acknowledging the uncertain connections of journalists and writers to the new medium. Captions and texts, left to them, always pointed in a particular direction, explaining the consciousness of the world as they saw it. To consider the collaborative character of the photo-essay is to realize, as Batchen stresses, “the entire political and cultural context that produced the work” (Batchen 2021, 162). It is also to acknowledge changing demands on the viewer. Spender is concerned with the ordinary life and identities of people living in close-knit communities like Lambeth. His earlier experience as a Mass Observation photographer of Bolton and Blackpool communities had helped him develop an intrusive attitude shaped by the organization and identified by Stuart Hall as a “passion to present. Above all to present people to themselves in wholly recognizable terms; terms which acknowledge their commonness, their variety, their individuality, their representativeness, which find them ‘intensely interesting’” (qtd. in Frizzell 1997, 28). Indeed, Spender presents his subjects focusing on a variety of subtle individual facial expressions and their fleetingness, also framing them tightly in natural light to highlight intimacy. His focus on expressions is crucial. Darwin in his famous study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1874), arguably the first scientific study to use photographs, shows that emotions are intimately connected with their “outward manifestations” and that they are not distinctive but shared also with animals. Instantly recognizable, they matter not only for our well-being but also for strengthening our “mutual good feeling” by granting “vividness and energy to our spoken words. They reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified” (Darwin 1965, 364). The immediacy of Spender’s facial displays centres on shared agreeable expressions, all connected through the theme of engagement in collective ordinary activities like talking and shopping. In his story, they are meant to harmoniously define a good day in the life of this small community.

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Not only the visual narrative but also the atmosphere supported by the narrative play a part in sustaining the utopian intimacy. Ada Barber writes in a casual, conversational manner on behalf of a community she knows and loves. Though poor, she believes, it “has a racy and vigorous life” (Picture Post 1938, Dec., 46). Her father, 88, sells straw bags, weather permitting; “you might say he was Lambeth Walk almost” (Picture Post 1938, Dec., 47). She introduces the Lambeth Walk with its lively shops and their frequenters, its “half-church and half-cinema” called the “Ideal” (Picture Post 1938, Dec., 47). In a caption to a photograph showing its packed interior with a big screen, we read that it is crowded on Sunday evenings. Outside “The Ideal” a group of ladies’ chat, possibly about outings the church organizes for those who can spare a small fee. There are other sources of pleasure like a regular cinema. Children can watch Mr. Bradbrook’s lantern pictures of holy places. Barber praises the local pub “The Feathers” and eel-pie saloons; they provide space and sustenance for reasonable prices, “and after all That’s the Chief Thing” (Picture Post 1938, Dec., 49). The life of the Lambeth Walk is “the market that we think of, and the street and the houses. Most of us spend all our lives in these three and never go away at all” (Picture Post 1938, Dec., 53). There are sometimes outsiders visiting; everyone remembers actors came to dance the Lambeth Walk; they recollect the shooting of Mutiny on the Beauty. People stay busy working, washing, cleaning, and connecting with others. Barker identifies as a Northern [sic] custom cleaning not just the doorsteps but also the pavement around it. The striking image “Life in Lambeth Walk: A Lady Cleans Her Doorstep” (Picture Post 1938, Dec., 50) presents, according to the caption, such a “strangely noble act.” This is the only image in the essay which presents a single subject and it is one trying to conceal the face. Determined to finish her job, the “lady” does not look at the cameraman. There is focus and control in her expression, and authenticity, too, resonating with a strikingly similar image in Orwell’s diary from his Wigan observations. Like Orwell, Spender feels he cannot connect with this woman. Baker, however, wants the readers to recognize how overworked these women are and, despite that, how sociable they can be: “you would be surprised what a lot of time some of us have to talk about the others […] and now that some of us use a little lipstick you might think that we were trying to act like Greta Garbo for the fuss they make” (53). While the images focus on the connectivity, the story is defined by the connection to place, time, and ordinary

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activities. Lorant, as Freund writes, embraced the idea that the stories had to have a clear structure and action, “just as in the classical theatre” (Freund 1974, 124). Barber’s account renders life in the Lambeth Walk as dynamic, orderly, and purposeful. It is defined by ordinary actions in a rich network of social relationships. It also sustains the illusion that life is good in the Lambeth Walk. Of course, the Lambeth Walk was a widespread myth in the thirties. In Britain produced by Mass Observation in 1939, this cockney world lives its native carnivalesque lives appealing also to other classes. Though not always represented fairly by Mass Observers, Nick Hubble argues after Ben Highmore, Lambeth Walk created the opportunity to “unite without unifying” (Hubble 2010, 162), and to project an idea of an attractive collective community. Hubble emphasizes that though it was, of course, defined by “enchantment and performance,” by an old “version of pastoral,” the myth carried an alternative at the time of a germinating crisis (Hubble 2010, 162). From Hubble’s perspective, its attractions connected with crossings of class, of gender, and of dress exerted certain influence on the emerging new kind of subjectivity in post-war Britain (Hubble 2016, 354). Hubble also hints at what Mitchell identifies as critical criteria of the photographic essay, a notion of seriousness. It is “frequently constructed in anti-aesthetic terms, as a confrontation with the immediate, the local and limited, with the unbeautiful, the impoverished, the ephemeral, in a form that regards itself as simultaneously indispensable and disposable” (Hubble 2016, 310). In “Life in the Lambeth Walk” essay, photography is the agent of illumination, inducing in viewers that elusive sensation of achieving some higher awareness of subjects while a personal narrative, an ancillary, works to sustain the illusion. Ian Jeffrey reflects that “the candour evident in the ‘human interest’ photography especially of the Thirties is of a special sort” because of the distinctive subjects of the new photo-reporters in Britain, “vitality” of life and “assertive modern types”—not drama (Jeffrey 1984, 180). Jeffrey argues that traumas of Spanish or French photographers were experiencing seemed very removed (Jeffrey 1984, 197). It may be true for many popular magazines but not for Picture Post . The illusionism, affirming the enchanting diverse forms of human and animal lives, also the vibrant lives of the upper class presented beside images of less privileged people, was one sphere the magazine embraced. Its realism was another. Intersecting the two visual perspectives, Picture Post engaged

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in contradictions, believing it was showing the truth of the depth of crises, whether international and domestic, with a profound consciousness. Extreme poverty, squalor, and misery in England feature in many of its essays. In “Big Town Series,” Tyneside, for example, presented in December 17, 1938, with images by Humphrey Spender, a story by Michael Roberts, and layout by Lorant, was an essay representative of the magazine’s successful tactics. The essay stirred responses from readers and in turn answered their comments. A Mrs. Clare Jarman writes, “That such squalor can exist in this rich land of ours is almost unbelievable […] to see the actual pictures of such sufferings, to see the hurt look on human faces, the tightly compressed lips, telling of courage in the face of fearful odds, it tears at ones [sic] heart” (Jan. 7, 1939, 56). To counter the accusations of misrepresentation, Spender was sent on another project in Tyneside aimed to record its nicer parts. Readers were then invited to engage in a dialogue about the real face of Tyneside. Frizzell suggests that the visual polarity, the juxtaposition of opposing worlds, in photographs and Lorant’s harmonizing layouts worked to “counteract complacency” and to “affect social reform” (Frizzell 1997, 44). The strategies used were direct: The irreconcilable contradictions of the messages and formal means embodied in the photographs brought together within these pages jolt the viewer to the recognition that these polarizing conditions exist within the same city. In the captions charity and philanthropy are invoked alongside social reform, while Spender’s individual images document the despair as well as the material achievements. (Frizzell 1997, 45)

Picture Post addressed other difficult themes. The disturbed lives of people in Tarragona and other bombed cities of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, (“Tragedy of Spain” in Feb. 4, 1939), are evidentiary but also intimate, juxtaposing pain and compassion, despair and hope. Robert Capa’s intimate photographs presented in an essay form were selected to rhyme combat scenes with “indecisive moments” fighters spent together in the trenches. It is life shared and endured. Refugees are addressed not as strangers but neighbours: “Picture Post believes that in a rich country like Great Britain there should be a sufficient living for our own men and women, and room for those who are forced to find refuge here […] incidentally, it may not be long before this country will be thankful for all the man-power it can get” (Picture Post 1939, no. Jan. 28, 64). Most of all,

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Picture Post was very conscious about the threats of Nazism. Its longest story “How History Was Made in the Year 1938” with 28 pages and 118 captioned pictures was a record, month by month, of the “momentous” year in Europe. This was the year of Neville Chamberlain, we read, a time of his efforts to secure appeasement and to, nevertheless, prepare for war (the magazine’s owner was a Conservative and a loyal supporter of Chamberlain). Britain features as a nation extending help to refugees from Germany: “Here, in camps or private homes provided by charity, they begin again lives broken by Nazi pogroms” (Picture Post 1938, no. Dec. 31, 36). Born in Hungary, Lorant came to England in spring 1934, with the objective to publish his intimate diary I Was Hitler’s Prisoner (1935), documenting his almost year-long “protective custody” by Nazis in 1933. The day it was re-published as a Penguin Special, Lorant decided to include a brief but revealing extract in Picture Post (1939, no. Jan. 14). Working in England, as mentioned, Lorant was painfully reminded about the threats of Fascism and became determined to warn the English against its horrors. But he chose to do it in an indirect manner. Under his editorship, in Picture Post the images of the everyday in England conjure the real world in control of chaos and alarm; in Nick Hubble’s accurate words, the everyday is a “site of public theatre” (Hubble 2010, 164). Lorant orchestrated it not to instil anxiety but to harness and maintain the attention of an immense audience to what he perceived was the worst threat for England—her growing interest in Fascism, in the multitude of fasces.

6.4

Faces Re/framed

Redefining the idea of singularity, Lilliput and Picture Post developed the conception of the face as a potentiality, as a privileged resource to shape and to use. Because faces trigger a response, and functioning in society entails a necessity to respond to others, they can serve as remedies for isolation and fracturing of communities. Picture Post addresses practical and accessible ways of getting the face ready to meet other faces. In a picture story “How a Face is Changed” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 26, 55), it shows how to appreciate the artifice behind the “art-photograph” of a beautiful face. Its “taker,” the photographer, is the connoisseur of facial beauty who decides whether the face of the model should be oval, square, or triangular; he alters the brows to make them higher and give them “the slightly questioning look which is so much sought after at

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the present day” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 26, 55). He relies on dependable instruments such as shades which are deeper than those in ordinary make-up kits. The photographer is also the agent embodying creative powers in the literal sense, helped only by lightning and background. Light is all important as it can “bring out a good feature or obscure a weak one. Lighting from above will make a face look longer, more elegant, more distinguished. Light from below will make it more mysterious” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 26, 55). Lighting is also influential in sculpting the features around the face for it “can emphasize or fade away the hair. It can make the eyes sparkle, or sink them in pools of darkness. It can make the lips critical, spiritual or inviting. Background also can be used to “accentuate or distract” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 26, 55). The photographer unveils the dynamics of face vision and the reader can see for him/herself the degree of possible transformations. Another story on how an actor’s face is made up from Dec. 24, 1938, shows Charles Laughton being made-up for a new film Jamaica Inn. The complete transformation takes several hours of first the application of grease-paint, the eyebrow pencil job, then “stippling” of a beard, attaching a false nose made of wax (liable to melt in the heat). This representative picture story illustrates the desired changes achieved with the help of make-up. We should highlight that in the thirties and the 1940s “make-up developed a previously unknown degree of sophistication. Artificial eyelashes, plucked eyebrows, talcum powder, and lipstick transformed facial features into an abstract composition of lines and colors. A new sensuality emerged” (Ducros 1998, 545). Photographers produced made-up images, “just the way cosmetics are used: solarization and bleaching-out effects accentuated the symmetry of the outline or eliminated the ridge of the nose in order to bring out the eyes or the lips” (Ducros 1998, 545). Following on these developments, Picture Post familiarized readers with the metamorphosing potentials of new means of aesthetic effects. When represented in an image, a made-up face, Françoise Ducros shows, could be transformed into a seductive plastic component, a “separate artistic entity” (Ducros 1998, 545). In Lilliput experiments in modification and falsification of the face are visualized by the German photographer Blumenfeld Erwin whose sequences stand out because of his fresh language of the photographic image featuring the face as a separate entity: “The Photographer of the Unusual,” “Shadows on a Veiled Face,” “Draped Beauty,” “Eyes of a Black Man,” “Eye of

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a White Woman,”; “Eyes of Youth,” “Make-Up,” “The Eyes”; “Eyelashes”; “Silhouette,” “Through a Veil,” “Beautiful Women,” “Through Frosted Glass,” “Seen Through a Veil,” “The Hidden Beauty,” “Haunted Eyes,” “Speaking Eyes,” and “Eyes of Youth.” Blumenfeld teases out parts of the face to expose their expressive autonomy. As a photographer “conjurer,” Blumenfeld is responsible for the invention of a brilliant, made-up universe in which transformed facial features promise new attractions (Ducros 1998, 545). They are captured and remade for this purpose with all possible photographic techniques: “solarization, overprinting, combination of positive and negative images, sandwiching of color transparencies, and even drying his wet negative in the refrigerator to achieve crystallization” (qtd. in Ducros 1998, 545). In Blumenfeld’s photographs, the sensuality of the face and its distinction emerge as a product of manipulation, a departure from physiognomy Kracauer so lamented. The facial appearance became a subject of transforming picture comparisons, the most popular image arrangements in Lilliput . In them the face draws connections with other figures through the use of double frames—the face next to other faces, next to objects such as stones or sculptures, and also often next to animal faces. Some examples are: the portrait of Gracie Fields (famous comedienne) and Not Gracie Fields (head of herald angel in medieval Bamberg Dome); George Arliss and His Image (Lion at Weimer Castle); the Famous Angel in Rheims Cathedral (Stone); and Mrs. Louisette Bouniol also of Rheims. Contrasts bring together old and young faces of humans, faces of the rich and faces of the poor, animal faces and human faces with captions reinforcing the editorial purpose, as for example in “the man with the sea lion’s face” and “The sealion with the man’s face.” Some pairs show back-front takes: “the critical gentleman”—donkey and the back of “the beautiful lady” (back of her). In Dorien Leigh’s couples details are added as in “The Sun: G.B. Shaw on holiday” and “The snow: an old woman at Garmish.” Contrasts are brought together to originate an exchange, as in a pair in which an image of Goebbels is captioned “we shall conquer the world” next to an image of the sea lion with the caption: “goodness I’m all of a tremble.” A salutation “Hello, Gracie Benito Mussolini” is rhymed with a response “Hello, Musso Gracie Fields.” A pictorial exchange combines Velazquez’s “The Conversation” and its “Modern Variation: A Test Photograph.” The pairing strategy was also employed to put in conversation distinct facial expressions with captions,

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types and stereotypes. For example, Dr Salomon’s portrait of the famous conductor Willem Mengelberg appears with the caption “Put everything in it, will you” next to an imaginary response by Goering “Sure I will.” A “careworn Aged peasant” is presented next to a “carefree Countess von Haugwitz-Reventlow.” The expression on the face of a crying chief diplomatic adviser is made to resemble the crying face of a baby. Images of expressions such as ecstasy, happiness, dignity, sadness, and pleasure motivate yet a further type of juxtapositions. Some pairs evoke facial similarities, others contrasts as in pairs of enemies “Trotsky” and “Stalin.” The old versus new juxtapositions are serialized as in images of the “old Germany” and “new Germany,” in pairs of the classical and the modern ideas of beauty, as in the images of the immortal beauty of Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss” next to its recent mortal model. There are contrasts between species, young and old also in the animal kingdom. A separate group includes juxtapositions of groups as in “ramblers in 1888 and today.” Frames and shapes are also brought together as, for example, in fried eggs and heads of diamond merchants seen from above, or in pairings of x-ray images next to conventional portraits. Face forms in these photographic images seek to approach connections, though any proximity is only an illusion. Additionally, the doubles help reveal an important fact about the identity of photography as always “just one part of a chain to which it refers” (Batchen 2021, 6). In the book of literary juxtapositions, Chamberlain and the Beautiful Llama (1940), Lorant explains that “juxtapositions” were not originally his idea. He copied inferior juxtapositions from American Coronet, a general interest magazine, sure that “people would understand the point of these juxtapositions. They would find the connection between the two pictures themselves, guessing what the pictures meant to say. They would be the artists whose imagination and feeling made up in their own minds the story about the rich man and the poor woman”(qtd. in Hallett 1994, 62). Also, Lorant says: “I tried to show in Lilliput that you should not take yourself too seriously. What does it matter that you look exactly like a dog or a llama resembles Chamberlain? Debunking, it was funny, but it had a meaning. Later, when detractors said that it was a success because people didn’t have to think, it was just in fact the contrary” (qtd. in Hallett 1994, 62). Lorant is aware that humour could trigger interest in new structural formations of subjects—not framed by their singular honorary presence but transmuted into humour-inflected serial forms.

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In the iconographic world of trivia, interplay and resemblance discredit notions of unity, origin, and hierarchy. Visual, the doubles appear more direct than a linguistic pairing. This montage strategy replicates the face by its double—an image of an animal, an object or another subject with connections to the world of nature, taking attention away from the uniqueness or purity of the facial features to allow a game of subversion. In an advertisement for Lilliput , Picture Post sums up “the comparisons” thus: “quite mischievous, devastatingly effective, they puncture pomposities of every kind, and set people with a sense of humour laughing all over the world” (Picture Post 1938, no. Nov. 5, 20). Indeed, Lilliput turned this vis comica into its signature tactic. It can be argued that by highlighting likeness, doubling strengthens connection with the agency of other subjects and objects. The double may appear to offer the potentiality of protection, but it may also work to diffuse the power of the neighbouring agency, by being more impressive in size or form. And so engaging faces, doubles project and multiply all sorts of presences and with them a suggestion of contact. Rosalind Krauss reminds that Freud identified doubles with the mechanism of protection “in order to gain mastery over an all-threatening and inchoate environment” (Krauss 1987, 59). Doubling brings to mind also the Lacanian concept of the “mirror stage,” first presented to the public in 1936. Most of all, doubling should draw attention as an important surrealist “structural principle: simultaneously formal and thematic” (Krauss 1987, 48) and its surreal representations of the “disarticulation of the self by means of its mirrored double” (Krauss 1987, 55). As buffers, complementary faces of humans and non-humans may appeal to union, though many of the doubles mark clear disjunction undermining the singularity and autonomy of the face that we associate with portraiture. Zoomorphic analogies with animals, for instance, suggest the closeness of the relation between human and non-human. The direct deduction method employed by Giovanni Battista della Porta in his influential De humana physiognomonia (1586) worked to determine the relation between the inner and outer world of man, between man and him/herself. In Porta’s iconography, his bestiary, the animal character was assumed to be familiar and thus helpful in identifying the less familiar human characters assumed to be visible in the facial features. Porta identified the signs, organized them and though in a very hazy way, shifted attention to physiognomy, devising also a language of distinction of facial features to show ways to some self-improvement for humans. The purpose employed by Lilliput clearly

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gestures towards the importance of multiplication. Pairs are a locus of connection, faint protective strategies against new emerging brutal signs and masks. Likeness and connection feature in an amusing poem “This One Is Father” by John Holmes Lilliput published in 1939 with an oval photographic portrait. Its speaker, the father figure, addresses his mature son, who is 30, pleading understanding not only of the “funny clothes” but also the smile and hidden “large anxieties” and “small perplexities” invisible in his portrait. He was 30 in the image and it seems everything was “unreconciled” then. The speaker wants his son to remember that strange as his world may seem to him, it was full; it “had weather, women, war, and trouble, / Not only one, but always double.” His world has also been incomprehensible and laughter seems the adequate response to its images. Turning a page, we discover other portrait images of public figures like Chamberlain and some effigy of a soldier. It is the speaker’s invitation to “relax and laugh” when confronting the portrait (Lilliput 1939, no. June 4.6, 632–633) that captures the mood of much of Lilliput ’s propositions extended to its far-reaching readers. To conclude, though we cannot ascertain the actual impact of photographic images, both Lilliput and Picture Post with their premises of participation and entertainment, education and reform, exercised unprecedented power in relations with readers. Both magazines were designed as an arena of integration around public discussions and shared experiences of the world and of its changing fields of vision. Contrary to Kracauer’s estimates, images in these journals did not alienate or deaden the subjects they presented. Earning the extraordinary confidence of the public, Lilliput and Picture Post committed to the “economy of repetition” and novel graphic principles for construction of communal identity and recognition of new dimensions of life. In the world threatened with defacement, images of agreeable faces offered much needed points of connection. And, if anything, attending to them both magazines proved the extraordinary force and validity of visual face forms.

References Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988. Batchen, Geoffrey. Negative/Positive: A History of Photography. Routledge: London, 2021.

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Beaton, Cecil. British Photographers. London: William Collins of London, 1944. Belting, Hans. Faces. Historia twarzy [in Polish]. Translated by Tadeusz Zatorski. Gdansk: ´ Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2015. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965. Ducros, Françoise. “The Dream of Beauty: Fashion and Fantasy.” In New History of Photography, edited by Michel Frizot, 535–553. Köln: Könemann, 1998. Freund, Gisèle. Photography and Society. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974. Frizzell, Deborah. Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-Documents, 1932–1942. Yale: Center for British Art, 1997. Frizot, Michel. ed. A New History of Photography. Köln: Könemann, 1998. Fry, Roger. “Mrs Cameron’s Photographs.” In Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, 23–29. London: Hogarth Press, 1973. Hall, Stuart. “The Social Eye of the Picture Post.” Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, Spring, 1972. Hallett, Michael. Stefan Lorant: Godfather of Photojournalism. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2006. Hallett, Michael. The Real Story of Picture Post. Birmingham: The ARTicle Press, 1994. Hayward, John. “Introduction.” In Literary Britain Photographed by Bill Brandt. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1986. Holme, Geoffrey C. “Modern Photography Annual.” In The Studio of Camera Art 1938–1939. London: The Studio Limited, 1939. Hopkinson, Tom. Of This Our Time: A Journalist’s Story, 1905–50. London: Hutchinson, 1982. Hubble, Nick. “Documenting Lives: Mass Observation, Women’s Diaries, and Everyday Modernity.” In A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Hubble, Nick. Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Jeffrey, Ian. Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928–1983. London: Barbican Art Gallery, Corporation of London, 1993. Jeffrey, Ian. “Introduction.” In Frizzell, Deborah. Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-Documents, 1932–1942. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1997. Jeffrey, Ian. Photography: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. 1984. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography. Edited by Phillipe Despoix and Maria Zinfert. Translated by Conor Joyce. Zurich: Diaphnes, 2014.

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Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987. Lilliput. The Pocket Magazine for Everyone. Hulton Press, 1938–1939. Man, Felix. Man with Camera: Photographs from Seven Decades. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. Marien, Warner Mary. Photography: A Cultural History. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014. Mellor, David Alan. “London-Berlin-London: A Cultural History. The Reception and Influence of the New German Photography in Britain 1927–33.” In Germany: The New Photography 1927–33, edited by David Alan Mellor, 113–131. Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978. Mitchell, Thomas W. J. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Moholy-Nagy, László. Painting, Photography, Film. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973. Picture Post: Hulton’s National Weekly. 1938–1939. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. 1925. Ebook. Accessed 15 March 2021. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusions

Reflecting on the situation of portraiture in the early twentieth century, Jean-Luc Nancy foregrounds its persistence. Portraits continued to be sought after when new and destructive forces traversed the human subject, when the subject was no longer “the subject of a self-certainty or of a ‘humanism’ gathering the properties of the divine into man” (Nancy 2018, 91), and when “the possibility of a face-to-face of the ‘self’” collapsed (Nancy 2018, 86). The human face in the image, the subject of portrait makers—though at times overexposed, often blurred, distanced, or even fading away—has nevertheless kept transforming and renewing its modes of appearance. The main trajectory of this study has traced a propensity to represent the portrait as an evolving site of potentiality for the self to emerge and to renew itself. The authors I have brought together in this study explored connections and passages between accounts of the self, its experiences, transitions, social displays, and relationships. For Witkacy, Woolf, Vogel, Benda, Craig, and Beaton, visual and verbal portraiture, as life practice, shows up concerns about integration and self-display. Engaging face forms without measure—in Nancy’s powerful terms—these face formers approximated not definable limits and measurable boundaries, but excess and excessive modes. This modern trait defines a world of a certain essential instability

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_7

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of the face image, seemingly self-sufficient though always waiting for a response. In the interwar period, the human face began to assume a “new, immeasurable significance” (Benjamin 1980, 210). In response to the unprecedented range of possibilities offered by photography, a still “uncertain and uncomfortable” art (Fry 1973, 23), new forms of subjectivity and new pictorial ways of articulating and representing experience were conceived. Redefining singularity, shifting attention away from the positions of the “dense” subject of the autobiographical act, photographers adopted new approaches to receiving, framing, and reconfiguring the face. Photography, a still medium of relationality between the spectator and the subject—a medium triggering motion, increasing focus, occasioning proximity, inviting multiplicity to the point of deception— photography as a practice and an idea sustained a reframed identity of the face. As a major force in projects of writing, projects portraying and recording selves and thus changing notions of life both social and individual, photography helped undo that minimum of selfhood—the face. Tracing its cultural connotations and imbrications, this study has shown to what extent the visualised face embodied and developed modes of response to the significance of the visual in the field of subjective selfconsciousness. The relevance of the ideas of subjectivity as a matter of visibility has informed my thinking about the face within the discourses of photographic imagination. Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years focuses on artists who experimented with ways of knowing the scope and meaning of facial forms, probing face forms and finding them in their plurality and strangeness. As an image, “always both there and not there, appearing in or on or as a material object yet also ghostly, spectral, and evanescent” (Mitchell 2010, 39), the face escapes our control. Tracing, through the interwar period, the undoing of the face, I have shown how its visual depictions can reveal selves not always realizable in more verbalized practices of narrative self-construction. Multiple parallels and comparisons have emphasized creative acts of visual self-scrutiny by writers and artists particularly concerned about transmission of the self. Despite and through uncertainties around identity and identification, these writers and these artists regularly attend to the bodily nature of the self. Their selfdeterminations postulate an emancipation from traditional vocabularies of facial expressions. Deformed, reformed, and revaluated face forms emerge in distinctive visual metaphors and symbolism of the self; as sur-faces

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given to the senses (Beaton, Benda), as things metaphysically charged (Witkiewicz, Woolf), as the capacity to impose presence on the world of confusing sense experiences (Vogel, Craig, Woolf, Lilliput and The Picture Post photographers), and as the capacity to transform presence (Witkiewicz, Woolf, Craig). In their concern for the efficacy of narrative self-constitution, Witkacy, Woolf, Vogel, Benda, and Beaton turn to vehicles for ideas about life-writing that also contribute the reflection of life as a significant category. I have sought to demonstrate the extent to which the medium of photography, entrenched in life-writing, rehabilitated conceptions of a “life” as a process of experimentation and change. I have aimed to show modes of communicating with “life” as informed by a quest for knowledge through image-making. Life-writing forms in this study— portraits, albums, photobiographies, scrapbooks, image/text narratives, diaries, essays, memoirs, and imaginative self-commentaries—are motivated by real and metaphoric processes of face-making and imaginative risk-taking. A subject of experiment, the face addresses and attracts relations; it calls its identity into question and—ours with it. Intersecting with emerging territories of perceptions, the face forms refuse to provide secure relations for our fragile subjectivity. Nevertheless, in their concerns around mastery of the sur-face, the authors I have examined in this study turned to face forms. They did so in order to express a view of the self inflected to the outside world; in order, thereby, to confront the consequences of their own perceptual agency. In face forms, they found resources on which to draw in their attempts to restore the category of life to writing.

References Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 199–216. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Fry, Roger. “Mrs Cameron’s Photographs.” In Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, 23–29. London: Hogarth Press, 1973. Mitchell, Thomas W. J. “Image.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Thomas W. J. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, 35–48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Portrait. Translated by Sarah Clift and Simon Sparks. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Index

A Agency, 27, 100, 112, 130, 132, 175, 242, 249 Allure, 15, 142, 170, 190, 192 Autobiography, 101, 139, 140, 143, 190 autobiographical spaces, 97

B Barthes, Roland, 16, 159, 171, 193, 194 Beaton, Cecil cool portrait, 174 Garbo, Greta, on, 171, 172, 191, 193–195 glamour, 15, 173–176, 180, 192, 196, 199, 206 photography on, 7, 174, 177, 178, 199 works, 180, 187, 194, 196, 202 Beauty, 15, 19, 21, 36, 72, 80, 83, 92, 99, 106, 112, 113, 129, 137,

138, 145, 156, 161, 162, 170–172, 174, 176–178, 180, 181, 184, 186, 190–193, 195, 221, 238, 241 Beck, Maurice, 7, 170, 189 Benda, Władysław Theodore, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134–149, 163, 247, 249 mask-making, 129, 137, 146, 147 works, 135, 138, 140, 144 Blurriness, 36, 39, 48, 87, 95, 185 Brandt, Bill, 6, 214, 218, 232, 233 Brant, Clare, 129, 130, 145, 232 The Bright Young Things, 180, 196 C Cameron, Julia Margaret, 7, 26, 38, 39, 52, 170, 171, 219, 220 Celebrity, 51, 91, 157, 174, 176, 197, 198, 224 Close-up, 5, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 35, 36, 38, 43–49, 54, 60, 88, 107, 176, 184, 194, 221

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Bru´s, Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8

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252

INDEX

Benjamin on, 44 cinematic close-up, 16, 43, 45, 195 female faces in, 19 Garbo and, 184 photography, 43 portraiture, 38 Collecting, 83, 202 Craig, Edward Gordon, 10, 15, 112, 127, 129, 130, 135–137, 141, 146, 148–163, 247, 249 work, 136, 149, 158, 161

D Defacement, 25, 122, 243 de Quincey, Thomas, 30, 31, 62, 73, 86, 204 Deterritorialization, 17 Diary, 62, 65, 110, 132, 170–173, 178, 188, 235, 238 Doubleness, 13, 34, 50, 58, 63, 184–186, 197, 240–242

E Effigy, 189, 190, 243 Essay, 3, 14, 44, 45, 50, 79–85, 87–90, 92, 93, 95–98, 100–102, 104–108, 119–121, 149, 152, 154, 156, 162, 175, 176, 183, 201, 215, 218, 230, 231, 233, 235–237 photo-essay, 9, 10, 227, 230–234 Excess, 29–31, 35, 48, 62, 65, 79, 80, 86, 89, 111, 118, 174, 177, 194, 203, 247 Experience, 31–34, 40, 44, 47, 50, 56, 59, 60, 63, 65, 72, 79, 84, 85, 90, 93, 96, 97, 99, 102, 107, 108, 110, 111, 121, 133, 137, 140, 148, 156, 160, 173, 175, 178, 187, 192, 203, 212, 213,

221, 224, 228–234, 243, 247–249 Expression, 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 19, 25, 34–36, 39, 41–47, 51, 52, 55, 56, 62, 65, 68–70, 74, 84, 85, 89, 105, 107, 121, 132, 134–138, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 158, 159, 163, 171, 174, 179, 180, 192, 205, 212, 216, 217, 220, 229, 232–235, 240, 241, 248 F Façade, 13, 106, 173, 176–178, 181, 187, 190, 206 Face actors’ faces, 163 as image, 95 autonomy of facial parts, 16 disintegration of, 43 experience of, 15 facelessness, 98, 102, 115, 117, 163 facescape, 17 false face, 129, 140, 143, 145, 147, 148, 153 floating face, 20 forms, 4, 8, 20, 80, 96, 118, 128, 129, 161, 172, 174, 203, 212, 241, 243, 247–249 framing, 14, 147, 248 glamorous, 174, 180, 206 images, 10, 12, 16, 17, 247, 248 massification of, 211 mastery of, 17 model face, 13, 62, 136, 221 selfie-face, 4 singularity, 3, 12, 133 star face, 15 undone faces, 17 value, 2, 58 visuality of, 104 war and, 18

INDEX

Figure, 1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 16, 41, 43, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, 71, 81, 83–85, 87–89, 91, 94, 98, 102, 104, 111–118, 128, 129, 131, 145, 152, 154, 157, 160, 162, 163, 169, 174, 177, 179, 180, 182, 190, 197, 199, 200, 206, 213, 227, 240, 243 Fragmentation, 5, 14, 43, 100, 101 Freund, Gisèle, 6, 170, 218, 229, 236 Fry, Roger, 7, 93, 95, 170, 171, 215, 220, 248

G Garbo, Greta, 15, 16, 142, 171, 184, 191, 193–196 face of, 190, 191, 194 Glamour, 170, 172, 174, 177, 181, 182, 190, 192, 194–196

I Identity, 1, 4–6, 13, 25–27, 30, 33, 37, 40, 42, 43, 48, 52, 56, 62, 63, 65, 71, 96, 98, 105, 114, 130, 131, 151, 155, 158, 197, 199, 203, 213, 220, 231, 234, 241, 243, 248, 249 fluidity, 131 Illustrated Magazines, 6, 9, 10, 176, 211, 212, 216 Image image-making, 9, 196, 249 mobility, 8, 9 proliferation, 70, 211 self-image, 56 Interiorography, 172, 173 Interwar period, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 41, 129, 173, 211, 248 Intoxication, 7, 30, 31, 33

253

K Kracauer, Siegfried, 14, 57, 211, 212, 215, 216, 240, 243 L Léger, Fernand, 16, 116 Life, 19, 21, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 40–42, 46, 48, 53, 54, 57, 65–68, 73, 79, 80, 82, 84, 88–90, 92–95, 99, 101–104, 106, 107, 110–112, 114–116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 129, 130, 135–137, 142, 143, 146–148, 150–154, 157, 158, 161, 169, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178, 182, 191, 192, 196, 198, 204–206, 212–216, 220, 224, 229, 231, 234–237, 243, 247–249 Life-writing, 7, 10, 20, 128, 129, 154, 163, 172, 176, 192, 198, 202, 249 as image writing, 192 essay, 249 “new biography”, 199 photobiography and, 172 photography and, 7, 20, 172 Lilliput , 10, 212–214, 216, 218–221, 223, 226–233, 238–240, 242, 243, 249 Lorant, Stefan, 213, 216–219, 224–230, 233, 234, 236–238, 241 Loy, Mina, 21 M MacGregor, Helen, 7, 189 Magazines, 5, 10, 137, 138, 174, 175, 179, 196, 202, 212–214, 217–219, 226, 230, 231, 236, 243 Make-up, 58, 116, 141, 239, 240

254

INDEX

Mannequins, 112, 113, 116, 117, 131, 186, 224 anonymity, 112, 116 Marionette, 154, 161–163, 190 masked marionette, 159 Mask agency, 134, 145, 150 as quasi-object, 129 Benda mask, 141 death mask, 17, 132, 146, 155, 194 masking, 132, 143, 147 mask-making, 136, 144 mythology, 143, 185 portrait mask, 18, 145 revival of, 140, 149 silence, 134, 135, 148, 161 theatrical mask, 40, 153 Mass Observation (MO), 213, 234, 236 Media, 2, 5, 9, 12, 21, 128, 129, 143, 174, 178, 184, 187, 193–195, 202, 206, 211, 212, 214, 217 interwar and, 21 Metamorphosis, 56, 106, 131, 145 Modernism, 21, 30, 40, 104, 110, 187, 230 photography and, 30, 39, 230 Modern visual art, 8 literature and, 40 Montage, 11, 12, 14, 63, 80, 95, 102, 107–111, 153, 154, 159, 199, 202, 218, 219, 242

O Observation, 80, 85, 93, 96, 97, 99, 140, 144, 212, 213, 229, 235

P Performance, 15, 34, 68, 129, 132, 139, 141, 142, 146, 148, 155, 162, 169, 179, 201 Person, 5, 6, 42, 45, 54, 58, 81, 89, 90, 94, 96, 117, 143, 144, 157, 201 Photobiography, 169, 170, 178, 186, 188, 191, 198 Photocracy, 172, 180 Photographer, 34, 59, 172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181–184, 186, 187, 189, 192, 196–198, 200–204, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 225–229, 232–234, 236, 238–240, 248, 249 as life-writer, 198 Photography, 2, 4, 6–9, 11–13, 17, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 46, 54, 57, 63, 64, 67, 73, 109, 129, 131, 132, 140–143, 170, 173–178, 180, 182–185, 187, 194, 199–201, 203, 212–215, 218, 220–223, 225, 231, 234, 236, 241, 248, 249 as art, 39, 221 as medium, 4, 6, 12, 32, 36, 39, 43, 143, 175, 179, 223, 248, 249 as self-expression, 7, 25, 201 as self-realization, 7 composite photography, 59, 213 materiality, 129 photographic culture, 218 photographic experience, 214, 218 photographic experiments, 10 photographic portraiture, 33 photographic subjects, 6 serial photography, 7, 57, 225 Photology, 82 Physiognomy, 5, 15, 35, 44–47, 57, 135, 136, 145, 215, 240, 242

INDEX

Picasso, Pablo, 19, 20, 58, 112, 132, 197 Picture comparisons, 240 Picture Post , 10, 212–214, 216–219, 221–239, 242, 243, 249 Pleasure, 8, 33, 40, 85, 107, 115, 129, 133, 146, 148, 163, 203, 220, 230, 231, 235, 241 Portraiture, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 33, 36, 40, 47, 48, 55, 56, 58–60, 64, 68, 72, 79, 87, 95, 113, 134, 175, 179, 180, 184–187, 190, 196, 199, 242, 247 close-up and, 16 composite, 39 fracturing, 12 painting and, 95 photography and, 59, 95

R Relationality, 21, 163, 248 Repetition, 5, 14, 71, 73, 108, 114, 153 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 5, 6, 96

S Sander, August, 5, 6, 57, 58 Schulz, Bruno, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 113 Scrapbook, 10, 150, 176, 184, 189, 199, 201–203, 249 Self, 1, 21, 27, 28, 30, 31, 50, 55, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69–71, 79, 86, 98, 100, 101, 129, 130, 155, 156, 189, 190, 242, 247–249 anti-self, 156 Selfhood, 10, 130, 248 Seriality, 212 Sitwell, Edith, 171, 187–191, 193 Smile, 107, 146, 187, 220, 233, 243

255

Snapshot, 5, 21, 91, 96, 197, 224, 232 Spender, Humphrey, 190, 226, 233–235, 237 Streng, Henryk (Marek Włodarski), 103, 108, 113–117 Style, 32, 38, 56, 68, 83, 105, 119, 121, 153, 162, 170, 174, 175, 181–184, 194, 196, 199, 214 Subjectivity, 4, 30, 40, 41, 50, 54, 63, 96, 101, 112, 121, 128, 130, 162, 196, 213, 233, 248, 249 Surface, 1, 4, 5, 11–13, 19, 45, 47, 48, 50, 66, 69, 80, 85, 100, 127, 134–136, 150, 161, 176, 177, 195, 197 Surrealism, 131, 186, 220 Surrealists, 13 T Terry, Ellen, 16, 156, 157, 159 Tonks, Henry, 18, 19 V Visual juxtapositions, 10 Vogel, Debora, 41, 42, 67, 80, 102–122, 128, 247, 249 centre, 102 city, 105, 107, 108, 110, 118, 119 Constructivism, 117 language, 105, 113 mannequins, 102, 111–113, 118 montage, 105, 108–111, 115, 117, 118 poetry, 104, 109, 112, 119 walking, 106 works, 110, 119 Vogue, 141, 173–176, 179 W Walking, 97, 98, 101, 203, 204

256

INDEX

Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, 25–43, 45–48, 50–52, 54–68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 249 on photography, 67 on portraiture, 32, 34, 39, 40, 48, 50, 51, 57, 60, 61, 65 works, 27, 36, 38, 40, 58, 62, 67, 73, 108 Woolf, Virginia cinema, 92 colour, 85, 93 observing, 85, 87 on change, 80–83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 102 portrait, 96

self, 81, 82, 87 splitting, 86, 102 walking, 96, 97 works, 99 Writing, 14, 31, 39, 40, 42, 49, 59, 67, 71, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 92, 95, 99, 103–106, 121, 122, 143, 152, 154, 158, 162, 171, 172, 174, 182–184, 187, 188, 196, 197, 199–201, 206, 211, 221, 226, 248, 249

Y Yeats, William Butler, 155, 156, 189