Multimedial Exposures: The Modernist Self-Portrait in Text and Image

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, many artists began to develop experimental modes of envisioning the self that were inseparable from the new sensory reality of modern life. Textual examples of personal writing in the Modernist era, including poetry and prose by Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schüler, demonstrate an engagement with characteristics of visual media, resulting in a form that is closer to the painterly or photographic self-portrait than to conventional personal narratives such as diary or memoir. Examples from Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, and Paula Modersohn-Becker underscore the role of self-portraiture, in both visual and textual forms, as a means not of summing up a lifetime but of situating identity as ephemeral and highly contextualized. In part because of their own new and uncertain status within artistic and urban communities, women artists in particular tended to embrace this fleeting construction of identity, using the guise of public exposure as a method of presenting an image of the self while also maintaining the possibility of reinvention.