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Portraits of the Artist

SPURR, David Anton

Abstract

This essay is composed of two distinct but related parts. The first considers how the title of Joyce's first novel invites analogies with the tradition of the “self-portrait as a young man” in the history of painting, notably in the work of Dürer, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck, each of whom made a series of youthful self-portraits. These analogies are considered on both formal and theoretical levels. The second part of the essay considers the history of portraits of Joyce made by other artists. Although such portraits are as varied as Joyce's writings, they can be loosely divided into two categories. On one hand are those which establish Joyce's image as that of an eminent man of letters. On the other hand are those which transform Joyce's image into a figure of the avant-garde, where literature and the visual arts are understood as being part of a common project. The stories of how these latter works came to be made give evidence of Joyce's engagement with contemporary visual art as being like his own work in its formal experimentation. Both kinds of portrait, traditional and avant-garde, reflect Joyce's construction of [...]

SPURR, David Anton. Portraits of the Artist. European Joyce Studies, 2020, no. 29, p. 23-39

DOI : 10.1163/9789004426191_004

Available at:

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Portraits of the Artist

David Spurr

Abstract

This essay is composed of two distinct but related parts. The first considers how the title of Joyce’s first novel invites analogies with the tradition of the “self-portrait as a young man” in the history of painting, notably in the work of Dürer, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck, each of whom made a series of youthful self-portraits. These analogies are considered on both formal and theoretical levels. The second part of the essay consid- ers the history of portraits of Joyce made by other artists. Although such portraits are as varied as Joyce’s writings, they can be loosely divided into two categories. On one hand are those which establish Joyce’s image as that of an eminent man of letters. On the other hand are those which transform Joyce’s image into a figure of the avant- garde, where literature and the visual arts are understood as being part of a common project. The stories of how these latter works came to be made give evidence of Joyce’s engagement with contemporary visual art as being like his own work in its formal ex- perimentation. Both kinds of portrait, traditional and avant-garde, reflect Joyce’s con- struction of his own image, as well as the manner in which the artistic modes of the twentieth century evolve along with those of Joyce’s work.

Keywords

Portraiture – Rembrandt – Man Ray – Brancusi – Klee – César Abin

1 Portrait as Portrait

For his first novel Joyce chose a title that invites us to look for sources and anal- ogies in the history of art. In that history, the portrait of the artist as a young man is invariably a self-portrait, for reasons one can readily imagine: for the young artist who may lack the means to procure other models, his or her own person provides a subject willing to sit for as long as the artist wants, and even to sit for a series of portraits over time. The youthful self-portrait is a kind of training ground for the treatment of other subjects at a later stage of the artist’s

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career. The history of the self-portrait of the artist as a young man goes back to Dürer in the 15th century, who painted three pictures of himself between the ages of 22 and 27. In the 17th century Van Dyck began his self-portraits at 15, and in the same epoch Rembrandt made several self-portraits between the ages of 20 and 27. The limitations of this kind of self-portrait are that the artist has only the time of fleeting youth in which to do it, when the artist’s mastery is no more formed than is the youthful subject. In the contest of art vs. life, the series of self-portraits may be seen as a kind of race against time, where the art- ist seeks repeatedly to capture his or her own figure before it is altered by age.

Of course, it is art that wins in the end, as the portrait outlives its subject, and embodies that subject’s absence even while it is being made.

Joyce’s written portrait of the artist conforms to all of these elements in the history of self-portraiture, even if his title character does not bear his name.

To the objection that Stephen Dedalus is a fictional character, I would reply that every self-portrait is to some degree a product of invention. Arguably, the difference between the artist Van Dyck and his self-portrait is no less than that between Joyce and Stephen Dedalus. If we therefore consider Stephen Hero as Joyce’s first sketch in the genre, he produces this portrait at age 22, only a couple of years after the events of this unfinished novel; the age differ- ence between the author of A Portrait and its subject in the final section is little more than that. Joyce thus produces his self-portrait at the same age as those of his Renaissance forebears, during those brief years between acquir- ing the necessary skill and growing too old to be pictured as a young man. The form of his novel, moreover, corresponds to the Renaissance tradition of serial self-portraits in that the subject of Joyce’s novel is portrayed at five distinct stages of his life, formally divided into different sections from early childhood to young adulthood.

The art historian Svetlana Alpers points out that the young Rembrandt made use of the self-portrait as a means of training himself to depict different facial expressions, such that in various sketches as well as finished paintings he looks variously surprised, contemplative, amused, and even horrified. She writes, “By looking at his own face in a mirror he could practice expression which might be of use in rendering figures in narrative works”.1 In other words, self-portraiture was among other things for Rembrandt the occasion for a kind of theatrical performance. There is an analogy here with the way, in Portrait, Stephen Dedalus continually tries on different roles in his search for a suit- able attitude and vocation. I am not thinking here of his performance as the

1 Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 37.

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farcical pedagogue in the Whitsuntide play, but rather of other roles, more or less consciously assumed: that of the zealous Catholic penitent; of the priest

“wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence!” (P 4.394–95); of the cynical intellectual, the scapegoat, the mas- ter of the “spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri” (P 5.2764–65); and finally, of course, that of

“the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable” (P 4.811–13). Joyce’s Portrait is that of an actor among other things: a theatre of the young artist appearing onstage in constantly changing guises.

If we move from the history of self-portraiture to portraiture in general, we find another series of parallels between Joyce’s work and painting. Portraits traditionally have a memorial function in both the private and the public spheres. The portrait also has the function of representation on several levels: it represents the natural subject in body and physiognomy; ideally, it also repre- sents something of the subject’s inner life and even destiny. Finally, the portrait performs the function of mythologization, or the invention of the subject as a key figure in history, be it the history of a nation or merely that of a family.

Joyce’s novel both conforms and offers resistance to these traditional func- tions. By its very nature the Portrait commemorates his youth, but it ends by rejecting the kind of art that lives in the past. Against W.B. Yeats’s nostalgia, Stephen writes in his diary, “Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty”, and “presses into his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world.

Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world” (P 5.2723–27). As a work of self-representation, Joyce’s novel neglects the physical aspect of its subject: we are given only the barest hints of what Stephen looks like; but the novel is rich in its representation of the subject’s inner life and even his destiny, from his thoughts on love and po- etry to his exalted, self-appointed vocation of forging the uncreated conscience of his race. The insistence on Stephen’s destiny is part of the Portrait’s mytholo- gization of its subject: not only is Stephen Dedalus identified with the fabulous artificer of Greek myth; he also projects for himself a privileged place in the history of his nation. Of the patricians of Ireland he asks, “How could he […]

cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, […] that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own?” (P 5.2265–68).

Apart from these general functions, Portrait has more specific features in common with the history of certain kinds of portraiture in painting. Van Dyck’s portraits place their subject in a narrative, however simply evoked. In his portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio of 1623, the prelate has a letter in his hand which he has barely read before turning, as if interrupted by the entrance of

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someone into the room.2 An extension of this narrative principle is the contex- tual portrait,3 where the subject figures at the centre of a larger scene, as in the portraits of illustrious persons pictured on great historical occasions. A famous example is Jacques-Louis David’s 1808 painting of the coronation of Napoleon i.

Such portraits are often assorted with emblems of the subject’s power and character, such as the pelican and the phoenix in portraits of Elizabeth I of England, symbols respectively of motherly love and eternal life. There are also portraits of portraits, where a portrait figures among the elements that com- pose a picture.4 Johannes Gumpp’s triple self-portrait of 1646 exists in two ver- sions, in both of which the artist is shown from behind, looking at his image in an octagonal mirror as he paints this image onto the canvas. Art historians particularly call our attention to the play of gazes in the “tondo”, or round ver- sion of the portrait: the painter’s gaze is hidden because his back is turned;

the gaze of the mirror image is directed at the painter, while the image on the canvas looks at the spectator, where our own gaze coincides with that of the painter painting himself painting.

We will find a similar scene in Joyce’s novel.

Joyce’s own Portrait of the Artist has, like Van Dyck’s portraits, a loosely nar- rative form. It also places its subject in a key moment of Irish history, where the forces of nationality, language and religion figure as obstacles to his free- dom as an artist. These forces are often represented by portraits that figure in the novel. There are the old family portraits on the walls of Stephen’s fa- ther’s house, including the one of his great-grandfather, “condemned to death as a whiteboy” (P 1.1086); there are “the portraits of the saints and great men”

of the Jesuit order who look down silently on Stephen as he passes through the halls of Clongowes on his mission to the rector’s office (P 1.1716–17). There is the “droll statue of the national poet of Ireland” (P 5.216), Thomas Moore, whom Stephen regards with contempt as “a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian” (P  5.221). Stephen wishes to cast off the memorial weight repre- sented by these portraits of family, religion and nation, so that the Portrait of the Artist is designed to transcend these lifeless portraits. At the end of Part iv of the novel, the emblems of the bird-girl and of the mythical Dedalus serve as signs of mortal beauty and artistic freedom, as well as of Stephen’s deliverance

2 Edouard Pommier, Théorie du portrait de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 146.

3 Elisabetta Gigante, L’art du portrait: histoire, évolution, et technique. Trad. Todaro Tradito (Par- is: Hazan, 2012), 118.

4 Gigante, L’art du portrait, 157.

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from the institutions the more common portraits of his world represent. But it is Gumpp’s triple self-portrait that invites the most interesting analogy to Joyce’s work, insofar as the young artist of the novel seeks to define his own artistic vocation – his self-image as an artist – through a process of self- examination. This process is recounted in several stages, including the one in Part 2 where Stephen contemplates himself in a mirror: “he went into his mother’s bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressingtable” (P  2.389–90). At this moment he has just composed a series of sorrowful verses “To E—C—” depicting a scene in which two persons ex- change a kiss in the moonlight. Assuming that one of these persons is a figure for Stephen himself, we have a literary version of the triple portrait: Stephen’s poetic self- representation is combined with his gaze in the mirror, with the

Figure 2.1 Johannes Gumpp, Self-portrait Gallerie degli Uffizi, Firenze

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suggestion that, through the force of his gaze, his mirrored image bears resem- blance to the figure in the poem. It is a triple self-portrait, then, in the following sense: (a) the male figure in Stephen’s poem reflects his own emotional state and his conscious fantasy of kissing the girl Eileen: “I could hold her and kiss her” (P  2.352–53); (b) having just completed the poem, Stephen beholds in the mirror his image as that of the poet; (c) the narrative puts the reader behind Stephen, looking over his shoulder, as it were, as he composes the poem and gazes in the mirror. This last element completes the “self-portrait” to the extent that we identify Stephen with Joyce. In this scene, the reader of Portrait thus stands in the same position as the viewer of Gumpp’s triple self-portrait.

As a literary portrait, Joyce’s novel inscribes itself within the long history of rivalry between painting and literature for ascendancy in the realm of portrai- ture.5 In this debate, painters have claimed a greater fidelity to nature, whereas poets have claimed a better representation of the inner life of the subject.

However, this contest has often been pacified by the many works that establish bridges between the two arts. Petrarch devoted two sonnets (Nos. 77 and 78) to the portrait of Laura he had commissioned by Simone Martini; he praises Sim- one for having “matched the high concept I had in mind with the design be- neath his hand”.6 In the sixteenth century Vasari’s Lives gave birth to the liter- ary portrait of the artist, while his contemporary Paolo Giovo established in Florence the first collection of painted portraits of poets and other men of letters, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola.

The rivalry between painting and poetry is revived in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24, which claims that the “cunning” eyes of portrait painters “draw but what they see”, and “know not the heart”, unlike the poet in whom “your true image pic- tured lies”.7 Likewise, Ben Jonson’s poetic eulogy to Shakespeare in the 1623 First Folio points to Droeshout’s portrait with the claim that the engraver who has captured Shakespeare’s face cannot draw his wit, so that “since he cannot, Reader, look / Not on his picture, but his book”.8 A more even judgment of the

5 Pommier, Théorie du portrait de la Renaissance aux Lumières, 182.

6 Francesco Petrarca, Sonneti, canzone e triomphi (Venezia: Nicolini da Sabio, 1561), 62–63. This translation is signed by Jeremy Hunt on the website Art in Fiction: <https://artinfiction.word- press.com/2015/07/16/petrarch-il-canzoniere-1327-1368-sonnets-77-78> [accessed 20 March 2019].

7 William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets Never Before Imprinted (London: Thomas Thor- pe, 1609), 11.

8 Ben Jonson, “To the Reader”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ed.

John Heminges and Henry Condell (London: Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard, 1623), 1.

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relative powers of poetry and painting is made by Dryden’s poem in praise of Godfrey Kneller, who had just painted the poet’s portrait:

Of various parts a perfect whole is wrought;

Thy pictures think, and we divine their thought.9

Joyce’s creation of a literary self-portrait is better understood in the context of centuries of exchange between poetry and painting; when his work is pub- lished in 1914 it is but the latest form of cross-fertilisation between the two arts.

It also comes at a time when portraiture, both in painting and literature, is enjoying relative prestige. Historically, the self-portrait had been a relatively minor genre, painted in rather small dimensions. In terms of prestige and size, a traditional hierarchy in place since the Renaissance put it below the religious or historical painting, the landscape, the genre painting, and the portrait of a noble personage. But by the end of the nineteenth century it is fair to say that portraiture in general, including the self-portrait, equalled or exceeded other genres in importance, enough for Henry James to write in his 1887 essay on John Singer Sargent, “There is no greater work of art than a great portrait”.10 James himself had of course enlarged the literary portrait, also a traditionally minor genre, to the form of a substantial novel in his The Portrait of a Lady (1881), which Oscar Wilde followed with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The ground for Joyce’s Portrait had thus been prepared, and itself would be fol- lowed by such works as Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). Unlike James and Wilde, Joyce uses the indefinite article for his title: A Portrait, thereby suggesting that other portraits of the artist are possible. In fact, Joyce was to become one of the most visually portrayed writers in literary history.

2 Portraits of Joyce

Joyce’s interest in fictional portraiture was accompanied by a lifelong interest in visual portraits. Having written A Portrait of the Artist, he cooperated and sometimes actively collaborated in the making of portraits of himself made by others. It is difficult to think of another writer as often painted, drawn, and

9 John Dryden, “To Sir Godfrey Kneller”, in The Annual miscellany, for the year 1694 being the fourth part of Miscellany poems: containing great variety of new translations and original copies (London: Jacob Tonson, 1694), 92.

10 Henry James, Picture and Text (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893), 114.

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photographed as Joyce, and the history of these portraits is almost as varied as that of Joyce’s different writings. The portraits reflect both Joyce’s projection of his own self-image and the manner in which his image has been rendered in the context of twentieth century art and literature. What follows is a brief sur- vey of several of those portraits.

A number of drawings of Joyce were made by Wyndham Lewis in 1920, prob- ably during Lewis’s visit to Paris with T.S. Eliot. Lewis had not thought much of Joyce’s first two works of fiction, an attitude symbolized by one drawing in par- ticular, which depicts the writer from a higher position, so that Joyce appears to bow before the artist. A note by the curator at the Ransom Center in Texas, where this drawing is held, remarks that the oblique angle of Lewis’ sketch

“hints at the distance from which he approached his fellow artist”.11 In this con- text it is hard not to recall Lewis’s later attack on Joyce in Time and Western Man as “the poet of the shabby-genteel, impoverished intellectualism of Dublin”.12 If Joyce sought revenge, he eventually took it in Finnegans Wake, where he satirizes Lewis’s Portrait of an Englishwoman in the Night Lessons chapter: “Every admirer has seen my goulache of Marge (she is so like the sister you don’t know, and they both dress ALIKE!) which I titled The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman” (FW 165).

When Ulysses was published in 1922, Man Ray was commissioned by Shake- speare and Co. to photograph Joyce in order to provide publicity for the novel.

Joyce dutifully went to Man Ray’s studio in the Rue Campagne-Première, in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. The photographer writes of Joyce, “His fine Irish face, although marred by thick glasses – he was between two operations on his eyes – interested me. […] He was very patient, until after a couple of shots when he turned his head away from the lights, putting his hand over his eyes and saying that he could no longer face the glare. I snapped this pose, which became the favourite one, although in certain quarters it was criticized as too artificial, too posed”.13

Man Ray has caught his subject unawares – one advantage photography has over painting. Among the other shots taken on this occasion is one memorable for its use of the subject’s shadow, at a time when the aesthetic of the shadow was gaining prominence in film, architecture, and in the writings of Joyce him- self.14 In this respect the year 1922 marked an important shift in Man Ray’s art.

11 <http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/windows/southeast/james_joyce .html> [accessed 20 March 2019].

12 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 93.

13 Man Ray, Self-Portrait (London: Deutsch, 1963), 186.

14 For more on Joyce’s use of shadows in the context of the other arts, see my “Joyce’s Shad- ow Vision”, in Dublin James Joyce Journal, 6–7 (2013–14), 73–89.

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He wrote to the American collector Ferdinand Howald, “I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself”.15 Man Ray was responsible for turning photography into an avant-garde art form partly by finding new ways to use shadows, as he does here and in other por- traits, for example of the photographer Lee Miller, of the actress Ella Raines, and in his own self-portrait.

In 1924 Joyce agreed to a more conventional portrait by Patrick Tuohy, ap- parently at the suggestion of the artist himself. Tuohy was a teacher of painting at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin on a visit to Paris, where he toured the museums with Joyce’s friend Thomas MacGreevy.16 Ellmann reports that

15 Katherine Ware, Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: The Getty Museum, 1998), 28.

16 See MacGreevy’s memorial to Tuohy in The Father Matthew Record, July 1943, 5, at <http://

www.macgreevy.org/style?style=text&source=art.fmr.011.xml&action=show> [accessed 20 March 2019].

Figure 2.2 Man Ray, Portrait of James Joyce J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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Joyce initially objected to Tuohy’s offer to paint him, on the grounds that he had “a very profound objection to my own image, needlessly repeated in a pic- ture or bust” (JJ 565). It is hard to judge Joyce’s sincerity here, given the number of photographs, paintings, and drawings of him, for many of which he took an active role in the composition. In any case, he eventually consented to a por- trait by Tuohy, and pronounced himself pleased by the rendering of his tie and the folds of his jacket. Tuohy later painted Joyce’s father in a portrait more im- pressive than the one of Joyce himself. Tuohy’s Irishness undoubtedly played a role in gaining Joyce’s cooperation. He had taken part in the 1916 Rising along- side James Connolly in the General Post Office. He was known for his portraits of Irish peasants as well as his religious paintings. And according to Ellmann he had an “irresistible Dublin accent” (JJ 565).

Beginning in 1928, Constantin Brancusi made several sketches of Joyce at the request of Harry and Caresse Crosby for the publication of Tales told of Shem and Shaun: Three Fragments from Work in Progress by the Black Sun Press.

Given the nature of Joyce’s text, the Crosbys appear to have been disappointed by the realism of these sketches. The final result, which appears as the frontis- piece for this volume in 1929, is entitled “Portrait of the Author”.

When Joyce’s father was shown the image, he famously remarked, “The boy seems to have changed a good deal” (JJ 627). Brancusi also made a sculptural version of the portrait in cardboard and metal. Carola Giedion-Welcker, visit- ing Brancusi’s studio that year, saw the cardboard and metal sculpture there, and tells the following story: while contemplating the portrait, Brancusi took a sheet of paper and drew a spiral from the center outward, making her think of Vico and the cycles of eternal return in Joyce’s work. Brancusi then drew an- other spiral that closed in on itself from without, explaining that in opposition to the movement outward toward infinity there was also a “death spiral” in movement against the great rhythm of life.17 We are left to wonder whether Joyce’s is the life spiral or the death spiral, or if, in Joyce as in Yeats’ theory of the gyres, the one, having reached its limit, transforms itself into the other. In any case Giedion-Welcker compares these drawings to the aesthetic theories of Paul Klee, for whom the question of the opening or the closing movement of the spiral is “fundamental to the psyche”.18 Klee puts the question in the follow- ing way: “Do I liberate myself from the center in a movement of ever greater freedom, or do I move closer and closer to a center that will end by devouring me? […] The question is no less than one of life and death”.19 There is also a

17 Carola Giedion-Welcker, Constantin Brancusi (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1958), 199.

18 Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1956), 415, translation mine.

19 Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 415.

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simpler way of interpreting the drawing, keeping in mind that Brancusi titles it a portrait of the author, i.e. of Joyce as a writer. Since the portrait is basically non-representational, even the most naïve interpretations cannot be rejected outright. Let me therefore hazard my own. In my reading the spiral represents the coiled labyrinth of the writer’s imagination as it moves outward into the space of the world, whereas the lines represent the disciplined columns of writing or type whereby the material of the imagination is coded in language.

Such a figure of the author amidst his books and writing materials would

Figure 2.3 Constantin Brancusi, “Portrait of the Author”, frontispiece from James Joyce, Tales told of Shem and Shaun: Three Fragments from Work in Progress. Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929

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derive from a well-established tradition of literary portraiture, as in Van Loo’s famous portrait of Diderot, or Joshua Reynolds’ of Samuel Johnson. Brancusi’s portrait was made at the time when Joyce was writing “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, first published by Faber in 1930. Joyce’s text incorporates its own geometric forms on what would become the diagram on page 293 of Finnegans Wake. This diagram has been compared to the cyclical models of history and the universe in Vico, Bruno, and Yeats. In explaining the diagram, the speaker of the Wake passage says, “I’ll make you see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geom- eter” (FW 296–97), a claim that echoes, however parodically, the psychic and cosmological uses to which the spiral has been put by art and philosophy.

On a purely aesthetic level, the geometric forms of Brancusi’s portraits bear affinity to the work of avant-garde artists like El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters.

Both artists combined circular or spiral forms with straight lines in designs that sought to escape from organic and impressionist models. El Lissitzky’s Constructivist art of this period was dedicated to experimenting with the geo- metrical forms of spatial language in such a way that painting would become a form of architecture.20 As for Schwitters’ “Merz” paintings, in 1924, when asked by El Lissitzsky and Hans Arp to define this elusive word, he replied, “Alles, was ein Künstler spuckt, ist Kunst”, everything an artist spits out is art.21 The claim is worthy of Shem in FW i.8. Like Joyce, Schwitters, El Lissitzky and Klee were all contributors to Eugene Jolas’s review transition in the late 1920s and early 1930s.22

Beyond these formal comparisons, the affinity between Joyce and avant- garde art belongs to the wider context of what historians have called the crisis of referentiality in modern art. The Renaissance techniques of perspective and naturalism, which had guaranteed the central position of the human subject, began to collapse, resulting in the continual displacement of subject and ob- ject in modern art.23 The historical reasons for this displacement are beyond the scope of this essay. I shall merely observe that in the art of De Stijl and the Constructivists, as well as in the architecture of Le Corbusier and Mies van der

20 E. Forgacs, “Definitive Space: The Many Utopias of El Lissitzkys Proun Room”, in Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed, eds. Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (Los Angeles:

Getty, 2003), 47–76, 59.

21 Megan Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space Image Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 9.

22 El Lissitzky in No. 18 (1929), Klee in Nos. 18, 19–20 (1930), Schwitters in No. 21 (1932). El Lis- sitzky’s “Project for Public Rostrum” appears in the same issue as an early version of Finnegans Wake iii.4.

23 Cf. Chapter 4 in Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present. Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge: mit Press, 2008).

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Rohe, this self-referential, ahistorical movement tended to produce composi- tions of purely geometric forms. Similarly, in Finnegans Wake linguistic forms were recast in a dynamic, largely self-referential composition which has the effect of neutralizing history through the sheer nature of its form. Of course, the modernist rupture with history is itself a self-consciously historical act, even if it effectively announces the end of history as the master narrative of the human condition.

César Abin’s caricature of Joyce was published in transition No. 21 in 1932, which devoted 28 pages to an “Homage to James to Joyce” for his 50th birthday.

There were contributions by Padraic Colum, Stuart Gilbert, Jolas, Thomas McGreevy, Philippe Soupault, and James Stephens, among others. One of Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist sound-poems appears in the same issue,24 forming a coun- terpart to the page proof of Work in Progress reproduced in facsimile.25 Abin, who had been commissioned for the purpose by the Jolases, had originally done a conventional portrait of the writer in a dressing-gown, surrounded by his books. But Joyce was not satisfied with this, and suggested several changes.

Ellmann quotes him as saying, “Paul Leon tells me that when I stand bent over at a street corner I look like a question mark” (JJ 658). In the portrait the writ- er’s body was therefore put in the interrogative form. Commenting on a draft of the present essay, Katarzyna Bazarnik remarks that the question mark also hints humorously at the “enigma” of the author of Work in Progress. The Joy- cean enigma was in the air. As Stuart Gilbert has pointed out in his essay in Our Exagmination, the reader’s first essential question when confronted with this work is “What is it all about?”.26 A similar question might be asked of the au- thor himself.

In any case, the upper part of Abin’s question mark surmounts a point shaped like the world, with only Ireland visible, and Dublin in black. As some- one had called Joyce a blue-nosed comedian, he told Abin to put a star at the end of his nose in order to illuminate it. The image also recalls Epiphany No. 18, where, in apparent mockery of Joyce’s literary pretensions, Dick Sheehy says to Miss Callaghan, “Did you ever observe how…the stars come out on the end of Joyce’s nose about this hour?” (psw 178). In the caricature Joyce also wears the patched clothing of a pauper, with a black derby bearing the unlucky number 13 and covered with cobwebs. In the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter of the Wake

24 Schwitters, “Lanke tr gl”, 320.

25 transition 21 (1932), 259. This is an early version of FW 566.17–570.21.

26 “Prologomena to Work in Progress”, in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for In- camination of Work in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929), 50.

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(i.8), one of the washerwomen says to another, “Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It’s well I know your sort of slop” (FW 214). The analogy between this critique and that of Joyce’s work is open to conjecture. In Abin’s drawing, a copy of William Vincent Wallace’s “Oh,

Figure 2.4 Cesar Abin, James Joyce. transition 21, March, 1932, 256

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Let me Like a Soldier Fall” protrudes from Joyce’s pocket, recalling the allusion to this song in “The Dead”, where Mr Browne recalls it being sung to great ac- claim at the old Theatre Royal (“The Dead” 791–97). Given the “world” of Ire- land over which Joyce’s body is bent, the song could reflect the sacrifice Joyce believes he is making for his country. In Edward Fitzball’s lyrics, the second verse begins:

I only ask of that proud race, Which ends its blaze in me, To die the last, and not disgrace Its ancient chivalry!27

The drawing of Joyce is of Abin’s execution, but given Joyce’s detailed instruc- tions it is clearly a work of self-parody, an updated self-portrait of the artist.

The design, moreover, reflects the use of geometrical forms by the avant-garde artists mentioned above: Klee, El Lissitzsky, and Schwitters. Abin reprinted his drawing in Leurs Figures (1932) a collection of his portraits of 56 figures in the contemporary art world, including Picasso, Léger, Miró, de Chirico, Brancusi, and Matisse.28 For Joyce’s portrait to be included among these is one more tes- timony to the value of his image, which extended beyond the literary world to contemporary art in the larger sense.

By the time Pomes Penyeach appeared in 1927, Joyce’s circle in Paris had ex- panded to include musicians as well as writers and practitioners in the plastic arts. The composers Herbert Hughes and Arthur Bliss arranged to put the po- ems to music by enlisting eleven composers, including Roger Sessions, John Ireland, and George Antheil. The result was The Joyce Book, published in 1933, with a frontispiece done in 1930 by Augustus John. John was hardly an artist of the avant-garde at this time, but 25 years earlier he had ushered in a new style of English painting by making a radical break with the Victorians. In an auto- biographical essay Virginia Woolf remembers her family home in Gordon Square as it was in 1908, after her parents had died. “The drawing room had greatly changed its character since 1904 [the year of Leslie Stephen’s death].

The age of Augustus John was dawning. His ‘Pyramus’ [John’s son] filled one entire wall. The [George Frederic] Watts portraits of my father and my mother were hung downstairs if they were hung at all”.29 Joyce was sufficiently satisfied with John’s portrait for him to write to the artist, “Praise from a purblind penny

27 Edward Fitzball, “Oh, Let me Like a Soldier Fall”, in Songs of Ireland and Other Lands (New York: Sadler, 1847), 112.

28 César Abin, Leurs figures: 56 portraits d’artistes, critiques et marchands d’aujourd’hui (Paris:

Imprimerie Muller, 1932).

29 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), 195.

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Figure 2.5 Jacques-Emile Blanche, Portrait of James Joyce National Portrait Gallery, London

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poet would be ridiculous but your drawing is clearly the one thing in the vol- ume which is indissentable” (JJ 627).

With the portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1935, the image of Joyce ac- quired a new sort of standing.

Blanche was the foremost society portraitist of his day. His clientele includ- ed some of the great figures of modern letters and art, including Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and Marcel Proust. The Blanche portrait had the effect both of confirming Joyce’s place in the literary pantheon, and of granting him, at least symbolically, the kind of social status reserved for the well-born. For all his mockery of the upper class, Joyce always wanted to be regarded as a gentle- man; among the household items which Joyce always kept with him were fam- ily portraits and a framed copy of the Joyce of Galway coat of arms.30 The Blanche portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Joyce is pic- tured as a writer surrounded by his books, papers, and pictures. Though he looks to the left in order to conceal the bulging lens of his glasses on that side, the cigarette and the informal pose lend him a gentlemanly air of elegance, ease, and reflection. Here at last is the accomplished author, secure in his place in literary history and society.

Although I have surveyed the portraits of Joyce chronologically, they can also be considered as forming two distinct categories. On one hand are those by Tuohy, Augustus John, and Blanche, which contribute to Joyce’s image as that of an eminent man of letters. These portraits correspond to the kind seen in Stephen Dedalus’ Dublin, such as those of the “big nobs” at the Rotunda (P  5.2669). On the other hand are those by Man Ray, Wyndham Lewis, Bran- cusi, and Abin, which transform Joyce’s image into a figure of the avant-garde, where literature and the visual arts are understood as being part of a shared project. Such portraits would have been unknown in Stephen’s Dublin. Instead, they belong to the wider world toward which Stephen intends to depart at the end of the novel, and they represent the kind of artistic freedom to which he aspires. The stories of how these latter works came to be made give evidence of Joyce’s engagement with contemporary visual art as being like his own work in its formal experimentation. Both kinds of portrait, traditional and avant-garde, reflect Joyce’s construction of his own image, as well as the manner in which the artistic modes of the twentieth century evolve alongside those of Joyce’s work.

30 Michael O’Shea, James Joyce and Heraldry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 10.

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