On Artists’ Self-Portraits and Autobiographies

Аннотация

The article is devoted to the problem of self-portraiture in fine art in comparison with ego-texts written by artists. Many of the most prominent Russian painters of the twentieth century (Chagall, Petrov-Vodkin, Filonov, Malevich) were not only enthusiastic about the self-portrait genre, but also produced literary works about their own lives: they became authors of autobiographical prose, memoirs and poems. This article compares their life-writings and paintings in order to at model the relationship between visual representation and verbal representation in twentieth-century culture. It raises the problems of self-presentation in the context of intermediality, with particular attention to how writing and painting deal with time and space.