UC Berkeley

At the heart of the very specific ambitions of the portrait project at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were a number of interlocking and often anxiety-producing uncertainties. The human subject had come to seem more vulnerable to, and less separate from, his or her environment. Also, debates about the subjectivity of artists themselves, and their duty both to nature and to the goals of art made the portrait an arena for a very focused battle: the occasion of portraiture, it was thought, had the potential to register an intersubjective encounter, with all of its rich, irreducible and subtle meanings. Fernand Khnopff and Odilon Redon demonstrated a determination to mark both the uncertainties about subjectivity and the strangeness of the portrait encounter in many of the portraits they produced. Both artists shifted the conventional relationship between viewer and portrait, Redon by creating portraits whose meaning and emphases change radically in front of an active and mobile viewer, and Khnopff by conjuring a sense that the depicted figure is putting pressure on the membrane of the surface of the painting, and challenging its control over its little empire of represented space. Both of Redon's portraits of the Baroness de Domecy (1900-01), and Khnopff's depictions of girls and women have hints within them of the possibility of the subject calcifying into a Symbolist icon, but they also provide consistent and multiple resistances to this eventuality.