Article

Name: Portrait in the Avant-garde Painting: Between a Name and a Myth

Authors: N. V. Zlydneva

Institute for Slavic Studies of Russian Academy of Science, Russian Federation; Institute for World Culture of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russian Federation

Abstract: The article deals with a portrait in painting, historical avant-garde of the 1910s in particular, as the genre highly marked in a sign system. The semiotic nature of a portrait elicits its genesis in archaic times and goes back to a funeral mask and a sacred ritual of replacing a dead human being with his visual image. It defines a high level of freedom of a signifier from a signified that defined numerous narratives in the world literature tradition. Portrait as sign system also characteristic with its verbal (linguistic) component as an integral part of its text, especially a name (a proper noun) accompanying the image starting from the epoch of Renaissance. Initially linking index and iconic sings a portrait during European art history left its meaning as a document and gradually shifted to symbolic meaning. It resulted in likeness giving way to the issue of personality expressed in a portrait image as a much more significant. The article discusses the relation of three elements marking the portrait semantics: mask (‘parsuna’), face and inner face (‘lik’). The last one corresponds to a myth regarded as its visual equivalent. The issue of a name corresponding to a myth occurred in a portrait of avant-garde, in an abstract portrait in particular. Among some general problems discussed in the article considering image recognition in non-object compositions there is also a problem of interconnection between a proper noun and a portrait image on the one hand and the mythological level of the visual text on the other hand. The article submits a typology of deviated images in European painting and its later extensions in an avant-garde poetics. The article demonstrates that the non-object portrait of Russian avant-garde painting (and sculpture) reveals a trace of archaic mythological epoch that explicated a human face as a realm of a myth. The null communication of the faceless persons in the late Malevich painting demonstrates the dominance of an inner face (‘lik’) as a mythological way of thinking in a visual projection. The conclusion: inclined with the correspondence to an inner form of a face as a noun the avant-garde non-object portraits reveal the fundamental nature of the genre that can be described in semiotic terms.

Keywords: portrait, painting, visual semiotics, myth, noun / name, Russian avant-garde, deviance, face, inner form

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