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

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.