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Modernism/modernity 11.3 (2004) 373-424



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The Distinguished Shaman:

T. S. Eliot's Portraits in Modern Art

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression . . . dance, dance . . .
T. S. Eliot1
Il ne faut pas apprendre à dessiner.
One must not learn how to draw.
Pablo Picasso2

In The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits, David Piper laments the "decay" of portraiture "through the first half of the twentieth century, when almost all artists of any originality were uninterested in it, pursuing rather Roger Fry's formal values in painting to the brink of abstraction and beyond." He goes on:

T. S. Eliot is a case in point. There is little of him other than photographs. Wyndham Lewis's portrait of 1938, though odd enough at the time to cause its rejection by the Academy . . . seems now very conventional, inexpressive in characterization, though a tantalizing encapsulation of publisher/critic/poet in the armour uniform of invisible ordinary man. In context with Wyndham Lewis's work it is more informative about that than it is, in context with Eliot's work, about his poetry . . . Eliot, advocate of "extinction of personality," was famous for his rejection of the picturesque poet's garb. Sober-suited.3

My curiosity was piqued by Piper's comments about the decay of portraiture and modern artists' disinterest in it. I thought of Picasso's cubist, abstract, neo-classical, surreal, and expressionist experiments in the art of portraiture, Giacometti's sculptural [End Page 373] portraits with their strange formal distortions, or Francis Bacon's kinetic, deforming faces and figures?4

And what of Piper's claim about the conspicuous absence of other portraits of Eliot? I recalled Theresa Garrett Eliot's pen-sketch of Eliot's face in three-quarter view, made in the 1920s, Wyndham Lewis's numerous pencil, charcoal, ink-and-wash exploratory sketches of him, and Charlotte Eliot Smith's enchanting oil painting (c. 1900) of a twelve-year-old Eliot sitting on a chair, in sculptural side profile, reading a red volume of Shakespeare.5

My interest was further stirred by Piper's invocation of that critical albatross of the twentieth century, Eliot's notion of the "extinction of personality." Yet one recalls a famous photograph of Eliot (with Lady Ottoline Morrell), standing by a grand fireplace, slickly coiffured and white flannel trousered, a Prufrockian figure, with his self-consciously fashionable dandyism (LOTSE, Fig. 27). (Eliot once wrote to Conrad Aiken to ask him to retrieve a valise with "a blue suit in it" because "I want to be able to look herrlich" (splendid) for Lutheran Herr Pfarrer [LOTSE, 40].) Here indeed is Baudelaire's dandy, striving to create "a personal form of originality," "taking the pleasure of causing surprise," and "never showing anyone oneself."6

Furthermore, there was Piper's astonishingly blasé dismissal of a century of photographic portraiture. Yet two of the most striking photographs of the twentieth century are portraits of Eliot; one is by the German émigré Bill Brandt (hailed as "the Samuel Beckett of photographers" by Cecil Beaton), who captured Eliot's silhouetted figure in front of and framed by a Victorian window that makes for a richly monochromic, vigilantly geometrical mise-en-scène.7 The other is by the great American avant-garde photographer Irving Penn, who created an intensely visceral and scrupulously reductionist image of Eliot, with one half of his face dramatically illuminated by a bone-white, electric light, the other absorbed into an obliterating, illegible darkness.8

What Piper seems to be doing is what Seamus Heaney has called "tolling" the "official bell of Faith," re-presenting a familiar narrative and a perfectly tuned formalism cleansed of cultural dissonance.9 As a result he fails to be listening in, or "hearing in" (in Adam Phillips's term), to those more "querulous, outcast melodies" (Heaney) discernible in Eliot's life, art, and times.10 Such an approach is the opposite of Walter Benjamin's depiction of the organic contours, auditory coloration, optics, and metaphysical...

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