Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity

5. Portraiture and Assimilation in Vienna: The Case of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat

5 Portraiture and Assimilation in Vienna The Case of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat Catherine M. Soussloff A mimetic regime of representation dominates painting and sculpture in Europe from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. The genre of portraiture developed relatively late, “almost like an unexpected gift brought by a visitor no longer waited for,” as it was put by the famous cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1898.1 If, as Burckhardt and every other twentiethcentury student of portraiture insists, this genre succeeds above all others in giving us a portrayal that resembles a historical person, where can a portrait be claimed to fail? How does a specific portrait signify a particular human being, including their social-historical context, and how does it hide aspects of the person? Does the interpretation of a portrait and its subject reflect the ambiguities of both representation and subjectivity? Does the representation of a fully assimilated or acculturated subject signal Jewish identity? In this paper I will be interested in how the assimilated Jewish subject appears in the portraiture of early-twentieth-century Vienna. I will focus on the double portrait of Hans Tietze (1880–1954) and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1883–1958) painted by Oskar Kokoschka (1886 –1980) in Vienna in 1909 and today owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 5.1). Useful definitions of the portrait describe the act of making a portrait, portraiture, rather than the thing. The art historian Richard Brilliant writes that it is the genre that “directly reflects the social dimension of human life as a field of actions among persons”: the artist, sitter or sitters, and viewers.2 This occurs along an axis perpendicular to the image’s frame rather than contained within it. The portrait describes subjectivity, the “who” I am, perhaps better than any genre, but this description through its very actions and in its material instantiation, invokes identity. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen describes the ways in which subjectivity becomes identity in representation: 113 114 catherine m. soussloff “But to say who I am—who thinks, who wishes, who fantasizes in me—is no longer in my power. That question draws me immediately beyond myself, beyond my representation, toward a point . . . where I am another, the other who gives me identity.”3 The representation of subjectivity in the portrait, as elsewhere, is not autonomous, for either the artist, the portrayed, or the viewer.4 This paper will explore the interpretation of portraits of Jews as representations for artist, sitters, and viewers. I will begin with a brief examination of the history of the portrait of the Jewish subject. In a chapter entitled “The Rabbi as Icon” of his recent book, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, Richard I. Cohen carefully describes the change in attitudes of European Jewry towards portraits, which coincided with an increasing sensitivity towards the image in general throughout Europe .5 To be sure, portraits of Jews existed earlier, but in the main, until the eighteenth century they “were deemed idol worship and emulation of a Christian tradition.”6 The first “modern” portraits of Jews were of rabbis, a common genre with clear references to Judaism in dress, attributes, and attitude . In rabbi portraits the subject is always depicted alone within the frame of the painting or print. This is the case even when a number of representations occur together in one work, such as the broadside of rabbis from Breslau (fig. 5.2). In the rabbi portrait the figure is truncated and often Figure 5.1. Oskar Kokoschka. Portrait of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909). Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 53 5/8 inches (76.5 x 136.2 centimeters). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. Photograph ©2000 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. portraiture and assimilation in vienna 115 holds a book with visible Hebrew script, such as in thePortrait of Hakham Zevi Ashkenazi of 1660–1718 (fig. 5.3). The gaze is invariably focused forward. The clothes and hair distinguish the rabbi as a Jewish religious figure. In fact, these portraits appear to derive in their typology from the Christian visual tradition, in particular from Netherlandish portraits of the Renaissance , such as the Portrait of a Carthusian Monk painted by Petrus Christus in 1446 (fig. 5.4). In this portrait the monk can be distinguished from others...