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FIVE 3 Expansion ezra pound and avant-garde portraiture In the years following its Imagist contraction, the portrait poem breathed out, multiplying into collections and expanding into longer and more complex forms. From Masters’s book-length Spoon River Anthology in 1915 to the twenty-nine portraits in E. E. Cummings’s Tulips and Chimneys (1922) and Melvin Tolson’s 1935 Gallery of Harlem Portraits, the Modernist portrait collection became a site for exploring social relationships through a multiplicity of characters, rather than (as in earlier stand-alone portraits) the nature of consciousness and identity. Placed in this context, Ezra Pound’s sequences written between 1913 and 1920 are evidence of a change in the shape and aims of portraiture. From the early group portrait “Les Millwins” of 1913 to the sequences “Moeurs Contemporaines” (1918) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Pound gradually expanded the scale of his canvas by adding figures, concluding with Mauberley, his longest and final work of lyric poetry. Unlike Spoon River or Harlem Portraits , which are organized geographically to tell the story of the inhabitants of a place, Pound superimposed the multiple figures of each group portrait on the shadowy outline of a single quasi-autobiographical protagonist , thereby retaining traits of the single-figure portrait. By setting multiple short portraits inside the frame of a single-figure composition, “Moeurs” and Mauberley test the capacity of the genre for expansion. How big can a portrait poem get before it becomes a catalogue of names, before it loses its distinctive concern with interiority, consciousness, and face-to-face engagement? Epigrammatic modulation had diminished the significance of the individual subject while shrinking the scale of the portrait, but kept the single figure as its focus. Pound’s many devices for expanding the scale of his portraits subjected the genre to a more thoroughgoing revision, perhaps Expansion 145 to the point of transforming it into something else—though in 1921 he was still content to collect “Moeurs” and Mauberley under the title Three Portraits and Four Cantos. In this chapter I examine what happened to the portrait poem as Pound added figures and tested out a variety of avant-garde techniques drawn from the visual and performance arts. The test, as I see it, was to see how far the core concerns of single-figure portraiture could go when mapped onto the larger canvas of multifigure compositions. In particular, “Moeurs” extends the work of “Portrait d’une femme” in detaching interiority from the individual subject and reconfiguring it as a fluid medium. This sequence draws from a variety of avant-garde arts to develop a multimedia approach to the group portrait. The exchange among arts comes to serve as a model of intersubjective exchange. In Mauberley, by contrast, the project of reanimating interiority falters, and the sequence becomes more concerned with the object-like impermeability of individual figures. Pound’s movement toward multifigure portraiture owed much to his involvement in the avant-garde revolution in London from 1913 to 1919. The density and disjunctiveness of “Moeurs” and Mauberley reflect Pound’s avant-garde commitment and also the difficulty of revising a nineteenth-century genre for Modernist purposes. Avant-garde art posed a special challenge to the portrait poem. As early as 1906, painters in France and Italy challenged the composition of the portrait and its very identity as a genre of painting. In the history of early twentieth-century painting, Marcia Pointon writes, “modernism and the portrait might be said to be impacted, welded together,” but this is true more for Cubism than Futurism, which attacked the single-figure portrait.1 These two artistic movements operated as catalyzing influences on modern poetry, in ways that have been much examined by critics.2 Early Modernism could be dated from the masklike face of Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), through the apex of Analytic Cubism in his portraits of Kahnweiler and Vollard (1910), to the synthetic portraits of Eva Gouel (such as Woman in an Armchair, 1913, and Portrait of a Girl, 1914), ending with his return to representation in the neoclassical studies of the spring of 1914. During this period Picasso painted and drew many portraits of himself, his lovers, and his acquaintances, progressively “analyzing ” the features of the face, first into blank masklike elements (as in the portrait of Stein), then gradually “slicing” the face and figure into more and more geometric shapes and planes with an emphasis still placed compositionally on the face (as in the Portrait...

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