Exile and subjectivity: words and images in the writings of Sadakichi Hartmann

Abstract

This article considers the fundamental role played by self-fashioning in the aesthetic theory elaborated by the Japanese German American art critic Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944) in the early twentieth century. I read this concern with subjectivity in the context of what Hartmann believed to be the fragile, exiled, connections between word and image. The Symbolist aesthetic Hartmann elaborated in his work as a critic and historian of painting and photography brought with it a consciousness of the suspect and depleted power of words and of their capacity to reflect the world and experience not through exactitude but through suggestion and imprecision. Hartmann the poet worked with that quality of perception in the early part of his career, and the consequences for the potential of language to conjure the world, and of the visual to do the same, provides a central theme in a body of significant critical work that is coloured by his sense of exile and ‘strangeness’.

Keywords

• sadakichi hartmann
• symbolism
• early twentieth-century art and photographic criticism
• japanese-americans
• american art