ABSTRACT
The early twentieth-century avant-garde rhetoric of boundless formalist experimentation was seemingly threatened by the mimetic demands of portraiture. Unlike most modernist painters, Picasso produced a large number of portraits yet barely any self-portraits. His figurative and portrait works during the period of cubism appear to disregard the subjective properties of his sitters. The prevailing demand of naturalism in portraiture held back the very idea of modernist portraiture. Modernist abstract portraiture proposes a dual affirmation of dualism in that it represents a metaphysical inner state through the employment of the artist's equally metaphysical skills of insightful vision. Individuality lies at the core of modernist art practices, the celebration of which influenced formalist abstraction through a search for a unique style that would justify the existence of a distinctive personality through the appraisal of its products. The early cubist writings map the style's theoretical development from the initial objection to mimesis to a justification of the reasons driving the proposed abstraction.
