Into The Mainstream

The present thesis studies the self-portraits of woman artists in the first half of the 20th century. It aims to explore how the woman artists, confronted with an established self-portrait tradition, a male-dominated modern art world, and the "myth of the artist" with "male" as its implied sex, managed to "re-image" themselves by resorting to self-portraits and thus exerting their positive interventions in the configurations of "the myth of the artist", the mainstream modern art and art history as such. The thesis attempts to conduct original and penetrating analyses of these self-portraits by combining theoretical analyses with studies of historical literature and individual works. It uses French scholar Michel de Certeau's theory of "tactics" as the main thread, and divides these self-portraits into five main categories according to the various "tactics" adopted. The theoretical basis of each tactics is, respectively, Bakhtin's theory of carnivalism, the post-structuralist theory of appropriation, Jean Rivere's theory of masquerade, feminist and psychoanalytist theories of "the body", and the post-structuralist theory of deconstruction. The conclusion part of the thesis summarizes these self-portrait's interventions into the artistic representation, the art world, and the mainstream modern art, and also reveals the inspiring insights they provide into the writing of art history, the art criticism and the art theory.