Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Historic Art and Design

First Advisor

Morgan Falconer

Second Advisor

Bernard Vere

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the evolution of the Surrealist strategy of face concealment from a modernist device of perceptual estrangement into a contemporary tool of feminist and postcolonial critique within portraiture. By obscuring the most recognisable marker of identity, it evokes a complex and unsettling emotional response in the viewer, transforming the act of looking at another person into an encounter with absence. The study situates this transformation within broader aesthetic and ideological discourses, drawing on feminist art history as articulated by Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock, alongside John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, the Zeigarnik effect and Guy Debord’s détournement. The conventions of Western portraiture from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including likeness, decorum and social hierarchy, establish the historical framework later subverted by Surrealist and Neo-Surrealist artists. This study employs comparative analysis to reveal how concealment functions as both a formal and philosophical strategy, unsettling the viewer and exposing the symptomatic tensions of modernist and contemporary societies. In Surrealist practice, artists such as René Magritte and Eileen Agar used the obscured face to question perception, the coherence of identity and visual representation. In contemporary artworks by Ewa Juszkiewicz and Yinka Shonibare, this strategy is reinterpreted to expose the exclusions of gender and colonialism embedded within canonical portraiture. Across these contexts, concealment transforms absence into agency beyond convention. It dismantles art-historical frameworks and reshapes visibility, with the newly constituted image existing outside the bounds of social norms. The central argument is that face concealment persists as one of portraiture’s most radical gestures. It is not an act of erasure, but a redefinition of how identity is constructed, seen and remembered. Through its capacity to both withhold and reveal, obscuration foregrounds the tension between subjective identity and artistic representation. By tracing this trajectory from twentieth-century Surrealism to twenty-first century Neo-Surrealism, the dissertation argues that portraiture remains a vital site for interrogating power, visibility and the politics of self-representation within art history and contemporary culture alike.

Download

Share

COinS