TESTIFYING FICTION OF THE MODERN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF PAINTERS

Abstract

As part of great ideologies of democratic and civil liberties, the new understanding and positioning of the individual in bourgeois society is, first of all, reflected in his or her need to establish personal identity. However, similar to the memory an autobiographical subject relies on, the identity of the individual is an unstable and open construction whose meaning is grounded in the life story which is floating between documentary layers to the ones of a fable. At the same time, the reader’s understanding of identity is variable as well, as it depends on individual, cultural, temporal and spatial designations, that is, on the diachronic and synchronic position of the storyteller himself, to which Uroš Predić has already pointed out. Upon the encounter with autobiographies of two great painters Vlaho Bukovac and Steva Torodvić, and one of the greatest artists in the history of Serbian photography, Anastas Jovanović, which were written in the late 19th and early 20th century, the reader has to establish an intersubjective communication and trust/believe in the existence of the artists’ different identities. Lastly there is also the self of the reader which is compared with the three previous selves and seeks his own profile and moral role model in the life stories of famous personalities from a different place and time. The immediate histories of myself, the storyteller/writer and the reader, enter into communication through an autobiographical narrative which can successfully overcome all other generational differences. Each new reading of the autobiographies of great artists, such as Bukovac, Todorović and Jovanović, renews the timeless, interpersonal and intertextual dialogue between my self and your self.