This chapter frames the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso in the making of the 1906 portrait of Stein as a struggle over the modernist representation of the face. Having started the portrait with the sitter in front of him, Picasso famously erased Stein’s likeness and subsequently replaced it with a mask. Stein self-styled herself as an author and celebrity using Picasso’s portrait as a prop – as if it were a photograph. In turn, Stein’s literary portraits of Picasso attest to a desire for a radical erasure of the face, from memory and representation alike. The face nonetheless returns in the invocation of the proper name Picasso and through the intermedial dimensions of Stein’s portraiture writing. The chapter concludes by revisiting Nella Larsen’s use of the mask, specifically as the mask of whiteness, in her novel Passing (1929), a re-writing of Stein and Picasso’s experimentation with the racial dynamics of the mask.

The question concerning the adequacy of mimetic representation raised by the Holocaust, of how to best convey the vast suffering, the enormity of extermination, the tragedy of loss, has profoundly shaped the history of the visual arts since 1945. Focusing mainly on painting and sculpture, this chapter argues that Holocaust art largely rejected the turn to abstraction otherwise so characteristic of postwar modernism, in favor of an ongoing engagement with figurative representation. For many artists, this was a way to retain the human dimension of the Holocaust. The shared an underlying ethical and aesthetic commitment to the human figure with its myriad complexities and configurations. At the same time, they sought to avoid falling into the trap of kitsch and sentimentality. This created ineluctable aesthetic dilemmas – to combine beauty and terror – that led to a series of heterogeneous responses, not a “school of art,” but a struggle with aesthetics in the face of catastrophe.

This chapter explores hybridity by exploring the figure of the Minotaur in the context of a number of similar ancient creatures, such as the centaurs and satyrs, and of the god of shepherds, flocks, and the wild: Pan. It illustrates that the peculiar hybridity of the Minotaur and the ancient story explaining his genesis raise questions about the scope and limits of human intervention into the realm of nature. It shows that, rather than exploring the limits of the human in positive ways, the figure of the Minotaur manifests the monstrous consequences of human transgression.

In Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, Mailer attempts to make sense of the life of a painter he deemed one of his greatest influences. In Advertisements for Myself, he included a short piece called “An Eye on Picasso,” and had also planned to pen a biography of Picasso as early as 1962. Moreover, Mailer himself also dabbled in the visual arts, producing a number of sketches that invoke a Modernist aesthetic in their relative abstraction. This chapter traces these connections, and illuminates the role that Cubism played in determining the shape and dimension of Mailer’s literary canon during the second half of the twentieth century.

In the late 1940s, in the wake of the Liberation, it was the communist-aligned Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes that took the lead in commemorating the heroes of the Resistance who had died in the camps. It did so in the name of anti-fascist solidarity, and survivors of many political persuasions rallied to its ranks. Under FNDIRP’s aegis, a rough dozen camp memorials were erected in a corner of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the first of which, dedicated to Auschwitz victims, was dedicated in 1949.