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This paper deals with the aesthetics of absence and pre-postmodern strategies as carried out in the short story “Prázdná židle [Empty Chair]” (1916) by Richard Weiner. Drawing on the methodological fusion of narrative analysis, media philosophy, and visual anthropology, I argue that Weiner’s text offers a specific “portrait of absence”, which is able to intensify the subject despite its physical non-presence. In the first part, Weiner’s discursive strategy of feigning, revealing common features with postmodern metafiction and producing a rupture between what the text says and what it does, is explained. The second part analyzes an ironization of its affective and thematic center while bringing forth a new concept of “dia-narrative”. The third part explores the main figure of the empty chair in its intermedial relations with the portraits of Vincent van Gogh (1888) and the founding work of the conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth (1965).