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Chaïm Soutine: The Melancholy of the “Last Cursed Painter”

2013; Espace analytique; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1776-2847

Anne Juranville,

Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

This paper demonstrates what Chaim Soutine’s lavish yet excessive and disturbing painting owes to his melancholic subjectivity. Excess, prominent in the artist’s work, is addressed from the perspective of Romano Guardini’s distinction between a “good melancholy,” both ethical and tragic, which lies at the heart of creation, and a pathological “bad melancholy,” which leads to self-destructive violence. Based on his work, this paper attempts to show that Soutine’s swing back and forth between these two extremes is driven by the equivocal status of the trauma caused by a childhood scene, itself over-determined.