Phenomenology, on the other hand, is admirably suited to an analysis of Soutine’s portraits because it encompasses the total lived experience of the works. Formalist accounts start with the works, but are unable to account for the emotional response a viewer has. Contextual accounts can be informative and entertaining but yield little real understanding of his work. Contextual accounts are variously based on such biographical information, art-historical categories such as ‘Fauvist’ or ‘School of Paris’, Soutine’s cultural status as immigrant Jew in France, and assessments of his psychological condition. Soutine himself said very little about his life or his work, so biographies are based on stories told by eyewitnesses, which have often been romanticised to promote sales, to entertain, or for nostalgic reasons. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that a phenomenological approach to Chaïm Soutine’s portraits is more rewarding than the contextual and formalist approaches that have dominated the literature on Soutine to date.
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