Deformation of Painting. Studies on Chaïm Soutine

The PhD project examines the painting of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), shedding light on its early reception, that has been widely overlooked in art history. A central concern is to increase the focus on the discursive, institutional and artistic conditions and circumstances of Soutine's work upon his arrival in Paris between 1912 and 1913. The research project does not understand Soutine's painting as a hermetically sealed phenomenon that has been largely isolated by art history so far. Rather, it proposes a reading that understands his work in the context of French tradition, the ruptures of modernism and established norms in Western European art. Particular attention is to be paid to the concept of "deformation": On the one hand, the project explores the question of the extent to which deformation as a dynamic concept of form can contribute to a convincing interpretation of Soutine's painting; on the other hand, it sets out to reconstruct the discursive space in which Soutine's painting operates in the context of marginalizing xenophobic and anti-Semitic positions in French art(criticism), thereby raising anew the question of "good form".