Soutine à De Kooning, une mélancholie joyeuse?

Abstract

This article proposes to interpret the delayed encounter between Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning not merely as a formal lineage, but as the underlying transmission of a style of painting shaped by melancholy, convulsion and the instability of the body. Starting from the shock De Kooning experienced when viewing Soutine’s paintings, the aim is to show that what is transmitted is not a style, but a way of making the visible waver. By bringing together art history and psychoanalysis, the article draws on Freud, Lacan, Didi-Huberman and Deleuze to consider melancholy not merely as withdrawal or loss, but as a force of dispersion and renewal of the creative act. The notion of the ‘convulsive’ thus enables us to grasp a painting in which the figure unravels, in which flesh overflows the body, and in which the image becomes the site of a tension between memory, affect and survival. In Soutine as in De Kooning, the carcass, the silent scream, the twisted mouth or the trembling of the figure signal a crisis of appearance. Here, painting no longer stabilizes the world: it records its tremors, transforming melancholic loss into a power of invention.