Resumen de Defending deformation: Maurice Deni's positivist modernism
Critical debates over deformation in symbolist visual practice were exacerbated by the exhibition of Maurice Denis's 'Décor' in 1891, a highly distorted female nude rivalling modernist nudes by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Émile Bernard. While some critics licensed deformation as a symbolist strategy, most rejected deformation of the human body on the basis that it could never be anything but perversely pathological. This essay argues that Denis came to defend this practice by instituting a continuum between subjective and objective deformation, a strategy informed by his positivist education, which has emphasized experimental methods and a continuum between the normal and the pathological. Denis effectively provided deformation with a scientific cast, licensing it as useful in the modern artist's search for form. While these discursive manoeuvres effectively purified deformation, they also inaugurated an ambivalent attitude towards deformation that would continue to reverberate in modernist criticism.
