Max Picard interprète du visage humain : du pessimisme culturel à l’empathie faciale visionnaire

Although reflection on the interpretation of the human face may seem to have been exhausted in the 20th century, Max Picard renewed it in an unprecedented way through the originality of his vision and thought. The aim of this article is precisely to underscore the originality of a visionary meditation inspired by cultural pessimism and rejecting the traditional ways of conceptual analysis. Contempting physiognomy, Max Picard believes that the organic cohesion of the human face, initially guaranteed by divine likeness, is threatened with dissociation by the trends of modern life. This threat is further accentuated by a phenomenon of iconographic proliferation and by a war of images that could aggravate this process. But above all, Max Picard is an empathetic and passionate observer of the secret life of faces, which he knows perfectly well how to decipher and share with us.