“Flesh,” the title of a small, potent, and timely Chaim Soutine retrospective, elegantly curated by Stephen Brown, at the Jewish Museum, is genteel. “Meat” would better fit the show’s focus on the ferocious paintings of plucked fowl and bloody animal carcasses that the great and, I believe, underrated Russian-French artist made in the mid-nineteen-twenties, in Paris. Other uses of “meat,” for an argument’s main point or for any solid content, apply as well. The centerpiece of the show, “Carcass of Beef” (circa 1925), on loan from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, activates all those meanings. Painted in reds and blues as luminous as those of Gothic stained glass, it communes with Rembrandt’s seventeenth-century masterpiece “The Slaughtered Ox,” which Soutine contemplated often and intensely in the Louvre, and it crackles with formal improvisations (one swift white line rescues a large blue zone from incoherence) and wild emotion. It’s an event—an emergence, an emergency—that transpires ceaselessly while you look. Soutine has long been a marginal figure in modern-art history. Clement Greenberg, in 1951, adjudged his work “exotic” and “futile,” owing to its lack of “reassuring unity” and “decorative ordering.” But today Soutine feels of the moment, amid quite enough reassurance and decorativeness in recent art.
Soutine, born in a shtetl in the Lithuanian part of Russia (now Belarus) in 1893, the tenth of eleven children in a family of menders (a caste below tailors), was an outlier all his life. An early passion for painting appalled his father and at least two of his brothers, who gave him a beating for his secular heresy. In 1909, a small sum from his mother financed his departure to art school, which he attended briefly in Minsk and then for three years in Vilnius. There, he subsisted on modest patronage from a local doctor. At the age of twenty, in 1913, he emigrated with a fellow-artist to Paris and settled in a decrepit building—a warren of scruffy studios—in Montparnasse. A year later, he met Amedeo Modigliani, who became a close friend and whose death, in 1920, from tubercular meningitis, which had been worsened by drinking, left Soutine with a horror of alcohol. But he was otherwise a model bohemian, uncouth and turbulent while, at least in photographs, appealingly waifish. He haunted the Louvre and painted still-lifes in a mélange of styles informed by both Cézanne and, though for some reason he always angrily denied it, van Gogh. An arrangement of two forks resting on a dish of three herring, from 1916, evokes a meagre shared meal. Soutine was known in his circle for going without food so that he could buy art materials and, later, for fasting before he painted meat, using hunger to sharpen his perception. Among his other crotchets was an aversion to bare canvas. He preferred to work over old paintings that he acquired cheaply from antique dealers and flea markets.
In 1918, with Paris under threat of German invasion, Soutine moved to Ceret, near the border of Spain, and spent much of the next three years travelling in the South of France. He painted landscapes that are as vertiginous, to the brink of formlessness, as anything in art to this day: tornadoes of pigment, which are beloved by every painter I’ve ever talked with about them. His woozily contoured portraits of random people—friends, a hotel page, a bride, a pastry cook—force an oxymoron: empathetic caricature, seeming at once to mock and to cherish hapless humanity. Soutine’s genius peaks in the meat pictures, made after his return to Paris, in 1921. He bought the subjects from slaughterhouses and held on to them for so long that, according to an oft-told tale, their rotting stench drove his neighbors to call the police. He pleaded artistic necessity and—all hail the French—managed a compromise by agreeing to abate the smell with formaldehyde. Unfortunately, the chemical dulled the meat’s colors, which Soutine remedied by regularly dousing the carcasses with fresh blood. He worked spasmodically, with ecstatic frenzies following fallow spells. Rather than take the time to clean brushes, he discarded them from one color to the next. The used brushes would litter the floor of his studio.
In 1922, the premier American collector of modern painting, Albert Barnes, visited Soutine’s dealer. Close to fifty paintings were on offer. Barnes bought them all. (Sixteen of them are on view at the recently relocated museum of the Barnes Foundation, in downtown Philadelphia.) Success in Paris came apace. Just twenty-nine years old, Soutine was a star, profiting from a renewed taste for representational art in the demoralized wake of the First World War. He came to be associated with German and Austrian Expressionism—a mistake. Expressionism is a style. Soutine tore style to shreds. There’s a strangely realist immediacy to the meat paintings. He strove by any means expedient—palette knife, sticks, his thumbs—to transpose the forms and the substances that he saw directly into the stuff of paint. The process could seem like something between a mud-wrestling match and a fight to the death: horrific, in the instances of chickens plucked naked and strung up by the neck, their beaks agape as if screaming. Other pictures are tender: whole dead rabbits and fish as peaceable as children who have been sung to sleep. Greenberg complained that Soutine’s work was “more like life itself than like visual art.” Right he was! Soutine’s best paintings convey nothing so much as a desperate exasperation with “visual art.”
Even Soutine’s failures fascinate, as evidence of the artistic risks that he ran. For “Still Life with Rayfish” (circa 1924), he started with the pictured objects to do a version of “The Ray” (1725-26), by Chardin. You feel him yearning to engage with the ruddy flesh of the sea creature but distracted by having to incorporate images of a cat, a pot, and other impedimenta from the Chardin. Complex composition stymied him. But the ambition of the work is piercingly moving, as testimony to what painting can do by way of demonstrating what it can’t. Soutine’s production declined in the nineteen-thirties, when, his original furies spent, he gravitated toward some of the typically French modes of pictorial balance and painterly cuisine that formerly he had blown sky high.
Then came the war. The show ends with heartbreaking, scrappy little paintings that were all that Soutine could muster while moving from place to place west of Paris, hiding after the Germans occupied the city, in June of 1940. Stomach troubles, undoubtedly exacerbated by fear, became dire. In the summer of 1943, friends smuggled him by a circuitous route to a hospital in Paris, where he underwent emergency surgery for perforated ulcers. He died soon afterward, at the age of fifty, and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
Soutine’s reputation soared after the war. He was cited as a major forebear of Abstract Expressionism. Willem de Kooning called Soutine his favorite painter and once made a remark that applies not only to the likes of Titian, whom he probably had in mind, but also very neatly to Soutine’s meat pictures: “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” Greenberg, while maintaining his authoritative dismissal of Soutine, had to begrudge that “one has to go back to Rembrandt . . . to find anything to which his touch . . . can be likened.” (That’s spot on. Like Rembrandt’s, Soutine’s brushstrokes can feel sensate, as if talking back to the painter with ideas of their own.) And if any artist justifies Harold Rosenberg’s heady definition of what he called “Action painting”—a notion of the canvas as an existential “arena in which to act” rather than the ground of an aesthetic pursuit—it would be Soutine, though without the macho pathos that Rosenberg celebrated in de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. Meanwhile, being favored by fashion incurred a cost when Pop and Minimalism conquered the art world, in the early sixties. Ever since, Soutine has occupied a blind spot in contemporary tastes. That should end now. Let slide the weary art-historical narratives that lock Soutine into categories of style and sequences of influence. Only look. ♦
