May 4 – September 16, 2018
1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street,
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

In 1950, a Chaim Soutine exhibition at MoMA attracted a serious response from the New York art world. Willem de Kooning expressed great admiration for Soutine, arguing  that “[he] builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance.” Indeed, three years later de Kooning’s own figurative works responded to that show. Subtitling this year’s small exhibition of thirty-some Soutine still lifes “Flesh,” the Jewish Museum subtly (perhaps unconsciously) alludes to de Kooning’s famous statement, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”?

In our very different contemporary art world, this show will surely fascinate figurative and abstract painters alike. (I would be surprised, for instance, if Bill Jensen is anything but riveted by it.) Soutine appeals to our present sensibility in ways that his once more famous near-contemporaries, Picasso or Mondrian, do not. Where Cubism, Surrealism and modernist abstraction are now of essentially historical curiosity, Soutine’s painterly manner remains a live option. That is surprising, for he wanted to work within the old master and early modernist museum-based tradition – he expressed great admiration for Chardin, Courbet and Rembrandt. But the way he radicalized that tradition remains galvanizing.

Soutine is a surprisingly varied artist.  Still Life with Artichoke (1916) sets a dinner on a tilted table in a traditional still life format while Still Life with Fish (1921) lines up the fish in an opened up dish. He paints a number of hanging fowls, Chicken Hanging before a Brick Wall (1927) being one. He does great sides of beef and, inspired by Courbet, The Fish (1933). And near the end of his life, he painted the very strange Sheep behind a Fence (1940), which isn’t a still life. All of these works (except for the first and last of these I have named) set his subject, which is painted in his expressive style, on a flat, relatively neutral close up background. To speak, then, as I do, of Soutine as an expressionist is to identify the way that his technique always draws attention to the pigment per se. Seeing his luscious intense browns, yellows and reds, we are aware at the same time of the subject that they depict. Of course, all figurative art calls for this dual-awareness. But Soutine, more than the old masters he admired, focuses attention on the physicality of pigment. In his review of a Jewish Museum show of twenty years ago, Arthur Danto offered a challenging argument, which is relevant to our present inquiry. Soutine, he argues, is an artist who could only be properly (or fully) understood after the development of Abstract Expressionism, for his goal was “to paint recognizable subjects abstractly, that is to say, without the isomorphism between the image and the subject’s visual form as traditionally sought.” In thus inspiring de Kooning, Soutine showed us how to understand his own works – and demonstrated why today they remain so challenging.

Contemplating Paul Cézanne’s still lives, you become aware of how he manipulates the table and bowls supporting his apples and other still life objects, fashioning a visually precarious, spatial harmony. Cubism, we see, is in the wings. Here, in very different paintings, Soutine’s subjects are the armatures, the pretext if you will, for his exercises in pure painting. A great colorist, he uses intense, generally dark pigments, which almost always remain luminous. His art is touching in the double sense of that word: it is intensely expressive because you feel that he has created from mere pigment, as it were, the objects which he depicts; and it is touching because it holds your attention. Some old master still life painters show precious or rare foodstuffs and artifacts, luxury goods. Soutine’s banal subjects don’t call attention to themselves. And yet, once I attend momentarily to any one of them, I can hardly tear my eyes away.

Arthur Danto’s “Abstracting Soutine” is republished in his The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York, 2000).

The post “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”: Chaim Soutine at the Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.

April 24 to June 14, 2014
515 West 27th Street
New York City, 212 563 4474

[The catalogue accompanying this exhibition, edited and introduced by the curators, includes a commissioned essay by Nobel prize-winning neur0scientist Eric R. Kandel and a 1952 story by Roald Dahl written in response to the Soutine exhibition at MoMA in 1950.]

Seventy one years after his death, Chaim Soutine’s work is vehemently alive.  A few years ago the Helly Nahmad Gallery held a memorable exhibition, Soutine/Bacon, which made much of Bacon’s work look wan and perfunctory by comparison.  Now, Paul Kasmin Gallery has assembled sixteen works, also curated by Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, co-authors of the catalogue raisonné. At Kasmin’s West 27th Street space all but two works can be seen—as they were painted—in full daylight. You will be hard pressed to find richer works on view anywhere in the city.

Nevertheless, Soutine remains an outsider to the mainstream narrative of Modernism; he belongs instead to the still largely unwritten alternative history of modernist figurative painting. Well aware of all the developments from Post-Impressionism through Cubism, Soutine absorbed their lessons but rejected the language of abstract signs, and chose to develop his art out of the sensually rich tradition of nineteenth century naturalism: Corot, Courbet and their forerunners Rembrandt, Chardin and Goya. Foremost in this was his commitment to painting from life, which allowed him to connect emotionally to what he saw, to wed his strong temperament to a deep empathy with his subjects.  Working directly from life also allowed him to evade academic solutions to depicting the world, instead paying attention to the complex nature of our seeing; how we map the world as we turn our head and our eyes. This essentially personal vision is quite different from the social metaphor implicit in Albertian perspective.

There is nothing routine or indifferent in a work by Soutine. He was an ecstatic and painting was his vehicle into rapture. Few so-called expressionists have had Soutine’s capacity to render painterly effects, no matter how crude, into emotions so fully felt, so convincing. And this experience is heightened by its crabbed and bittersweet aspect: at once joyous and anguished.  Indeed, the kinesthetic rhythms that animate his landscapes and portraits, which also knead the hanging and splayed bodies of dead animals, suggest the bodily experience of dance and song, especially the plaintive cry of the human voice. This is the pictorial equivalent of García Lorca’s idea of Duende, a demonic possession that comes from a trembling in the moment, in being truly present in the work itself. Yet, this expressive ambition could strain the capacity of a painting to achieve coherence, and it is this negative capability that established Soutine’s avant-garde reputation as a man possessed by feelings beyond his control. This is the cliché about Soutine that suppresses any fair acknowledgement of his intelligence and his rare ability to synthesize opposing influences without succumbing to mere imitation.

Too often we have been told that Soutine was a man who painted without concern or interest in composition.  After spending some time in this show, I came away with an opposing view. Moving from picture to picture, I was continually struck by the variety of successful pictorial inventions. In the early and uncharacteristic work, Landscape with Donkey, (1918) the motif is at some distance from us as it unfurls into an arabesque governed by the suppression of tone for color, a dusky orange/green dyad, evoking early Bonnard.  In his most extreme landscapes, from his Céret period, it is El Greco who presides over the swaying alley of trees, the warped buildings and hills pressing up toward the surface in sensuous orgies of luminous writhing paint.  In the brilliant wide panoramic view, The Rainbow, Céret, (1920) Cézanne’s rhomboid structure is used to simultaneously shape and destabilize the landscape. In another work from 1919, The Red Castle at Céret, space seems to curve in all directions, as the windblown trees are swept back and forth, yet pictorially pressed up against the surface, so that space seems to open up only at the edges. Isn’t this precisely what happens thirty years later in de Kooning’s great Excavation? Aren’t these the same exemplars that brought Braque and Picasso to similar structural qualities in Analytical Cubism a decade earlier than Soutine?

The show’s focus is on still life, especially the nature mort of rabbits and fowl. I wish this had been more truly the show’s focus, for it is here that we enter into the greatest intimacy with Soutine’s contemplation of being and non-being, of gazing in fear and wonder in the presence of death. This is what I would call his spiritual quest. Each of these works has something marvelous: the iridescent flesh of a rabbit being attacked by animate forks, the contorted twitching of a skinned rabbit made evident by the visual ripples of a table’s irregular shape, a brace of pheasants set like jewels upon a radiant yellow cloth, a glowing icon –perhaps an inspiration for de Kooning’s Montauk Highway. And in another mesmerizing work, we are made tolook down on two pheasants displayed against a white cloth, projected up to the picture’s plane by the delicate diagonal shaft of a small side table, the blue, orange and yellow hued bodies seem to swim in the cloth, propelled by their rhythmic contortions, like the souls in Pontormo’s drawings of nudes for his lost Deluge.

Most memorable for me is the Plucked Goose of 1933, which achieves a sublime, tactile presence, realized with a searching calligraphy.  As I looked closely, opening myself to the painting, I was drawn inexorably into Soutine’s experience, into paint made most naked flesh.  Framed by a blue-black table, the body’s flesh glows from within, subtle desaturated pinks and blue purples. The fragile but lustrous body is materialized by the action of the paint smearing into modeled form. Stabbings and streaks of purple whites and pinks describe the remains of the head, neck and wings. Here and there tufts of unplucked remnants heighten the immanent mystery of the body.  It is less violent and less spectacular than his various depictions of a carcass of beef, but more profound. It is a stunning experience that stands with Gericault’s Anatomical Fragments and Goya’s The Butcher’s Counter.

It may also be significant that this is the only depiction of a dead fowl done in the thirties, and the only one shown decapitated.  It certainly can stand as a symbol for that tragic year, the year Hitler came to power. Even if this work was produced without the slightest conscious thought to its potential meta-meaning, Soutine could not have been oblivious to the current political climate, as an Ashkenazi Jew from the Pale of Settlement, used to the contempt of Russians, and devoted as a painter to expressing his existential anxiety as a Jewish émigré.

When the Nazis overtook France, Soutine fled to the south, to shelter in Champigny-sur- Veuldre, where he painted one of his last works, Maternity, in 1942, shortly before his death. A distressed, petit young woman holds a dead or unconscious child in a pose that is essentially a pieta—yet another symbolic painting of martyrdom, like Marc Chagall’s painted protest after Kristallnacht. While the emotion in Maternity is quite palpable, it remains psychological and isn’t adequately sustained by the picture itself. By this time, Soutine was painting very little and his anxiety had accelerated the severe attacks from the stomach ulcers from which he had long suffered. In August of the following year, he collapsed and died after an emergency operation in Paris. Picasso was one of the few that followed the coffin to the cemetery at Montparnasse.

The post Sensuous Orgies of Luminous Writhing Paint: Chaim Soutine Still Lifes appeared first on artcritical.

Until September 9

Like the artist it celebrates, “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art” is bursting with energy and ideas. The show presents Chaim Soutine 1893-1943) as a father figure of different traditions, American Abstract Expressionism and British expressive realism among them.

Of 46 works on display, seventeen are by Chaim Soutine himself, including such show stoppers as “View of Cagnes” (1924-25), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum and “The Carcass of Beef” (c.1925), from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.  These hang cheek by jowl (an apt metaphor for an artist notoriously drawn to dead animals as his favored still-life motif) with a range of modern and contemporary artists, including luminaries of the New York School like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell; School of London painters Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff; and individualists as diverse as Alice Neel and Joel Shapiro, Avigdor Arikha and Louise Bourgeois.

This line up is both a plea for Soutine’s contemporary relevance and a signal of his perennial outsider status.  The organizers of the show are Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, collaborators (with Klaus Perls) on the 1993 catalogue raisonée of the artist which—very rarely for a scholarly work of this kind—sold out its first hardback edition of 25,000, reflecting a deep interest particularly among painters.  Bizarrely, as the authors observe, the fascination with Soutine doesn’t inspire the Museum of Modern Art to hang any of the artist’s work in their permanent display.  On the contrary, MoMA recently deaccessioned an important later canvas, “Chartres Cathedral” (1934), to their shame.  There is a sense, however, that such official neglect bolsters Soutine’s standing as a supreme “painter’s painter”—a maverick who inspires artists whether by his drivenness and eccentricity or his deep rootedness in craft and tradition.

Soutine satisfies either criteria, which in a way is his paradox.  He has been vaunted as a kind of painterly madman, a latter-day Van Gogh.  Phrases like “hallucination,” “drunkenness,” “Dionysian frenzy” litter the Soutine literature—one critic even spoke of his flinging down ready-made compositions and not particularly caring if they landed on the canvas—and yet in marked contradiction to this is hisfierce rigor, the hidden order that binds together his frenetic marks and energized compositions.

This duality comes across in the masterful and perplexing “Landscape with Figures” (c.1922), from Soutine’s watershed three year period in Ceret, when his work reached its most “abstract expressionist” intensity (he destroyed many of the fruits of this creative outpouring in disgust at its extremity.).  A seated group of women are on a village terrace overlooking a ravine.  There are violent flashes of color—red chairs, the orange tiles of the surrounding houses, the blue of distant hills, and the near black of the steep wall disappearing beneath the figures—which somehow survive a tendency towards chromatic mush.  Similarly, close scrutiny of what could come across as a formless, expressive swirl, reveals moments of careful observation.

The elongated features of a woman with her back to the viewer, the exaggerated hat and almost dislocated, distended arms, appear to be carved out of the negative space around them—an area of intense greens and yellows that pop forwards into the picture plane.  Chairs and benches are at once specific and perfunctory, concrete and shorthand, lumpen and animate.  The whole composition is caught up in a kind of frenzy, submitting to the force of a spiral that moves down along the wall, up through the tree, and down again into the ravine.  There a sense of things coming into focus and melting away.

Some of the artists placed alongside Soutine relate more to his primitivism than to his modernist sophistication.  Jean Dubuffet, for instance, is represented by “Pierre Philosophique (D’Epanouissement)” (1951) and “Paysage Fossile” (1952), whose grinding, dense, existentialist gloom speaks to the expressionist angst in Soutine.

Two sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, a suspended bronze titled “The Quartered One,” (1964-5), that resembles a leg of meat, and a wall piece, “Rabbit” (1970), relate to the totemic, almost ritualistic identification with slaughtered animals found in Soutine’s work. “There is something electric and violent and fragile that touches me deeply in all of Soutine’s works,” Ms. Bourgeois told the curators in 2005.  His carcass motif—inspired by Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox” (1665)–is also picked up by Gandy Brodie in “Meditation on a Kosher Tag” (1963), while the depictions of inert fauna by such painters as Georg Baselitz, Alice Neel, and Susan Rothenberg, keep company with Soutine’s game and fowl.

The viscous veils of swirling reds and blues in Bill Jensen’s “The Five, The Seven VII (Ceret)” (2005) eerily relate to the Buffalo “Carcass of Beef” .  Jensen’s layering of translucent colors offers an abstract equivalent to Soutine’s ability to conjure hidden pockets of space while pushing his marks and colors outwards to heighten the visceral, intrusive presentness of the meat.  In the same room an untitled 2006 construction by Joel Shapiro, who owns a Soutine rabbit, takes on a carcass-like complexion: The wooden pieces hang together with awkward lifelessness; they are stained an almost sinister sanguine purple; and the bent out of shape wire (a device he started using after September 11, 2001) adds poignancy.

The heart of this show, however, is a presentation of Soutine as the father of two traditions—American abstract expressionism and British expressive realism.  The American involvement with Soutine has an historic marker: the 1950 Soutine retrospective at the MoMA, which the New York School artists took in with great admiration only seven years after the artist had died in Paris.

While Pollock is represented by a 1934 canvas whose robust, hefty awkwardness feels Soutine-like, it is his trademark “all over” drip paintings that relate to a defining quality in Soutine, identified by another Abstract Expressionist painter included here, Jack Tworkov: “the way his pictures move towards the edge of the canvas in centrifugal waves filling it to the brim.”  It is this sense of a swirling gestalt, a method in the madness of compulsively accumulated marks, which also justifies the inclusion of the poetically intense Milton Resnick.

De Kooning, on the other hand, relates directly to Soutine’s instinctive rapport with materials, the luscious, succulent, urgent, voluptuous presence of oily pigment that brings both their canvases so rudely to life.  While De Kooning’s “Untitled  XVI” (1976) hangs with the “Carcass of Beef” it has an unmistakably sexual presence in the way slippery pinks, whites and grays ooze into each other.  It is the kind of canvas that exemplifies De Kooning’s legendary remark that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.

De Kooning is as much an avatar of British painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as Soutine.  Auerbach’s gooey, glistening, sparkling impasto is impossible without the example of the American.  But these men, with Freud, are convincing in their role here as contemporary incarnations of the Soutine spirit.  A glaring omission in this show is the chef d’ecole of the School of London, Francis Bacon (in 2001 the same curators organized an exhibition in Germany that juxtaposed Bacon, Dubuffet, De Kooning and Pollock with Soutine) whose “Painting” (1946) directly quoted the Soutine/Rembrandt carcass.  Freud is represented by “The Painter’s Garden” (2003), a relatively rare outdoor subject that relates more to one of Soutine’s heroes, Courbet, than to Soutine.

Like Soutine, the English painters are romantics yearning to commune with the classical tradition.  Soutine was the victim of enormous prejudice even from critical supporters who mistook his expressive intensity for primitivism rooted in ignorance of painterly traditions.  He was seen as a wild primitive who painted from inner necessity, oblivious to conventions, whereas his style was in fact rooted in sophisticated observation of old masters, who he increasingly revered.  The School of London painters have a similar obsession with the past, which they believe can be reconciled with fresh, authentic, instinctive direct observation.  What is also telling is that just as the artist from the Lithuanian shtetl saw himself as keeper of the flame of French painting (working from Courbet and Chardin), the London painters (refugees from Nazi Germany, or in the case of Kossoff, the son of emigrants from Eastern Europe) as often work from Constable or Hogarth as from Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian or Poussin.

Kossoff is the English painter who comes across as the most Soutine-like.  He is represented by two of his finest works: “Here Comes the Diesel, Spring” and “Christchurch, Winter Evening” (both 1987).  Like Soutine, Kossoff (and Freud and Auerbach as well) prefer to have their subject present, although these Kossoffs are actually painted in the studio after copious drawings sur le motif.  Where Soutine would destroy many of his canvases, an equally doubt-driven Kossoff scrapes down numerous unsuccesful earlier attempts at achieving the desired image, some memory of which lingers under the final effort, the result of a single session.  His motifs, like Soutines, seem to wobble precariously in the expressive effort of landing in the picture.  And his buildings and trains, like Soutine’s French villages, anthropomorphize as if under the weight of their author’s ambition to instill into them a depth of feeling.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 6, 2006.

The post The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art appeared first on artcritical.