Chaim Soutine, great artist but disturbed?

Portrait of a Young Woman, 1915

Wiki

Pastry Cook of Cagnes, 1922 

The Guardian

Grotesque self portrait, c1923

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

Thank you to George Prochnik for this review. From 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in present-day Belarus, to Paris, 20 year old artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a huge impasto, churning with deep, febrile colours. Where Rembrandt’s hanging carcass is mottled with pale tones once the blood has drained away, Soutine’s reds appear to be fermenting. It’s not a picture of mortality! Interpreters of Rembrandt’s ox often place it in a memento mori, but Soutine’s picture convulses with what is happening right now.

Soutine insisted that he could only depict a subject if he had it in front of him, and various accounts of how he managed this with a huge quarter-side of beef came down to us. In her passionate biography, Celeste Marcus shares the most lurid. After hauling the carcass from the slaughterhouse to his studio in darkness, Soutine set to work painting it, but after a few days it began to go green and give off a terrible stench. He returned to the abattoir to get a bucket of blood so that he could keep the colours vibrant. But the blood dripped through the floorboards into the apartment below. The street was aghast. The official sanitation squad paid him a visit to shut down the project, but Soutine’s assistant prevailed on them to let him finish the work, whereupon they relented and showed him how to inject the meat with ammonia to preserve it. Soutine was also busy painting dead ducks, turkeys and chickens! The smaller bodies still stank making him a troublesome neighbour, but Soutine’s devotion to his work kept complaints to a minimum. 

Much death went into making Soutine’s art. Yet it is Marcus’ argument that everything Soutine does on the canvas should be understood as part of the artist’s pursuit of life. His canvases bear witness to his epic struggle for self-mastery, discipline and skill to communicate satisfactorily the energy of life itself. Plus many of his landscapes appear deliquescent, while the figures and faces of his human subjects are contortions. He shows us scenes in which our perspectives on life and painting have become unstuck, inverting his subject matter inside out. 

In an important 1963 essay on Soutine, critic David Sylvester noted the painter’s debt to Cézanne. Sylvester describes how Soutine’s endeavour recalls Cézanne’s determination to take hold of volume in its full tactile reality and beat it, as it were, into the picture-plane. Both artists aspired to re-create – which meant capturing the swing between broad, organic continuity and individual ephemerality. 

Marcus recognises the pitfalls of writing a biography about an artist who made so few personal statements, and for an understanding of whose formative experiences we are forced to rely on sketchy anecdotes supplied by those who knew the painter – or had heard the stories first-hand. She makes good use of this material, however, especially in her account of how Soutine left behind his constricted youth in an orthodox eastern European Jewish village for bohemian Paris. Here he lived a destitute, industrious, essentially monastic life for many years, despite soon earning the esteem of his peers in Montparnasse, among them Modigliani. 

Then c1922 collector Albert Barnes encountered Soutine’s work, seized on the artist as a star-in-waiting and bought 50+ paintings in one go, liberating Soutine from the struggle for survival, until the rise of Fascism stripped his life of all security once more. Soutine spent his last years moving from flat to flat, trying to keep out of sight. He relentlessly worked, but his health deteriorated. Medical care for the stomach problems that probably began with youthful malnutrition became more challenging under the new political realities, leaving him more vulnerable until, in 1943, he died of a perforated ulcer.

Marcus fills out this chronicle with mini-biographies of some of Soutine’s intimates, including Gerda Michaelis, the German-Jewish refugee who in 1937 became Soutine’s partner and one serious love affair. Conceptually however the author honours the position articulated by Hilton Kramer, that the painter had no biography outside his art; one might even say that his art was a substitute for a biography. She scoffs at those who insist he left no traces: he is there, right before our eyes. The man was his art, and his paintings bellow from the walls on which they hang. This is a legitimate position to take, but it is somewhat surprising to confront the confidence with which Marcus pronounces on what this bellowing is communicating.

Plucked Goose c1933,

Artists Rights Society, New York

 Carcass of Beef, 1924

The New Yorker

Marcus wants to rescue Soutine from critics who ascribe his work's emotional content  to traumatic Jewish experience. To consider this view of his art, she takes a formalist approach making Soutine’s evolution an almost exclusively interior, technical development. Marcus has enlightening things to say about the increasing strength of Soutine’s style, some informed by her own practice as a painter. Yet it’s unclear what is gained by trying to draw so strict a line between the historical & personal. World horrors can penetrate even the most focused creative consciousness. Nor did Soutine try to keep his head down as evidence for Hitler’s designs on Europe mounted.

The firewall Marcus puts up between Soutine’s subjection to history and his creative genius leads her to minimise the ways in which his first 20 years might have shaped his sensibility. There are conflicting ideas about how miserable Soutine was in the shtetl. He seems to have found the country beautiful and the markets lively, but he suffered poverty & physical abuse. Some versions of his story indicate that he was beaten by his brothers, perhaps for making art, and received at least one significant beating from others for painting an old man in the community, although accounts differ about whether a violation of Jewish law was the issue. Once he departed from the Pale of Settlement there is no outward indication that Soutine ever looked back. But the experience ?continued to gnaw at him.

Given the bias against visual culture within Orthodox Judaism, it is perfectly plausible to view his art as a reaction against it.  Many of his paintings do seem to demand that we look when others turn away – and to stare hard.  Soutine said When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded. Francis Bacon, who acknowledged the fertile shock produced by his encounter with Soutine’s work, and whose homage to Rembrandt’s ox seems more indebted to Soutine than to the Old Master, made the screaming mouth a leitmotif, even in the absence of a visual cue.

John Ashbery found Soutine’s MOMA show in 1950 a heady revelation that increased his sense of possibility as a writer: the fact that the sky could come crashing joyously into the grass, that trees could dance upside down and houses roll over like cats … I began pushing my own poems around. It’s a topsy-turvy scene but there is danger pulsing beneath that fallen sky. Writer Maurice Sachs, who met Soutine some times in the early 1930s, said he painted in a state of lyrical panic. He slashed his canvases and destroyed them when he felt they'd failed. Surely he was addressing a dilemma with historical and political dimensions; what Freud described as the perpetual agon between humanity’s life and death drives. Freud saw the future of civilisation as dependent on the life urge prevailing, but already by 1930 the prospects of that outcome were dwindling. Chaim Soutine’s died in 1943.

Good looking and young, even towards the end of his life

wiki

I Helen know that there was never a formal diagnosis from a psychiatrist to suggest the Expressionist painter Soutine was psychotic, even though his turbulent life and distorted paintings strongly suggested his mental state wasn't normal. If anything Soutine was a painter of his own obsessions, probably due to family rejection, exile, extreme poverty, physical illness and Nazi terror. I am on Hilton Kramer's side: Soutine's life was a harrowing tale of impossible aspirations,  unappeasable emotions and impossible appetites, not handled except perhaps through Expressionism.

Read Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art By Celeste Marcus