CHAIM SOUTINE: 'THE BIRTH OF JEWISH PAINTING' / 'THE BIRTH OF A JEWISH ART'. COGNIAT, 1973

‘The birth of Jewish painting’ / 'The birth of a Jewish art': Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Raymond Cogniat, 1973.

This is a personal summary of the account of the life and work of the painter Chaim Soutine by Raymond Cogniat: ‘Soutine’. Crown, New York. 1973.  The book was translated into English by Eileen B. Hennessy.

The headings below are the chapter titles in the book.

Antibourgeois Art

Chaim Soutine was an ‘artiste maudit’, and may even be regarded as the first of this kind: an artist who finds himself at odds with his surroundings and yet who thrives in this marginal condition and who thus comes to be representative of the era in which he lives. During the Nineteenth Century spiritual values were regarded with indifference.  The ‘artiste maudit’ symbolises this neglect.  An artist in this situation is misunderstood because his circumstances are not his deliberate choice, and because his standing in society is a function of ‘ineluctable predestination’.  Soutine was born in 1893, at the time when the increasing tension and desire for change was exacerbated by political regimes that actively resisted change.  Soutine’s life is to be viewed ‘from this viewpoint of inevitable protest’.

The Formative Years

Chaim Soutine was born in Smilovitchi – a small village near Minsk.  From a young age Soutine believed he had an artist’s vocation.  At the age of ten Soutine began work as a tailor, but four years later he was working in a photographer’s studio in Minsk, and he took drawing lessons.

At this time Soutine befriended a young man named Kikoine.  An anecdote from this time tells of one or more people assaulting Soutine because he had painted a portrait: in one version the assault is said to have been made by the son of a rabbi who was angered that Soutine had defied the injunction against representative painting in the Second Commandment.  Soutine received compensation for his injuries: this was partly given to his family and partly used by Soutine in 1910 to travel to Vilnius where he was accepted at the art school and where he stayed for two years.  Kikoine was also at the school but he soon left for Paris. 

Paris, Crossroads of the World

In 1912 Soutine moved to Paris.  Fauvism had originated six years previously and Cubism was four years old.  Aspiring artists from Eastern, Central and Western Europe were arriving in Paris to take advantage of the new opportunities.  Soutine joined Kikoine, along with other artists recently arrived in Paris including ‘Kremegne (another compatriot and friend), Chagall, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as Laurens, Zadkine, and Archipenko.  ‘Soutine was the junior member of this motley group’. 

Soutine spent much time in the Louvre.  He particularly studied Courbet’s The Burial at Ornans which Cogniat describes as realism that exceeds visible reality.  He suggests that this – and other works by Courbet - would have liberated Soutine.  Rembrandt’s works in the Louvre were also a revelation to Soutine: he ‘discovered (in Rembrandt) the constantly renewed, shifting play of colours in relation to one another, and ….. the poignant exploration and externalisation of the inner life’. 

Despite the fertile atmosphere in Paris for painters, Soutine did not identify himself with any of the artistic movements that emerged at this time. 

The birth of Jewish painting

Cogniat writes that another element to be introduced at this point is to relate Soutine’s work not to French art but to the German Expressionism of the time.  He argues that it is appropriate to attempt a ‘definition of a Jewish art style created to a large extent by the artists of Central Europe, fortuitously congregated at this time in a flight from the menace of ill-treatment and racial hatred that promised to grow worse’. 

Cogniat accepts that ‘the idea of a Jewish style of painting’ is controversial.  He considers that there is no tradition of Jewish painting prior to the Twentieth Century because of the prohibition of the making of images and objects contained in the Second Commandment.  He argues that any Jewish artists who pre-date the Twentieth Century ‘were not distinguished in any way from the other, Christian artists of the same period’.

Cogniat argues that a complete change occurred with the start of the Twentieth Century and that Soutine was in the vanguard.  He writes: ‘Several artists from Central Europe and Russia have introduced a very special note into the art of our age, a feeling for the pathos of daily life, a latent despair, or even simply a melancholy and a resignation, forms of Eastern fatalism expressed in the choice of themes and style’.    This is a style, Cogniat writes, that delights in bold brushwork that results from the artist’s ‘overstimulation … being held in check by the rules of an aesthetic system’.  Cogniat attributes this style to the ‘state of mind resulting from political circumstances and the climate of permanent anxiety in which the Jews of certain areas live’.  In the early Twentieth Century the more relaxed atmosphere of Western Europe stimulated Jewish artists to ‘give free rein to the hitherto suppressed nostalgia to which they had become accustomed’.

Kikoine – friend of Soutine – has written that he considered Jewish painting to have had its birth at the start of the Twentieth Century.  He stated that he and Soutine and other Jewish painters who were ‘exiled in a foreign country’ were preoccupied with their own lack of a pictorial tradition – a lack that the culture of their host country did not satisfy.  Cogniat presents this as evidence that Soutine’s art is unique and without precedents.

Cogniat argues that any prior inhibition that Soutine may have had because of the Second Commandment is irrelevant compared with Soutine’s opportunity in Paris to enjoy the experience of personal freedom.  Cogniat concludes: ‘This is the basis for our opinion that a Jewish art was born with Soutine’.

In 1915 Soutine met the painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani (an Italian Jew), and the two of them became close friends – or more accurately ‘companion hermits’, both living in ‘extreme poverty’.  Soutine and Modigliani were drinking companions, and temperamentally they were opposites: Modigliani’s extraversion, his detachment, and his ‘controlled’ painting style contrasting with Soutine’s introversion, his ‘hunted demeanour’ and his violent method of painting.  ‘Alcoholism’ was a source of the conflict between the two men, and yet Soutine received ‘daily nourishment’ from his friendship with Modigliani.

Modigliani introduced Soutine to Zborowski – a Polish poet and art dealer.  Zborowski and a small number of other patrons assisted Soutine financially and by preventing Soutine destroying all of the paintings that he was dissatisfied with.   Cogniat refers to a catalogue recently published by Pierre Courthion that contains fifteen canvasses painted by Soutine before 1915.  In this catalogue Soutine’s style shows the ‘impastos and bright colours that nevertheless form refined relationships’ which also characterise his later works.  In the catalogue some of the works show a severity and stiffness that suggest a style still in the process of being formed. 

Cogniat describes Soutine’s mature style as one that typically shows constant movement and ‘jostling, overlapping, interlacing whirlpools of paint that invade the entire surface of the canvas’. 

Cogniat argues that other extant paintings from 1915 and 1916 show Soutine’s immersion in anguish and misery.  Landscapes have a sense of impending doom; still lifes have a ‘despairing, aggressive realism’.

In 1918 Soutine moved to the south of France.  He was accompanied by Modigliani; Zborowski enabled the move.  The experience precipitated in Soutine greater liberty and a more violent and intense vision.  Cogniat writes: ‘His art now fully attained its apocalyptic character and became a suitable vehicle for the painful revelation of its creator, who continued to live in materially deplorable conditions …. increasingly harassed by his stomach troubles’.  Cogniat concludes that Soutine’s works at this time are an ‘affirmation of catastrophe couched in the form not of a probable future but of a visible, present reality’. 

The Charm of Ugliness

In the period 1920 to 1927 Soutine experienced the loss of Modigliani, who died in 1920, and a sudden upturn in his situation in 1922 when Dr Albert C Barnes of the USA purchased seventy five of Soutine’s works from Zborowski.  In 1927 Soutine had his first one-man exhibition, in Paris.  In the late 1920 and early 1930s Soutine achieved some stability through friendship with the Castaing family.  Zborowski died in 1932.

Soutine has a unique role in promoting the significance of ‘ugliness in art’.  Goya, Breughel, Bosch and Grunewald all paint ugliness but ‘in all these painters the existence of a less grim version persists.  With Soutine ugliness is a permanent condition ….. which reunites with that abstraction that may be an ideal beauty’.  Ugliness is the condition that typifies Soutine: it is a ‘translation of beauty’.

The carcasses of animals that Soutine painted emerged from Soutine’s exposure to ritual sacrifices that he witnessed as a child ‘with their atmosphere of religious terror’.

Cogniat uses the words ‘luminous’, ‘supernatural’ and ‘religiosity’ to describe Soutine’s works.  Soutine paints within his own spiritual parameters: his paintings may not be compared with the work of other artists because each one by Soutine is a ‘mystical window’.  The dominance of red in Soutine’s works ‘does not correspond to a factual reality: it expresses an obsession and an exasperation’.

Failure in success

In the latter part of his life – the late 1930s and early 1940s - the dominant red in Soutine’s earlier works gave way to a dominant green in his portraits of trees, often shown battling against the wind.  In 1941 Soutine escaped from Nazi Paris and, due to misunderstandings, was not able to reach the USA.  He moved to Touraine in Vichy France in the company of Marie-Berthe Aurenche.  In 1943 surgery on Soutine’s stomach became essential, and on 8^th August 1943 he was operated on in Paris.  Soutine died the following day.

Soutine’s life was typified by misperception and ambiguity.  This was caused by Soutine’s own ‘soul in search of the absolute’, his self-doubt and his pride.

There were several women in Soutine’s life: Paulette Jourdain – his assistant and model in about 1925; Deborah Melnik – a Pole who may have borne Soutine’s son; Gerda Groth – who was captured by the Nazis in 1940 at the Hiver velodrome and who was placed in the Gurs concentration camp; and Marie-Berthe Aurenche who was with him at the end of his life.