Chaim Soutine: ‘Patriarch of gestural abstraction’. S. Schama.
This is a personal summary of the chapter in the book by Simon Schama
‘Hang Ups’ entitled Chaim Soutine: Gut
Feeling. The book was published by
BBC Books in 2005.
Chaim Soutine was the subject of a previous blog post, dated 6th
January 2015.
Chaim Soutine
Simon Schama delights in finding a publicity brochure for an exhibition
at a Jewish museum – apparently at New York’s Jewish Museum - of the works of
Chaim Soutine. The brochure publicises
the museum’s café which has a ‘new menu inspired by great French painter Chaim
Soutine’. The joke is that at various
times in Chaim’s life, his subject matter was dead and decaying animals, fish
and birds. Soutine’s works were
‘shockingly visceral’.
Schama assert the apparent central role that Soutine’s stomach pain
played in his selection of subjects to paint and in his style of painting. Soutine painted in an Expressionist manner,
and expressed not only his inner mind but also his whole afflicted body.
Schama describes Soutine’s contradictory approach to personal
relationships: he argues that Soutine’s physical suffering inspired him to
achieve some of his greatest works, and that this affliction was a controlling
influence on his friendships.
Schama observes that dietary concerns are key to Jewish identity.
Kleeblatt and Silver
The catalogue to the exhibition is by Kleeblatt and Silver: it is ‘illuminating’
and it ‘reads well’; some of the contributions to the catalogue are
‘Judenschmerz’. (In his ‘Portrait of American Jews: the last half of the
Twentieth Century’, Samuel C Heilman describes Judenschmerz as ‘the pain of
being Jewish’ and ‘being torn between social integration and the pressures of
Jewish group survival’.)
Kleeblatt and Silver assert that Soutine functioned as: ‘Necessary Wild
Man’ at a time when modernist painting had become increasingly cerebral; re-interpreter
of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet; and retrospective forerunner of ‘American gestural
abstraction’.
Soutine was not isolated in pursuing a painter’s
life
Schama asserts that shtetl culture within the Pale of Settlement of
Soutine’s origin may well have been inhibited by the Second Commandment against
figurative depictions in art, but that city life – in Minsk, Vilna (Vilnius)
and Kovno (Kaunus) - was different. These
and other cities in the Pale were centres of creativity that produced ‘an
entire generation of Jewish modernists, including El Lissistzky, Jacques
Lipschitz and Marc Chagall, so Soutine was not isolated in pursuing a painter’s
life.
Soutine in France
Schama writes that Soutine’s portraits of Parisian figures were a
response to the death of Modigliani in 1920, which was partially due to
Modigliani’s abuse of alcohol and drugs: these par traits by Soutine were
‘personification of the dangerous pleasures of Montparnasse’.
In 1918 Soutine moved to Ceret in the South of France: he lived in
poverty and was taken in by two elderly women.
His ‘Expressionist landscapes’ painted at Ceret are ‘of dumbfoundingly
original power’. The Tate Gallery’s
‘Landscape at Ceret (The Storm)’ is described as ‘one of the most radical
pictures’ of this time.
The patronage of Soutine by Albert Barnes from 1922 was a surprising
phenomenon: Soutine returned to Paris as ‘primitivist poster boy’. But Soutine remained the tortured ‘wild
man’.
In the mid to late 1920s Soutine returned to the Masters whom he
believed ‘had treated painting as a perpetually incomplete creation’. At this time Soutine had a habit of
destructive dissatisfaction with his works and simultaneous inability to let go
of them.
Chardin and Courbet appealed to Soutine as ‘the least academic and most
painterly’.
Rembrandt was his main inspiration.
He was particularly drawn to Rembrandt’s obsession with the texture of
paint in the late part of his life.
Schama describes Rembrandt as the ‘proto-patriarch of Expressionism’. Soutine was especially drawn to Rembrandt’s
slaughtered beasts: ‘profound meditations on the relationship between sacrifice
and redemption’. This was the impetus
to Soutine’s ‘slaughter’ paintings.
Schama asserts that Soutine’s attraction to ‘sacrifice and redemption’
was ultimately religious. From his
upbringing he would have had understood Jewish and Christian traditions of
sacrificial atonement: as an Orthodox Jew, he would have been averse to the
Christian amalgamation of God and sacrifice.
But Soutine’s blood-filled carcasses are ‘adamantly unkosher’. Jewish ritual slaughter requires the draining
of blood, but Soutine painted dead creatures hanging inverted, so that the
blood would not drain. And there is a
hint of life, still, in these dead bodies: these paintings have an ‘element of
self-portraiture’. Schama considers
that these paintings of slaughter have the meaning only
of Soutine’s personal fate.
The patriarch of gestural abstraction
In the early 1940s, as Soutine’s death approached, he had already come
to the notice of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in the USA. In 1950 Soutine’s works were shown for the
first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: he had become ‘the
patriarch of gestural abstraction’.
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