Chaim Soutine, Modernist Master of Flesh, at the Jewish Museum

Empathy and brutality, appetite and hunger, reason and magic teeter in an unstable reality in Chaim Soutine’s paintings of flesh. The Jewish Museum has brought together 32 of his early still lifes of fish and fowl, his majestic slaughtered animals from the mid-1920s and ’30s, and his studies of farm animals, painted at the end of his life while he lived in hiding outside Paris, moving frequently because of the Nazi invasion of France. Although the Helly Nahmad Gallery presented Soutine together with Francis Bacon in 2011; Paul Kasmin put on a well-reviewed exhibition, Life in Death, in New York in 2014; and the Courtauld Gallery’s excellent show in London, Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys was on view last winter; there’s still a lot to think about when looking at this deep and tumultuous art. The Jewish Museum has done a splendid job of showcasing the paintings as masterpieces of modernism.

Soutine was one of those artists, like Monet and Cezanne, who moved serially through many subjects. Some of the things that obsessed him include: gladioli, self-portraits, liveried hotel workers, kitchen staff with chef’s caps, choir boys, the grand tree in Vence, Chartres Cathedral, and solemn children. If he painted something once, he returned to it, sometimes the very next day, and sometimes over several years, making changes that reflected the slow process of taking things in, of seeing an entirety, of resolving a set of complex feelings (the exception being the single female nude he painted in 1933). In this way he progressed from the early expressionistic tabletop compositions to his explosive mature work.

Continue reading "Chaim Soutine, Modernist Master of Flesh, at the Jewish Museum" at...