Soutine and Modern Art: The New Landscape, The New Still Live

The New Landscape The New Still Life

outine S AND MODERN ART

M AU R I C E T U CH M A N E ST I D U N OW CH E I M & R E A D

The New Landscape The New Still Life

outine S AND MODERN ART

M AU R I C E T U CH M A N E ST I D U N OW CH E I M & R E A D 2 0 0 6

This exhibition would not have been possible without the assistance and encouragement of many people. We are grateful to John Cheim and Howard Read for responding to our presentation with warmth and boldness, their passion for art matched by their entrepreneurial daring. The exceptional efforts of the Cheim & Read staff – in particular Chris Burnside, Amy Shapiro, Lynn Tondrick, and Adam Sheffer – resulted in a fluid collaboration. We wish to acknowledge the similar enthusiasm and professionalism shown us in 2001 by Galerie Gmurzynska, by Krystyna Gmurzynska and Mathias Rastorfer, for working with us on their extraordinary exhibition, The Impact of Soutine: De Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon.

To the artists who worked with us in realizing this project with exceptional generosity of spirit and diligence in preparing vivid accounts of their own responses to the paintings of Chaim Soutine we are deeply grateful. To the lenders to this exhibition, listed on the next page, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery and many of the most dedicated art collectors and art dealers in the U.S. and Europe, who extended courtesies to us beyond the usual, we say … Thank you and l‘Chaim!

MAURICE TUCHMAN AND ESTI DUNOW, APRIL, 2006

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE AT CÉRET, DETAIL, C. 1920–21, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 X 41 IN., 71.1 X 104.1 CM., COURTESY ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, INC.

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LENDERS ALBRIGHT–KNOX ART GALLERY, BUFFALO, NEW YORK METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, INC., NEW YORK ACQUAVELLA MODERN ART, NEW YORK CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK GALERIE GMURZYNSKA, ZURICH LA LOUVER, VENICE, CALIFORNIA MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK MITCHELL–INNES & NASH, NEW YORK PACEWILDENSTEIN, NEW YORK SALANDER–O’REILLY GALLERIES, NEW YORK SPERONE WESTWATER, NEW YORK WASHBURN GALLERY, NEW YORK

AMBASSADOR AND MRS. DONALD BLINKEN MONIKA AND JONATHAN BRAND MELVA BUCKSBAUM AND RAYMOND LEARSY JOHN CHEIM RUSSELL LEWCZUK-JENSEN JOEL SHAPIRO AND ELLEN PHELAN MAURICE TUCHMAN ESTATE OF JACK TWORKOV TIM WALSH AND MIKE HEALY AND VARIOUS PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

SOUTINE, TREES AT AUXERRE, DETAIL, C. 1939, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 3/4 X 23 5/8 IN., 73 X 60 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION, MIAMI

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THE NEW L ANDSCAPE / THE NEW STILL LIFE: SOUTINE AND MODERN ART, 1950 –2006

COMMENTARIES ON SOUTINE BY ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION:

MAURICE TUCHMAN AND ESTI DUNOW AVIGDOR ARIKHA

SOUTINE: A HISTORY OF VISIBILIT Y

FRANK AUERBACH

MAURICE TUCHMAN AND ESTI DUNOW

GEORG BASELITZ LOUISE BOURGEOIS

SOUTINE AND HIS LEGACY

GANDY BRODIE

MAURICE TUCHMAN AND ESTI DUNOW

WILLEM DE KOONING RICHARD DIEBENKORN

OUT OF THE SHTETL

JEAN DUBUFFET

MAURICE TUCHMAN

LOUISE FISHMAN LUCIAN FREUD

A “PAINTER’S PAINTER”

PHILIP GUSTON

ESTI DUNOW

BILL JENSEN LEON KOSSOFF JOAN MITCHELL

SELECTED WRITINGS ON CHAIM SOUTINE:

ALICE NEEL PHILIPPE PASQUA

JACQUES LIPCHITZ

JACKSON POLLOCK

JACK TWORKOV

MILTON RESNICK

CLEMENT GREENBERG

SUSAN ROTHENBERG

THOMAS HESS

JOEL SHAPIRO

ELIE FAURE

JACK TWORKOV

DAVID SYLVESTER ANDREW FORGE MEYER SCHAPIRO HAROLD ROSENBERG

* AN ASTERISK NEXT TO CAPTION INFORMATION THROUGHOUT THE BO OK DENO TES A WORK INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION.

SOUTINE, TWO PHEASANTS ON A TABLE, DETAIL, C. 1926, OIL ON CANVAS, 19 3/4 X 25 1/2 IN., 50.3 X 64.8 CM., GALERIE GMURZYNSKA, ZURICH AND MAURICE TUCHMAN, NEW YORK

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We talked about fame and both agreed that the funny thing about fame is that nobody believes it’s you…. Names appear in conversation and slip away. Names that have a certain feel to them. Idi Amin, Lenny Bruce, Roman Polanski, Herman Melville, Mose Allison, Soutine the painter …

BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES, NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2004

THE NEW L ANDSCAPE / THE NEW STILL LIFE: SOUTINE AND MODERN ART, 1950 –2006 All modern artists carry with them the consciousness of past art, and often incorporate into their work elements from vastly different periods and schools that resonate with their own souls.

But few modern artists are especially eager to identify any particular predecessor as their major source, since no artist in this day and age wants to be perceived as a follower (and indeed none of the artists in this exhibition would ever be regarded as such). Be that as it may, the response of contemporary artists to the work and legacy of Chaim Soutine is of a profoundly different kind.

In 2001, we organized an exhibition at the Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne which focused on the impact of Chaim Soutine on four artists – De Kooning, Pollock, Bacon, Dubuffet. Today, in 2006, we have opted to focus specifically on the Still Life and Landscape vision of Chaim Soutine, rather than his equally important portraits, and on the relationship between these works and that of twenty-one artists of the past half-century. It seemed appropriate to us to present this selection, an often edgier side of Soutine’s work, in Chelsea, the gritty new heart of the younger international art world.

Repeatedly we have been struck and at times even surprised by the spontaneous outpouring of praise for the work of Chaim Soutine by each and every artist we contacted. (This includes statements made decades ago by artists such as Francis Bacon, Willem De Kooning, Philip Guston, Jean Dubuffet and Richard Diebenkorn who are no longer with us.) When artists look at Soutine, something exceptional comes into play. In fact there are two decisive factors: the essential vision of Chaim Soutine’s expressiveness, his natural masterly painterly powers; and his poignant status as an Outsider in the history of modernism.

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES, C. 1922, OIL ON CANVAS, 26 X 21 1/2 IN., 66 X 54.6 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION, MIAMI

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SOUTINE: A HISTORY OF VISIBILIT Y

In our catalogue for the exhibition in 2001, we gave a detailed account of the accessibility and availability of Soutine’s work to the post-war generation, which we summarize here.

Chaim Soutine’s presence was actively experienced by the avantgarde painters in the United States, England, and France from 1930 into the 1950s. A loan show of the artist’s paintings was held virtually every year during this period in one of the three major art world capitals, New York, Paris, and London.

As early as 1930, (the second year of the Museum’s existence) Alfred Barr presented three Soutine paintings in a group exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Soutine subsequently exhibited thirty-two times in New York from 1936 to 1959, exposing 195 paintings in these critical decades at such galleries as Carroll Carstairs, Niveau, Valentine, Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan, Bignou, Van Diemen-Lilienfeld, Pierre Matisse, Kraushaar, Hirschl and Adler, and Perls. At his major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950, organized by Monroe Wheeler, seventy-five paintings were shown, and many more were reproduced in the exhibition catalogue.

In these years, important exhibitions were also held outside of New York City, in Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. In addition, his presence was strongly felt by the artists who visited the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, where scores of early expressionist Soutines could be seen as part of the permanent installation.

In Paris Soutine showed continuously from 1927 until the late 50s, in exhibitions held at Paul Guillaume, Galerie Bing, BernheimJeune, Durand-Ruel, Galerie Zak, Katia Granoff, André Weil, Galerie de France, and Maison de la Pensée Française, among others. In 1959, no fewer than 119 paintings were shown at Galerie Charpentier. In London, major galleries such as Leicester, Lefevre, Redfern, Hanover, Storran, Arthur Tooth, and Gimpel Fils featured his paintings. A memorial retrospective exhibition of thirty-five selected works represented France in the 1952 Venice Biennale.

At any time in these years, Soutine’s work was accessible, in either group or solo exhibitions, to the general public and a generation of artists. Understood in the context of an art world a mere fraction of the size it is today, Soutine’s visibility was prominent. Additionally, from 1928 through the 1950s, at least twenty-one monographs and solo exhibition catalogues were published on Soutine’s paintings. All of his exhibitions received marked critical attention. Reproductions appeared routinely in the leading art magazines and journals.

SOUTINE, HARE WITH FORKS, DETAIL, C. 1924, OIL ON CANVAS, 26 X 25 3/8 IN., 66 X 64.5 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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We will use the opportunity afforded by the current exhibition, to add to the above account and make special note of the extraordinary significance of the 1950 Museum of Modern Art exhibition to the artists working in New York at that time and in the years immediately following.

Meyer Schapiro, in his 1956 article, “The Young American Painters of Today,” (The Listener, January 26, 1956) called attention to MOMA’s formative influence on the painters of that generation: “No less important were the great exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the continued study of the works of Klee, Miro, Kandinsky, and Soutine …”

The painter Charles Cajori, spoke with us in 2005 of his memory of those years and of the MOMA show in particular: “in the late 40s and 50s, the time of the MOMA show, Soutine was central to the ongoing understanding of what painting was. He was understood as a pillar.”

When we asked Jane Freilicher in 2005 to describe her connection to Soutine, she wrote: “Soutine is a painter one can’t forget. I can still recall the MOMA exhibition in 1950. A vivid light, a mixture of pathos and joy. That was his unique gift.”

And the poet John Ashbery describes the impact of that show more fully: “… I hadn’t realized it, but my arrival in New York coincided with the cresting of the ‘heroic’ period of abstract expressionism, as it was later to be known, and somehow we all seemed to benefit from this strong moment even if we paid little attention to it and seemed to be going our separate ways. We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing… I could see all of this entering into Jane’s work and Larry’s and my own. And then there were the big shows at the Museum of Modern Art, whose permanent collection alone was stimulation enough for one’s everyday needs. I had come down from Cambridge to catch the historic Bonnard show in the spring of 1948, unaware of how it was already affecting a generation of young painters who would be my friends, especially Larry Rivers who turned from playing jazz to painting at that moment of his

life. And soon there would be equally breathtaking shows of Munch, Soutine and Matisse, in each of whom – regardless of the differences that separate them – one finds a visceral sensual message sharpened by a shrill music or perfume emanating from the paint, that seemed to affect my painter friends like catnip. Soutine, in particular, who seems to have gone back to being a secondary modern master after the heady revelation of his MOMA show in 1950, but whose time will undoubtedly come again, was full of possibilities both for painters and poets. The fact that the sky could come crashing joyously into the grass, that trees could dance upside down and houses roll over like cats eager to have their tummies scratched, was something I hadn’t realized before, and I began pushing my poems around and standing words on end.” [emphasis ours. In exhibition catalogue, Jane Freilicher Paintings, Manchester, New Hampshire: Currier Gallery of Art, 1986]

ABOVE: SOUTINE, HOUSES AT CAGNES, C. 1923, OIL ON CANVAS, 29 1/2 X 36 5/8 IN., 73.5 X 92 CM., MUSÉE DE L’ORANGERIE, PARIS, COLLECTION JEAN WALTER ET PAUL GUILLAUME. RIGHT: SOUTINE, HOUSES AT CAGNES, DETAIL, C. 1923

By now, Soutine’s work is represented in almost every major museum in the United States and abroad. A partial list of important retrospectives and survey exhibitions which have been held throughout the world during the past few decades would include: Tate Gallery, London, 1963; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1968 (including 90 paintings); Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1968; Perls Galleries, New York, 1969; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, 1973; Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1973; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster (96 works) (traveled to Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1981 – 82; Hayward Gallery, London, 1982; Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1982); Galleri Bellman, New York, 1984; Musée de Chartres, 1989; Odakyu Musem, Tokyo, 1992 (traveled to Nara, Ibaraki, Hokkaido, 1993); Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano, 1995; Jewish Museum, New York, 1998; Musée de Céret, 2000; Jüdisches Museum, Vienna, 2000; Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne, 2001; Jewish Museum, Budapest, 2003.

The Galleri Bellman show in 1984, in particular, was warmly received by New York artists. Kiki Smith told us in May 2005 that this show had a real impact; all the artists she knew saw and talked about it. Roland Augustine, the director of the gallery, remembers Francisco Clemente and Joel Shapiro coming by often. Shapiro acquired his Soutine Hanging Rabbit from the show. The painter, Robert De Niro Sr., in an eloquent article on Soutine, in Art World, January, 1984, wrote:

“The influence on Soutine on other painters has often been, and this is probably true of the influence of all great painters on their followers, a lifting of surface, leaving the heart of the work untouched … Soutine painted nothing untouched by the love he felt for his subject, and what could seem like a loss of control, especially in the early canvases, is merely an exuberance, only pastiched by his followers.”

Our work on the Catalogue raisonné has placed a spotlight on the artist and served to authenticate a body of work that had long suffered from misattributions and fakes. In the course of our research, we identified as many as 100 paintings which we deemed false. In a life’s work of approximately 650 canvases this high percentage of fakes harms an artist’s reputation and distorts his true achievement. Volumes I and II of the Catalogue raisonné were published by Taschen in 1993. Unusually for a scholarly work of this kind, the edition of 24,000 books in two printings sold out quickly and was subsequently reissued in one volume in 2001.

These volumes list approximately 500 paintings by Chaim Soutine.

Since that time, many more paintings by Soutine have come to our attention, and we are currently preparing Volume III of the Catalogue raisonné, in cooperation with Galerie CazeauBéraudière, Paris. To date, we have accepted 100 works for inclusion and we are determinedly trying to locate many missing works. A number of the paintings that will appear in Volume III are included in the present exhibition.

SOUTINE AND HIS LEGACY

Despite the wide visibility of Soutine’s work and his influence on other artists over the past several decades, there remains a sense in which he is still viewed as an “Outsider” in relation to the canon of academic Modernism (a status which, as we have mentioned, if anything only increases his credibility among working artists). Even today, in 2006, one may observe with wonder that not a single painting by Chaim Soutine hangs on the plentiful walls of the new MOMA. Further, the museum recently discarded a singular and iconic painting of his, Chartres Cathedral, 1934, depriving its audience forever of a rare experience in exchange for a paltry sum of money – fewer dollars than it expends monthly on artists of the moment with no record of sustained achievement. This is all the more ironic in light of MOMA ’s Soutine retrospective of 1950, organized by curator Monroe Wheeler, an exhibition that not only helped crystallize and define the intentions of Abstract Expressionism, but actually influenced its development at a crucial moment. In the 1950 show’s catalogue, Monroe Wheeler offers a passionate exegesis on Chartres Cathedral: “Chartres Cathedral seems to have been intended as a piece of mysticism, glorifying and rejoicing, yet solemn. It is in jewel-colors, but not this time the famous intense shades suggestive of passion and sacrifice; an extraordinary range of delicate tints instead, an opalescence – greenish-blue of sea-water, gray of sea-water, and a bit of vivid rosiness like quartz. It seems a tribute of one art to the other, the contemporary easel-painter gladly sacrificing some of his individualism to the great work of the collective medieval architects; its intricacies of structure, minutiae of carved stone and inset glass, all simply and fervently rendered.”

Artists of the past half-century have been nourished by Soutine’s work, and they have truly reciprocated in kind: in making their own art, they have caused an alteration in perception so that the earlier master’s work has been brought into the mainstream of modern art history – even if precariously, as noted above. This process of making and revising historical perception, the weaving of “influence,” has received attention in Rezeptionsgeschichte theory in recent decades; for now let us recall that the German Expressionists brought El Greco out of museum storage quite as effectively as they themselves benefited from his example. So too the reciprocity between African art and Cubism, Oceanic art and Surrealism, leads one to appreciate the complexities of creativity and history.

SOUTINE, CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, C. 1934, OIL ON PANEL, 36 3/8 X 19 3/4 IN., 92.4 X 50.2 CM., EX. COLL. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

DE KOONING, WOMAN I, 1950–52, OIL ON CANVAS,

ABOVE, LEFT: PORTRAIT OF BACON, 1952, BY JOHN DEAKIN

75 7/8 X 58 IN., 192.7 X 147.3 CM., MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

ABOVE: BACON, SECOND VERSION OF “PAINTING,1946,” 1971, 78 X 58 IN., 190.5 X 147.3 CM., MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE

Indeed, since World War II, the truest champions of Chaim Soutine, who have demonstrated consistent and unflagging commitment to Soutine, whether overtly or subconsciously, have been the artists. To this broad generalization one must add the names of these influential art historians and critics: Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, David Sylvester. Professor Schapiro, with the image of Soutine’s paintings on view at MOMA in 1950, suggested to De Kooning that Woman I was successful and a finished work, and urged that it not be destroyed by De Kooning, as he was actively considering. Greenberg, also at this time, claimed that Soutine’s painterly touch could be likened only to Rembrandt, in an essay read by most every prominent art world figure of the day. David Sylvester’s dedication to Soutine in his 1963 Arts Council exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery altered the course of painting in London for decades to come, as can be seen now in the strong paintings of Cecily Brown and Jenny Saville.

Painters such as Francis Bacon acknowledged the shock of liberation when encountering Soutine in the London galleries in the late 1930s. Bill Jensen speaks of his epiphany at seeing Soutine’s Beef in the Minneapolis Institute of Art as a teenager.

(Recently, in analogous manner, the youngest artist in this exhibition, Philippe Pasqua, a medical student, chanced on the paintings of Francis Bacon, and immediately became a painter.)

Similar statements of acknowledgment, often in extremely vivid

language, were expressed by virtually all the break-through artists of the post-war period: De Kooning, Dubuffet, Philip Guston, Georg Baselitz and the subsequent generations of serious painters – that is, artists consumed by their search for seeing, artists not inspired in the main by the advantages of the camera (although often benefiting from photography) or by the sometimes academic strictures of Conceptualism.

Many artists who were crucially affected by Soutine are not to be seen here but must be acknowledged. No artist was arguably more receptive to the example of Soutine – for his vibrant painterliness and his Outsider status than Francis Bacon. While Bacon’s work indeed draws from the landscapes (it was the Landscape at Céret, now in the Tate Gallery collection, that caught his attention in 1953) and the still lifes, it is only because he is preeminently a figure painter that he is not featured in this exhibition concerning the still lifes and landscapes of Soutine.

A diverse group of artists have documented their debt to Soutine in published writings and in statements provided to us in the course of this project. In the first category, and quoted elsewhere in this essay: Andrew Forge and Robert De Niro, Sr. In an essay written expressly for us, Charles Cajori connects Soutine and Cézanne:

DE NIRO, LANDSCAPE, N.D., OIL ON CANVAS,

MORLEY, BARCELONA CATHEDRAL AS A BLOOD

KITAJ, SOUTINE (AFTER HIS SELF-PORTRAIT),

27 X 44 IN., 68.6 X 83.8 CM.,

RED ORANGE, 1986–87, OIL AND WAX ON CANVAS,

2004, OIL ON CANVAS, 36 X 36 IN., 91.4 X 91.4 CM.,

COURTESY SALANDER–O’REILLY GALLERIES

80 X 90 IN., 203.2 X 228.6 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION,

COURTESY MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK

COURTESY PACEWILDENSTEIN

“The importance of Cézanne’s revolution lies exactly in that transformation – in a new way of seeing. The area that the eyes are able to focus upon is very small. To look at the world which surrounds us requires scanning. As the eyes move, searching for locations, relationships are in constant flux, the structure of objects and of space itself is transformed in astonishing ways. The axis of a bottle shifts, tables break, a tree pushes against a segment of sky. Space becomes fluid and is expressed in time. The eyes, moving, form new and unexpected structures….

“Soutine, I believe, recognized this world and flung himself into it. It was a sensuous and felt embrace of Cézanne’s mode of seeing. Done always before nature, trusting the eyes, in violent one-shot attacks, trees, hills and houses surged and coalesced under the desperate search for location … He entered a flight of location, a “zone” dependent on an inner certainty and at tremendous risk.”

Malcolm Morley recounts that at art school in London he and his colleagues “kneeled before Soutine” … whose influence “went very deep inside.” Bruce Nauman is another acknowledged admirer of the painter; as are Jane Freilicher (quoted earlier); Jules Olitski (“Soutine had the controlled intensity of a champion bowler scattering the pins with unerring accuracy”); and Hermann

Nitsch, the Viennese actionist (“I learned to know his work very late. I understood him very deeply; for me, he is like a brother, because he had the same Dionysian and expressive intentions.”)

The late Karel Appel said Soutine experienced landscape “as if he were an animal.”

Jannis Kounellis remembers his first encounter [in 1977] with Soutine’s work: “together with the line of gas flames running along the walls at eye level, including the corner, and myself standing in between holding a mask painted yellow on my face, I put a painting of Soutine, belonging to the collection of the Lucerne Museum, a woman’s head, which interrupted the line of flames… I met the painting of Soutine in Lucerne and I then understood: he is a traveler and I have respect for him.”

It is Soutine’s figure paintings, in particular, that have been an inspiration for R.B. Kitaj. In conversation in July 2001 he said of Soutine’s Female Nude: “I pretended that Soutine’s nude was posing for me. I had rarely attempted to draw paint marks. In this case, I tried to reproduce his gesture, which is so outstanding, with my drawing pencil.” Similarly, Jenny Saville stated: "The landscapes at Céret, the carcasses of beef, the way he painted the nipple on the breast of the only nude he painted – the white stroke! – if I could do that I’d give it up.”

KOUNELLIS, UNTITLED, 1989, IRON PANELS, PIECES OF MEAT AND BURNING FLAME HANGING BY MEANS OF HOOKS FROM METAL TUBES, PROPANE GAS BOTTLE ON THE FLOOR, 78 3/4 X 523 5/8 IN. (43 5/8 FT.), 200 X 1330 CM.

OUT OF THE SHTETL MAURICE TUCHMAN

Born in poverty, the tenth of eleven children, Chaim Soutine didn’t even know his own birthday. As a child he was always hungry, and was beaten regularly by his older brothers. The family was constantly menaced by the Gentiles that surrounded their little shtetl (Smilovitchi, Lithuania), one of hundreds of Jewish villages extending the length and breadth of the Pale of Settlement.** His father barely eked out a minimum sustenance for the family as a mender of worn garments for poor people. His mother was always distracted, unsurprisingly.

But he always drew, on any scrap of paper he could find, or on the walls, using charcoal taken from the hearth when he couldn’t do better. He was ridiculed for this by his family, who wanted him to ascend from where they were, at the lowest rung of the social ladder, to become a cobbler or perhaps even a tailor. Chaim intended nevertheless to liberate himself and overcome shtetl constraints and become an artist. In time, his powerful art was to both reflect characteristics specific to the shtetl experience and simultaneously effect a supreme transcendence of these conditions.

Nothing was more characteristic of life in the shtetl than emotional expressiveness and intense feeling; but a close second was the magical power ascribed to seeing.

The texture of daily life was incessantly packed with energy, with noise and agitation. In the crowded village there was no surcease during the day. Soutine’s intensely animated canvas surfaces, the passionate quiver of his stroke, reflect this ceaseless emotionalism. A cry of joy, and sadness, grief and exultation, exudes from his paintings. The renowned scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote “the east European Jew’s heart has only one sound: ‘Oy!’” The flow of spontaneous passion on Soutine’s canvases sometimes threatens to overcome the forms, calling to mind an analogy to that Yiddish literature (Ashkenazic) in which all form and structure are submerged in an outpouring of sentiment.

On the powers ascribed to seeing in shtetl life: distrust of the visual was manifest. King Solomon condemned painting: “the sight whereof entices fools to lust after, so they desire the form of a dead image that hath no breath.

They that make them and they that desire them are lovers of evil things.”

SOUTINE, CARCASS OF BEEF, C. 1925, OIL ON CANVAS, 55 1/4 X 42 3/8 IN., 140.3 X 107.6 CM., ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY, BUFFALO, ROOM OF CONTEMPORARY ART FUND, 1939

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Soutine’s painting was to fundamentally contradict this dictum.

In the shtetl, the process of looking was regarded as dangerous. A pregnant woman was taught to fear “mislooking herself” – to avoid looking at anything that might harm the unborn child. She must be on the alert every minute of every day. If a woman were to “mislook herself” on an animal she may give birth to a monster.

An ugly or misshapen person was commonly referred to as a “mislooked one.” After a baby was born it was thought that it might be harmed by being looked at too much. A child was shielded and protected from the gaze of outsiders. The “evil eye” was blamed for any ailment at any age. The exclamation “no evil eye!” was always used as a precaution.

The act of looking and seeing was associated with terrible power: hence the phenomenon of the orthodox Jew who would avoid the sight of women and adopt a habitually furtive glance. Soutine’s own furtive manner was frequently noted by many who knew him.

As a boy in temple, Soutine would intuitively challenge this demand: when the praying congregation was asked to lower their heads, Chaim invariably raised his. But in Paris, three decades later when Soutine saw Henri Matisse approaching his way on the street, he walked across the street to avoid being seen by a master he venerated. (Soutine didn’t know that Matisse admired his painting and had purchased one of his most important landscapes for his collection.)

The shtetl’s injunction against “seeing” produced in Soutine the most compelling need to experience visual sensation. He is singular among early twentieth-century artists in his willful insistence on the concretely perceived thing. It was precisely because the visual experience was so impugned, yet loaded with significance, that Soutine placed supreme value on the particularity of the object. It is why he painted the same array of still-life objects, and precise landscape vantage points many times over: to get it right. (This is not “serial art,” variations on a theme, as we know it today.) He focused obstinately on precisely the shibboleth pertaining to sight, and violating these shibboleths became the basis of his most important paintings. It accounts in large part for the intense seriousness of his creations, their air of utter necessity.

Specific subjects and themes reflect his shtetl conditioning. He chose subjects that were particularly proscribed by the shtetl and religious belief. The iconic paintings of the carcass of beef, seven monumental canvases, were painted in early summer in Paris. To keep the flesh fresh over a period of weeks, Soutine had to pour

SOUTINE, BRACE OF PHEASANTS, C. 1926, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 7/8 X 19 7/8 IN., 65.7 X 50.5 CM., COLLECTION OF JOHN CHEIM

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SOUTINE, GREAT PHEASANT, C. 1926–27, OIL ON CANVAS, 10 5/8 X 39 3/8 IN., 27 X 100 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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fresh blood on the carcass, an explicit violation of the fundamental principle of kosherizing meat by draining the animal of blood. Or consider Soutine’s famous images of hanging, splayed fowl. Usually this is a clearly perceived subject, as is his wont. But there are images of the subject that relate directly to memory, specifically to a shtetl custom: on the morning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there was an absolution ritual described as the whirling of the fowl – a scapegoat metaphor. In place of beating the goat and sending the beast into the desert, carrying away the sins of the community, the shtetl rationale transformed the four-legged animal into a bird, and made the actual consumption of it the post-Yom Kippur meal. Soutine’s haunted still-life arrangements of food items relate, then, not only to the actual hunger suffered by the artist until he was fully thirty years of age, but to profound spiritual meanings on deeper levels of consciousness. When blood red tomatoes are perceived in conjunction with anguished fowl in the throes of death, we are not dealing with the enticements of French cuisine.

Chaim Soutine: Once I saw the village butcher slice the neck of a bird and drain the blood out of it. I wanted to cry out, but his joyful expression caught the sound in my throat. This cry, I always feel it there.

When, as a child, I drew a crude portrait of my professor, I tried to rid myself of this cry, but in vain. When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded.

** The Pale of Settlement was a western border region of Imperial Russia in which permanent residence of Jews was allowed, extending from the pale or demarcation line, to near the border with eastern/central Europe.

Though comprising only 20% of the territory of European Russia, the Pale corresponded to historical borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia. Additionally, a number of cities within the pale were excluded from it. A limited number of categories of Jews were allowed to live outside the pale. (From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia) Recently the Prime Minister of Belarus approached Maurice Tuchman and suggested that the birthplace of Chaim Soutine be attributed to Belarus, not Lithuania as it has been since the post-war period.

SOUTINE, HANGING FOWL, C. 1925, OIL ON BOARD, 49 1/4 X 31 1/2 IN., 125.1 X 80 CM., MUSÉE NATIONAL D’ART MODERNE, CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU, PARIS

SOUTINE, STILL LIFE WITH FOWL, C. 1918, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 5/8 X 21 1/4 IN., 65.1X 53.9 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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SOUTINE, TWO PHEASANTS ON A TABLE, C. 1926, OIL ON CANVAS, 19 3/4 X 25 1/2 IN., 50.3 X 64.8 CM., GALERIE GMURZYNSKA, ZURICH AND MAURICE TUCHMAN, NEW YORK

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SOUTINE, RABBIT, C. 1924, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 7/8 X18 7/8 IN., 73.3 X 47.9 CM., COLLECTION OF JOEL SHAPIRO AND ELLEN PHELAN

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SOUTINE, RABBIT, C. 1918, OIL ON CANVAS, 15 X 24 IN., 38 X 60.9 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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A “PAINTER’S PAINTER” ESTI DUNOW

Soutine works directly from life, simultaneously receiving sensations and projecting them onto his canvas. The motif is right in front of him. Each sensation communicates not only what is seen and what is felt, but also the urgency of its realization in paint. As a result, the final image impresses us with its convincing physical presence, its expressive substance, and traces of the pressure under which it was produced.

His paintings with their viscerally charged, energetic surfaces of paint and the intensely raw and evocative content they communicate – whether realized in landscape, still life or portraiture – have commanded the attention of painters and sculptors. Soutine is a master from whose densely-packed surface and fluidity of touch can be extracted powerful lessons of color, space, and light, as well as profound emotional content.

Furthermore, his absolute commitment to working from life and its multiple sensations, his all-or-nothing stance whereby neither the integrity of the painting nor of the artist is ever compromised, has endeared him to many artists. The appeal has not just been to artists such as De Kooning and Bacon, and others whom one immediately associates with the painterly and expressionist attributes of Soutine, but also to artists and students of very diverse sensibilities and styles who on the surface appear to share little with him. The very qualities that make him disturbing and difficult to categorize are the ones that have made him so compelling to other artists – a “painter’s painter” (and in the case of our exhibition a “sculptor’s painter” as well).

SOUTINE, CARCASS OF BEEF, C. 1925, OIL ON CANVAS, 55 1/4 X 42 3/8 IN., 140.3 X 107.6 CM., ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY, BUFFALO, ROOM OF CONTEMPORARY ART FUND, 1939

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to go back to Rembrandt to find anything to which his touch can be likened.”

In his lifetime, and significantly in the post-World War II generation, and now pointedly in the present generation, his influence can be felt in artists as diverse as Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Georg Baselitz, Jean Dubuffet, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Louise Fishman, Bill Jensen and Joel Shapiro (and others). In embracing the unique power and vision of the earlier artist, these contemporary masters have also succeeded in bringing Soutine into the central stream of modern art history.

The visceral quality of his paint, the movement of his brush, his deliberate working and reworking of the motif, the concrete manipulation and malleability of form, color and space are readily apparent. One can stand in front of a canvas and see – quite literally – each pull and twist and mark of paint and stroke. Face to face with a painting, we are immediately engaged by its sheer physical presence. The paintings open themselves up for examination and dissection. While complex and sophisticated, he leaves tracks for us to follow. We may get lost following them, but the marks are there. We see him working through each twist and turn, each placement in space, each texture of flesh, each burst of color and light. We are privy to the struggles and the process.

Soutine is a difficult artist. One has to understand the language of painting to understand him – a language of form, space and color.

But more than the lessons of organization, composition, and the handling of space and color and light, what sets Soutine apart is the juiciness and immediacy of his paint. The actual paint and stroke – the energy of the process, the experience of the painting being made – is what ultimately pulls a painter – whether of a classical or expressionist bent, representational or abstract – into a Soutine painting. Clement Greenberg said of Soutine: “One has

But a “painter’s painter” is more than a craftsman, a master of material and picture-making, from whose work one studies and learns. As well as being a teacher, he is also a model to emulate, a model of the stance the artist takes in the world. As such, Soutine personified the absolute commitment of the artist to his art – its pursuit and realization. He was a painter who turned to masters like Rembrandt, Chardin, and Courbet, seeking to emulate and pay homage to them. In turn, painters of his and succeeding generations have looked to Soutine. His work has not only given

SOUTINE, BRACE OF PHEASANTS, DETAIL, C. 1926, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 7/8 X 19 7/8 IN., 65.7 X 50.5 CM., COLLECTION OF JOHN CHEIM

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SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE AT CÉRET, C. 1921–22, OIL ON CANVAS, 31 X 34 IN., 78.7 X 86.4 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK, COURTESY JAMES GOODMAN GALLERY

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them concrete lessons of pictorial construction but has served as a model of the artist’s integrity, creative process, and position visa-vis history and the past.

Unfortunately, many people see only the emotional intensity of Soutine. The drama overwhelms, to the exclusion of the formal structure. But ultimately Soutine is an artist who strives toward order, and this quest coincided with his study of the Old Masters.

Among them one could list artists ranging from the 15th century painter Jean Fouquet – his favorite in the Louvre according to Jacques Lipchitz – to El Greco, Titian, Veronese, Rembrandt, Chardin, Courbet and Corot. To some this direct involvement with the Old Masters, which began to be felt in the post-Céret paintings, (specifically in the still lifes and portraits of the mid20s, becoming increasingly pronounced in the later works of the 30s and early 40s) appears at odds with his “natural” bent toward expression. As a result, a division has been established between the Céret and post-Céret work. The Céret paintings are seen as the most expressionistic in their tumultuous frenzy, and hence the least restrained by structural considerations. The later works are generally regarded as more resolved and successful formally, but at the price of having weakened in expressive power. Constant throughout these evaluations is the equation of the Céret period’s energetic gesture with the pure and essential Soutine; the structuring, harnessing and channeling of these same energies is equated with inauthenticity and a betrayal or compromise of Soutine’s true self. Not so. Expression is not sacrificed in later works. The thrust of Soutine’s development from the early work up to his death is toward clarity and concentrated expression. We find an elegance and classic quality in the late works, particularly the landscapes. He is not as some have said “a victim of the museum.” Instead he wanders through the pictorial past, not tied to any particular period or style, digesting and incorporating pictorial problems and solutions in order to ultimately refine and define his own statement.

Soutine is a prototype for other painters of how an artist looks to, absorbs and digests the lessons of past art. He exemplifies the processes of respect for, attachment to, and exploration into the work of other artists in order to extract – not an imitation, a copy, or even a particular vocabulary – but that which can help him discover and enhance his own voice and expression. Soutine used the Old Masters to further refine a personal statement. He looked selectively and took from the past those images and that sense of dignity and gravity that would reinforce his vision.

SOUTINE, GROUP OF TREES, C. 1922, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 1/2 X 25 IN., 72.5 X 63.5 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

SOUTINE, LARGE POPLARS AT CIVRY, C. 1939, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 3/4 X 21 1/4 IN., 73 X 54 CM., REUBEN AND EDITH HECHT MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA, ISRAEL

SOUTINE, TREES AT AUXERRE, C. 1939, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 3/4 X 23 5/8 IN., 73 X 60 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION, MIAMI

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REMBRANDT, SLAUGHTERED OX, 1655,

CHARDIN, STILL LIFE WITH RAYFISH, C. 1728,

SOUTINE, STILL LIFE WITH RAYFISH, C. 1924,

OIL ON WOOD,

OIL ON CANVAS,

OIL ON CANVAS,

37 X 27 1/8 IN., 94 X 69 CM.,

44 7/8 X 57 1/2 IN., 114 X 146 CM.,

31 7/8 X 39 1/4 IN., 81 X 100 CM.,

MUSÉE DU LOUVRE, PARIS

MUSÉE DU LOUVRE, PARIS

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

Soutine never worked directly from another artist’s painting.

Rather, he recreated the image in actuality and worked from life.

He set up a carcass of beef in his studio, a rayfish, posed a woman lifting her skirt in a stream – and painted directly from it. It is not a copy (his compositions are often totally different), nor an interpretation that he produces. When he paints a side of beef after Rembrandt or a rayfish after Chardin, they become Soutines.

Soutine is not emulating a painting but an image made urgent and real by Rembrandt’s or Chardin’s ability to translate it into a living reality. The art of the past helped Soutine discover and develop those inner images that pressed for realization.

“Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject of which anything he paints is both an homage and a critique …”

Robert Motherwell, 1951 This exhibition offers a window onto the idea of “influence.” What does it mean for one artist to be “influenced” by another? With most of the artists selected here, we are talking about “absorption” rather than “emulation.” We are talking about a process in which one artist – Soutine – is carefully looked at and internalized. His art is “stored” on some profound level, allowed to gestate, and then is intuitively released in the other artist’s work, to emerge at different times in the artist’s development – sometimes readily visible in a common energy, brushwork, and all-over gesture, or a shared approach to subject matter; at other times so transformed that it is unrecognizable. In each case, the artists found – as

Soutine did in Rembrandt, Chardin, Courbet – something vital and alive in Soutine that complemented their own vision and ultimately was incorporated into it. In many cases, Soutine’s example contributed to the formation and development of an artist’s work. In other cases, artists developed independently and subsequently found affinities in Soutine that validated and encouraged their own efforts.

“Influence” is a complex interchange between one artist and another. What one artist offers another and what the receiving artist perceives and takes can be very different. What happens in the case of Soutine? What does Soutine offer?

Soutine offers his “craft” – his paint, his touch, his stroke, the “matière.” He offers his compositions, the central isolated iconic images, the emphasis on verticality and/or horizontality, the creation of a large shape stretched over the surface – like molten lava dragging everything up along with it, the all-over thrusts of the landscapes, the physicality of atmosphere and wind. He offers an emotional richness that vibrates through every inch of his canvas – that transforms his landscapes, his still lifes, and his people – and is communicated directly through each stroke of the brush. Energy, physicality, the process of painting, the “painting being invented” as we watch. He offers subjects – especially compelling in the case of his still life motifs of dead animals: beef carcasses, rabbits, birds, fish. He offers a commitment to the natural world, to working from life, to looking at and receiving sensation, to direct immersion in the world he is painting. His

COURBET, TROUT, 1871, OIL ON CANVAS,

SOUTINE, FISH, C. 1933, OIL ON PANEL,

21 3/4 X 35 IN., 55 X 89 CM.,

13 3/4 X 30 1/2 IN., 34.9 X 77.5 CM.,

KUNSTHAUS ZURICH

PRIVATE COLLECTION

process is the perception – the back and forth volley of sensation from subject to artist and back again. Everything else – ideas, conceptions of suffering, anxiety, chaos – are secondary. He offers a stance of the artist in the world ….

What artists and critics “take” often has less to do with the artist being looked at than with the ideas, needs, emotions of the one who is looking. Too often, Soutine’s art is identified by its license and frenzy; the control and discipline of the work go unnoticed. Too often, a “surface” of expressionism, of loose haphazard brushwork, is equated with Soutine, when it is in fact lacking the density of a Soutine, a density into which the ongoing accumulation of momentary sensations is packed. Or, too often, the shock of a subject is attributed to a Soutine-derived impulse. Damien Hirst’s dealer, Jay Jopling, said that if Soutine were alive he would be doing work similar to what Hirst was doing with dead animals in formaldehyde.

Clearly Soutine, an artist who worked from life, for whom perception was everything, for whom the corporeality of the carcass gave a validity and painterly substance to the subject, would disagree. His last wish would have been to shock; after all, he wanted to be Rembrandt, to be an Old Master. (Even Hirst disagrees; in 2002 he said “I love Soutine and Bacon. But what I was doing is not painting. It’s completely different … Soutine would never have exhibited the dead animals. I wanted reality.”)

In the end, artists take what they need to enhance and complement their own vision. Soutine may inspire them and provide direction in their development or his work may validate and confirm shared sensibilities and styles. Or they may simply revel in the sheer joy and juiciness of his paint.

“In fact, the sign of an educated artist is the ability to get something out of other art that has nothing overtly to do with his or her own: that ‘something’ is the sense of quality, of eloquence and precision within the matrix of a different style, epoch and idea. The sense of the museum as one’s natural ground – not just a warehouse of motifs to be ‘appropriated’ but rather the house of one’s dead peers from whose unenforceable verdict there is no appeal but with whom endless conversation is possible ….”

Robert Hughes on Frank Auerbach, 1990

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE OF THE MIDI, C. 1918, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 X 20 5/8 IN., 63.5 X 52.5 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE AT CÉRET, C. 1920–21, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 X 41 IN., 71.1 X 104.1 CM., COURTESY ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, INC.

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SOUTINE, FLOWERS AND FISH, C. 1919, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 1/2 X 19 3/8 IN., 64.8 X 49.2 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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SOUTINE, HARE WITH FORKS, C. 1924, OIL ON CANVAS, 26 X 25 3/8 IN., 66 X 64.5 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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SELECTED WRITINGS ON CHAIM SOUTINE

JACQUES LIPCHITZ SCULPTOR

[Soutine] was one of the rare examples in our day of a painter who could make his pigments breathe light. It is something which cannot be learned or acquired. It is a gift of God. There was a quality in his painting that one has not seen for generations – this power to translate life into paint – paint into life.

(Quoted in Alfred Werner, Chaim Soutine, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977)

SOUTINE, FLOWERS AND FRUIT, C. 1918, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 X 21 IN., 63.5 X 53.3 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES, C. 1920, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 1/2 X 21 IN., 64.8 X 53.3 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

JACK T WORKOV PAINTER

Soutine technically defies analysis of how to do it. But it is precisely this impenetrability to logical analysis as far as his method is concerned, that quality of the surface which appears as if it had happened rather than as “made,” which unexpectedly reminds us of the most original section of the new painting in this country. Viewed from the standpoint of certain painters, like de Kooning and perhaps Pollock, about whom there is no reason to imagine any real Soutine influence, certain qualities of composition, certain attitudes toward paint which have gained prestige here as the most advanced painting, are expressed in Soutine in unpremeditated form. These can be summarized as: the way his picture moves towards the edge of the canvas in centrifugal waves filling it to the brim; his completely impulsive use of pigment as a material, generally thick, slow-flowing, viscous, with a sensual attitude toward it, as if it were the primordial material, with deep and vibratory color; the absence of any effacing of the tracks bearing the imprint of the energy passing over the surface.

The combined effect is of a full, packed, dense picture of enormous seriousness and grandeur, lacking all embellishment or any concession to decoration.

Soutine’s painting contains the fiercest denial that the picture is an end in itself. Instead it is intended to have a meaning which transcends the dimensions and material. The picture is meant to have impact on the soul.

one. It assumes a metaphysical relationship. It assumes that the relation between the subject (the painter) and the object is not fixed, but that the object, the more deeply it is experienced, changes, changing also the attitude of the painter towards the object.. And it assumes that this process goes on continually throughout the duration of the creative act. The picture does not refer to the object as it appeared to the artist at the beginning or at the end of the process, but refers to the whole sequence of relative changes that took place. Hence the fluidity of the image, the unpredictability of its outline, the “shake”: and in a flash it explains why Soutine’s subjects, in spite of violent distortions, have such intense reality.

This struggle on the part of the artist to capture the sequence of ephemeral experience is not only the heart of Soutine’s method, but also expresses his tragic anxiety, his constant brooding over being and not-being, over bloom and decay, over life and death … It requires the unity of instantaneous perceiving and doing – a headlong rush which cannot be retarded for the elaboration of detail. It excludes touching up. If the artist fails the failure is complete and disastrous. When he succeeds it is a miracle. In this process the hand is the dancer, following the rhythm of the disturbances of the soul. When the soul is dead the hand knows nothing. It is not a technique but a process. It is most unlike carpentry.

The composition is not a plan, a previous arrangement … It is rather the unpremeditated form the picture takes as a result of the struggle to express his motive. But the artist’s attitude toward the commonplace things that fill his picture – people, fowl, landscape – is not a simple

(“The Wandering Soutine,” Art News, vol. 47, no. 7, Part I, November 1950)

SOUTINE, SQUARE AT CÉRET, C. 1922, OIL ON CANVAS,

POLLOCK, EYES IN HEAT, 1946, OIL ON CANVAS,

23 5/8 X 28 1/2 IN., 60 X 72.4 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

54 X 43 IN., 137.2 X 109.2 CM., THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION, VENICE, THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION, NEW YORK

CLEMENT GREENBERG CRITIC

Soutine’s art has, from first to last, a genuine as well as an obvious capacity to move us. But, as I have hinted, this does not always accord with the art of painting.

What he wanted of the art of painting seems to have belonged for a long while to something more like life itself than like visual art.

Perhaps he asked too much of art, perhaps he set too high a value on the unimpeded expression of feeling. Certainly, he discounted to an excess the obligation to organize a picture decoratively; and even in the latter part of his life, when he became less high-handed in this respect and produced his most completely satisfying works, the decorative ordering of a picture remained something he submitted to rather than embraced. (“Chaim Soutine,” Partisan Review, vol. 18, no. 1, January – February 1951)

SOUTINE, VIEW OF CAGNES, C. 1924–25, OIL ON CANVAS, 23 5/8 X 28 3/8 IN., 60 X 72.1 CM., METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK, THE MR. AND MRS. KLAUS G. PERLS COLLECTION, 1997

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THOMAS HESS CRITIC AND CURATOR

I see the hill with a house on top, but below and to the left, I find a hook-nosed witch, a handkerchief tied around her head, holding the collar of a squatting dragon. But the beast’s right side is defined by a dark area which now appears to be a curly-horned steer, drastically foreshortened, rising up to the farmhouse, while below, guarding his eyes with his forearm, a man tumbles backward into the sea. A few minutes later, I might have some difficulty finding some of these forms again. Perhaps the landscape will return, with all its roads, banks of trees, coils of earth, and flying clouds. But the very manipulation of pigment has pried the subject from nature into the personal sensation of terror, violence and paint. Such a picture repays hours of examination, for it is fitted together as deftly as any Cubist portrait …

Everything in the painting breathes and devours space and color.

Nature is again populated with demigods who resanctify their ancient myths under the most banal fields or within everyday trees.

(Abstract Painting, New York: Viking Press, 1951. The reference is to Soutine’s Hill at Céret, c.1921)

ABOVE: SOUTINE, HILL AT CÉRET, C. 1921, OIL ON CANVAS, 29 1/4 X 21 5/8 IN., 74.3 X 54.9 CM., LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART RIGHT: SOUTINE, HILL AT CÉRET, DETAIL, C. 1921

ELIE FAURE ART HISTORIAN

The mystery of the greatest painting here bursts open, in flesh which is more flesh than flesh, nerves which are more nerves than nerves …It is in the dead meat that he finds his sensual delight.

One thinks that Soutine deforms for the sake of deforming, by a perversion that looks to shock and infuriate the viewer. What a mistake! …A passion for exact measure and proportion, an architectonic equilibrium torments him and it is just that which compels him to explore the source of these contradictory forces that tear him apart. He desperately seeks an internal order.

Soutine is one of the rare “religious” painters the world has known, because his material is one of the most carnal that painting has ever expressed.

(Soutine, Paris: Editions Cres, 1929)

ABOVE: SOUTINE, SIDE OF BEEF, C. 1922–23, OIL ON CANVAS, 27 1/2 X 20 1/2 IN., 69.9 X 52.1 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION RIGHT: SOUTINE, SIDE OF BEEF, DETAIL, C. 1922–23

DAVID SYLVESTER CRITIC

Looking at a Céret like the one from the Nan Kivell collection [now in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London] has nothing to do with the experience of gazing at a landscape. Here is a jungle of colour, layer upon impenetrable layer, not murky but of a luxurious darkness in which light is held as in porphyry or basalt or chalcedony. It is a light that belongs to the forms, not a light thrown upon them. The atmosphere, similarly, has nothing to do with how the weather is behaving in a given area at a certain time…. Whether it is noon or dusk, whether it is raining or the wind is blowing, is of no concern. Nor is it really a matter of importance what things the shapes stand for – that this is a hill or a house or a tree. We acknowledge that it is, but we get no feeling – such as we do before a Matisse, a Bonnard, a Picasso – that this particular transformation of an object is making us see this kind of object in a new way. We do not read this landscape in terms of objects and relations between objects. Our awareness cuts through objects. It responds to rhythms, to an interplay of forces. To the opposition, for example, on the left-hand side of the picture, between the hectic downward-rushing movement of the torpedo shape (the foliage of a tree) and the slow straining, upward-mounting movement of the two pyramids (the house and the hill) one of which rises out of and above the other. As it reaches the upper apex, goes over the top, this striving motion suddenly explodes into a paroxysm of movement and counter-movement, into abandon and release. And all the experiences the painting evokes are of a kind that engage our whole

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE AT CÉRET, C. 1920–21, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 33 IN., 61 X 83.8 CM., THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON

bodies: swinging, diving, falling, staggering, skating, climbing, gliding, riding downhill, teetering on a cliff edge. It evokes them as if they were disassociated from any firm contact with external objects. We enact them as we act in a nightmare, in the void of a nightmare. They arouse panic: only this panic is resolved, for the opposing forces are all somehow contained and held in balance by the overriding rhythm of the picture as a whole – not a frantic but an easy rhythm, like the swinging of a pendulum – which resolves convulsion and conflict into an unexpected serenity.

The forms mount up over us like a cliff, and as our eye moves over them we have the sensation of clambering up a cliff face. What we know about the density of these forms, about their stability and instability, their resistance and their give, is what we know through our imagined contact with the surface. It is as if we were blind. We do not see the landscape, we see the paint: the paint conveys what we would know and would not know if we were in the landscape, blind. The paint does not refer to an experience; the experience is precipitated in the paint.

Soutine, wrote Hess, “can seal the mysteries of nature within the mysteries of paint.”

(Chaim Soutine, 1893–1943, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1963. Catalogue for the exhibition held at the Tate Gallery, London and Edinburgh Arts Festival, August-November, 1963)

ANDREW FORGE PAINTER AND CRITIC

More than any other painter of his generation [Soutine] evokes abstract expressionism, not exactly through his forms or his picture structures – although de Kooning and others are said to have looked at him closely and American critics have been at pains to relate his work to New York painting – but through the ethic of his approach. The content of his painting is located similarly, not in a view of the world, nor in a criterion, still less a recipe, for a finished picture. It is first and last in the painting of the picture. Every picture is like a discovery of painting, in the course of which the paint (mere coloured material) becomes one with the subject. Unless the double sensation – of feathers, say, and paint, of looking and painting – is fused, no picture resulted, nothing came. For there was no alternative to fall back on: no theory of how the picture should work, no programme. Only the creative act.

The very fabric of his painting affects us as an active experience. His works defy words – that is their point. More specifically they defy discussion. We cannot say confidently that they are about anything, nor can we say that they intend anything. Still less can we apply the kind of formal analysis that works when a painter’s method is near the surface. Do concepts exist in Soutine? Again and again we are left with sensations and paint and sensations-in-paint. He is like a man painting out of darkness, filling his dark world with things and people.

Nothing is interchangeable, nothing is carried over from one thing to the next: he can paint a dozen turkeys and each picture is like the first discovery of a turkey. Each turkey has to be lived, to be made part of himself, and the painting of it had also to be lived on the same plane, to be brought wholly into the present. The paint-matter had to be made

SOUTINE, HANGING TURKEY, C. 1925, OIL ON CANVAS, 36 X 28 1/2 IN., 91.4 X 72.4 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

part of him and part of his living of the turkey. His handling of it must be naïve, bringing nothing from the past of skill or knowledge or practice; it had also to be virtuoso, allowing no reconsiderations and no backward glances.

His best pictures are unquestionable, like the things they are of. The Hanging Turkey is more of a turkey than a version of a turkey. Its surface yields a primitive experience, which we can only extend beyond the name ‘Turkey’ by a kind of verbal subterfuge. A wing is an unimaginable run of paint, black, forked, flicked, shot with red. The concept ‘wing’ is left standing by the paint which seems instantly and out of nowhere to generate silky feathers and limp dead-turkey joints.

To follow the shape of the carcass against the wall is to have to discover it every inch of the way. There is no tune to pick up, no past or future. You have to listen for each note as it comes. Look at the shape of the blue wall as it is marked out by the bird. Neither shape exists without the other, but theirs is not an aesthetic relationship, a balance in space. The relationship between them is one of violent mutuality. In such passages as these you have the feeling that Soutine is inventing painting while you look.

(Soutine, London: Paul Hamlyn/Spring Books, 1965)

MEYER SCHAPIRO ART HISTORIAN

The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the painting and sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation – all signs of the artist’s active presence.

The work of art is an ordered world of its kind in which we are aware, at every point of its becoming. .

The impulse … becomes tangible and definite on the surface of a canvas through the painted mark. We see, as it were, the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or extinction. These elements of impulse which seem at first so aimless on the canvas are built up into a whole.

The artist today creates an order out of unordered variable elements to a greater degree than the artist of the past … This order is created before your eyes and its law is nowhere explicit.

This power of the artist’s hand to deliver constantly elements of socalled chance or accident, which nevertheless belong to a well-defined personal class of forms and groupings, is submitted to critical control by the artist who is alert to the rightness or wrongness of the elements delivered spontaneously, and accepts or rejects them. (“The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News, vol. 56, no. 4, Summer 1957; reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers), New York: George Braziller, 1978)

It (abstract art) calls up more intensely than ever before the painter at work, his touch, his vitality and mood, the drama of decision in the ongoing process of art. Here the subjective becomes tangible. (“On the Humanity of Abstract Painting,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Second series, no. 10, 1960; reprinted in Modern Art, ibid.)

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE WITH TREES, C. 1919, OIL ON CANVAS, 18 X 24 IN., 45.7 X 61 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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HAROLD ROSENBERG CRITIC

[American Action Painters today employ a style] “which the painter could have acquired by putting a square inch of a Soutine or a Bonnard under a microscope.” (“The American Action Painters,” Art News 51, December, 1952)

DE KOONING, MONTAUK HIGHWAY, 1958, OIL ON CANVAS, 59 X 48 IN., 149.9 X 121.9 CM., LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE WITH TREES, DETAIL, C. 1919, OIL ON CANVAS, 18 X 24 IN., 45.7 X 61 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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ARIKHA, SOCKS, PARIS, 1998, OIL ON CANVAS, 15 X 18 1/8 IN., 38.1 X 46 CM., COURTESY MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK

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COMMENTARIES ON SOUTINE BY ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION AVIGDOR ARIKHA I admired [Soutine] from my earliest days in art school, but I did not try to emulate him. I have spoken about him at length. He could not possibly maintain his high tension forever, though tension was his main quality. Here is the short piece I wrote for you in 1987: Soutine He hallucinated whatever he painted, twisting his subjects into inextricable knots pulling and spinning to swirl and scream. Soutine’s painting is modern and not. Old and not. Masterful and not.

Primordial and derived. It is painting from painting, but painting from life. With Rembrandt behind his shoulder he painted from life the hanging piece of meat, forgetting Rembrandt. The page-boy at Maxim’s – haunted by the red and blue of the stained-glass windows of Chartres. The herring. The chicken. Flowers and trees. No tree he hung his gaze on, no face the likeness of which he seized, remained untwisted. Never cool, nor straight, nor calm. But furious or aching; nothing is certain, breathless, he painted what he saw. He turned what he saw upside down, inside out, as long as he could. But couldn’t for long. His scream is lasting. (1987) I have not changed my mind since.

(Statement to the curators, April, 2005)

ARIKHA, WINTER-COAT AND GLOVES, 2003, OIL ON CANVAS, 45 5/8 X 35 IN., 116 X 89 CM. COURTESY MARLBOROUGH FINE ART, LONDON

FRANK AUERBACH

My interest in Soutine has never slackened.

I do not think of him as an expressionist because for me “expressionism” and “truthfulness” are not quite synonymous.

“Truthfulness” and “Drawing”, however, do have something in common; I think of Soutine as an intense draughtsman who identifies with his forms, knows them from their core, and follows them all the way round.

I am stimulated by his remark: “Chagall and Modigliani never had the courage to destroy all their work, as I have sometimes destroyed all mine.”

(Statement to the curators, April, 2005)

Richard Shone, writing on Frank Auerbach (in a review of his exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, ArtForum, November 2001) used words that could describe a Soutine landscape: “… painter of London His spatial organization, even when hard to access through the impetuous gateau of paint, can be astonishing. Auerbach is the master of vertiginous canyons, of skies pressing onto buildings; later, he speaks for us all when faced with the need for split second selection as we launch ourselves off curbs, up steps, around street signs, picking one route from several, as in the recent Camden Place paintings…”

Auerbach himself has stated: “I wanted to make a painting that, when you saw it, would be like touching something in the dark.”

(Quoted in Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990) How strikingly this statement parallels David Sylvester’s description, quoted earlier, of experiencing a Céret landscape by Soutine: “We do not see the landscape, we see the paint; the paint conveys what we would know and would not know if we were in the landscape, blind.”

AUERBACH, TOWER BLOCKS, HEMPSTEAD ROAD, 1998, OIL ON BOARD, 16 X 20 IN., 40.6 X 50.8 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION *

GEORG BASELITZ

I was also once a student of painting. Soutine was not just my hero, but in our rotten post war period, his images were also a quite perfect replica of a skewed world – our world – perhaps somewhat flat as well, but important precisely because of this. Apart from that, he was a Russian, which was just as important to me, and he was an outsider and no Picasso. There was more of the existential and the broken, as well as the cynical and the hideous, in his images. At that time, he was really very important to me as nourishment, but not anymore. Now he is just another great painter and I believe it is in fact much better to be just a great painter.

(Statement written for the curators, June, 2005)

In 1959 Baselitz hitchhiked to Amsterdam, where he saw Soutine’s Beef at the Stedelijk Museum, a painting that had a lasting impact on his work. (Diane Waldman, Georg Baselitz, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995–96)

BASELITZ, EAGLE, DETAIL, 1982, OIL ON CANVAS, 78 3/4 X 98 7/16 IN., 200 X 250 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

Brooks Adams in a review of the 2001 Galerie Gmurzynska show in Art in America, April 2002, wrote: “There is often a shrill, expressionistic rhetoric in Soutine’s work … one is not wrong to see a connection between Soutine’s Brace of Pheasants, c. 1926, and Georg Baselitz’s upside-down anatomies.”

SOUTINE, BRACE OF PHEASANTS, C. 1926, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 7/8 X 19 7/8 IN., 65.7 X 50.5 CM., COLLECTION OF JOHN CHEIM

BASELITZ, RUNDSPITZ BRUNO, 1999, OIL ON CANVAS, 57 1/2 X 45 IN., 146.1 X 114.3 CM., COURTESY PACEWILDENSTEIN

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BASELITZ, UNTITLED (14.VII), 1985, CHARCOAL ON PAPER

BASELITZ, UNTITLED (GB836), 1986, CHARCOAL ON FABRIANO

33 1/2 X 23 3/4 IN., 85.1 X 60.3 CM., COURTESY LA LOUVER,

PAPER, 47 1/8 X 35 1/4 IN., 119.7 X 89.5 CM., COURTESY LA LOUVER,

VENICE, CALIFORNIA

VENICE, CALIFORNIA

BASELITZ, UNTITLED (14.VI.88), 1988 MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER, 30 X 23 IN., 76.2 X 58.4 CM., COURTESY LA LOUVER, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

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LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Whether the subject of the painting is a landscape or a portrait or a dead animal, you feel the speed of his brushstroke. There is something electric and violent and fragile that touches me deeply in all of Soutine’s works.

(Statement to the curators, May, 2005)

SOUTINE, FLAYED RABBIT, C. 1921, OIL ON CANVAS,

BOURGEOIS, RABBIT, 1970, BRONZE, 22 3/4 X 10 X 5 1/2 IN.,

29 3/4 X 23 5/8 IN., 75.6 X 60 CM.,

57.8 X 25.4 X 14 CM., EDITION OF 6,

BARNES FOUNDATION, MERION, PENNSYLVANIA

COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

BOURGEOIS, THE QUARTERED ONE, 1964–65, BRONZE, 62 1/4 X 24 X 20 IN., 158.1 X 61 X 50.8 CM., EDITION OF 6, COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

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GANDY BRODIE

In 1975, Meyer Schapiro spoke of Brodie’s work in terms that might easily be applied to Soutine: “Gandy’s subjects were a commitment far from the trends of the artists around him; that made his work seem to many observers untimely, refractory, even eccentric in the clamorous, often dogmatic world of the art of our day… [he was] sustained by his loving knowledge of great art that had outlived the fashions of its time.”

(Gandy Brodie, In Memoriam, New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 2000 [exhibition catalogue]; originally delivered at a memorial service for Brodie on November 10, 1975)

BRODIE, MEDITATION ON A KOSHER TAG, 1963 OIL ON CANVAS, 71 1/4 X 60 IN., 181 X 152.4 CM., COURTESY SALANDER–O’REILLY GALLERIES

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DE KOONING, UNTITLED II, 1978, OIL ON CANVAS, 59 1/4 X 55 IN., 150.5 X 139.7 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION © THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK

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WILLEM DE KO ONING

On being asked to identify his key influences] I think I would choose Soutine … I’ve always been crazy about Soutine – all of his paintings. Maybe it’s the lushness of the paint. He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration, a certain fleshiness in his work … I remember when I first saw the Soutines in the Barnes Collection … the Matisses had a light of their own, but the Soutines had a glow that came from within the paintings – it was another kind of light.

(Quest 77, March/April, 1977)

David Sylvester wrote comparing de Kooning and Soutine: “Thirty years before those Women were painted, Soutine, in the landscapes of his Céret period, had used broad strokes of thick, juicy paint to put flesh on the bones of analytical cubist compositions, or of the Cézannes that had inspired these. And there is no doubt that those paintings [Soutine’s Céret landscapes] had a crucial influence on de Kooning. Shortly after I wrote in 1959 that Soutines such as Village Square, Céret and Red Roofs, Céret, included in the one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950, could well have influenced the Woman paintings and later paintings such as February, I made the acquaintance of de Kooning and learned that he concurred with what I’d said. I mention this because de Kooning did not explicitly single out the Céret paintings when in 1976-77 he improvised a remarkable eulogy on Soutine inspired by a request to identify his key influences.” (“Flesh Was the Reason,” in Willem de Kooning, Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994–95 [exhibition catalogue])

DE KOONING, UNTITLED XVI, 1976, OIL ON CANVAS, 60 3/8 X 54 1/8 IN., 153.4 X 137.5 CM, PRIVATE COLLECTION © THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK

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De Kooning’s biographers, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan wrote: “Perhaps his greatest support came from an artist de Kooning never knew. In the fall of 1950, just when de Kooning was beginning his “woman” struggle in earnest, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a large Chaim Soutine retrospective, which included the artist’s landscapes, portraits, and depictions of carcasses. It was the first substantial show in America of the painter’s work... De Kooning was more impressed with the challenging figurative art of Soutine than he was with American abstractions. Excavation may have made de Kooning an art world insider, but what moved him in 1950 was the example of a Jewish outsider who tenaciously clung to the figure against the strictures of two different religions, Judaism and modernism. If Picasso was an autocrat with whom de Kooning must struggle, Soutine was a predecessor whom he could admire without reservation. … Soutine was a rootless wanderer who never quite fit in. De Kooning was also a poor European from the north who left home to seek another light; he, too, aspired to transform paint into a kind of flesh. In modernist New York, de Kooning drew courage from the abiding devotion of Soutine, an emblematic outsider, to the great tradition of Western old master painting, especially his regard for the Dutch masters Rembrandt and Van Gogh. In his paintings of animal carcasses, a contemporary version of Rembrandt’s beef carcass, Soutine seemed to probe … the guts of modern existence. No less than Soutine, de Kooning, in Woman I, hoped to bring a modern fire to art without abandoning what came before…

“De Kooning relished the seeming awkwardness of Soutine, just as he enjoyed the rudeness of Flemish painting, elements essential to Woman I. Soutine helped give de Kooning the fortitude to make art that disappointed taste and stood outside the fashion of the time.”

(De Kooning: An American Master, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)

DIEBENKORN, CUP, 1962, OIL ON CANVAS, 10 3/4 X 10 3/4 IN., 27.3 X 27.3 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION, COURTESY LA LOUVER, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

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RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Maurice Tuchman has written: “The diagonal plays a key role in Berkeley No. 8. Diebenkorn recalls his interest at the time in Chaim Soutine’s uprooted landscapes, with ‘their almost totally broken surfaces’ oriented around angled thrusts. (Diebenkorn had seen an early Skira publication with Soutine reproductions at this time). Diebenkorn describes these paintings: ‘things tumble through space.’” (“Diebenkorn’s Early Years,” in Richard Diebenkorn/Paintings and Drawings, 1943–1976, Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. [exhibition catalogue])

DIEBENKORN, BERKELEY NO. 38, 1955, OIL ON CANVAS

SOUTINE, LANDSCAPE AT CÉRET, C. 1919, OIL ON CANVAS, 21 X 15 3/4 IN.,

63 3/4 X 58 3/4 IN., 161.9 X 149.2 CM.,

53.3 X 65.4 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION OF THE LATNER FAMILY

THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART, PITTSBURGH; GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. SIDNEY M. FELDMAN

JEAN DUBUFFET

In conversations with Maurice Tuchman in Los Angeles in 1968, Jean Dubuffet spoke explicitly about his enthusiasm for Soutine.

Earlier, more general, statements by Dubuffet (and his work itself) confirm an affinity between the two artists: Art should be born from the material. Spirituality should borrow the language of the material. Each material has its own language and is a language.

I am pleased if the landscapes I have done… have an uncertain, unsteady scale. So that one may think, depending on one’s mood, … of a vast expanse of land, or equally of a minute particle of earth drawn to scale, or even enlarged.

The objective of painting is to animate a surface which is by definition two-dimensional and without depth. One does not enrich it in seeking effects of relief or trompe-l’oeil through shading; one denatures and adulterates it … Let us seek instead ingenious ways to flatten objects on the surface; and let the surface speak its own language and not an artificial language of three-dimensional space which is not proper to it … I feel the need to leave the surface visibly flat. My eyes like to rest on a surface which is very flat, particularly a rectangular surface. The objects represented will be transformed into pancakes, as though flattened by a pressing iron. … painting is a much more immediate language, and much more direct, than the language of words: much closer to the cry, or to the dance.

Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves. Further, painting manipulates materials which are themselves living substances.

(Quoted in Dore Ashton (ed.), Twentieth Century Artists on Art, 1985, “Anti-Cultural Positions,” from Dubuffet lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago, December 20, 1951).

DUBUFFET, PIERRE PHILOSPHIQUE (D’EPANOUISSEMENT), 1951, OIL ON BOARD, 26 1/2 X 32 3/4 IN., 67.3 X 83.2 CM., COURTESY ACQUAVELLA MODERN ART

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DUBUFFET, PAYSAGE FOSSILE, 1952, OIL ON MASONITE, 37 X 44 3/4 IN., 94 X 113.7 CM., COURTESY ACQUAVELLA MODERN ART

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LOUISE FISHMAN

I was introduced to Soutine by my mother – a painter who was studying at the Barnes Foundation in Merion – and by my aunt – a painter of Jewish themes, who had emigrated from Russia with her family to Philadelphia. She had studied with Albert Barnes at the Barnes Foundation, and later, with the great Mexican painter, Siquieros.

But my real discovery of Soutine happened on my own. As an art student, I spent hours with the Soutines at the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum, and then later when I was permitted to visit the Barnes Foundation myself – I was fortunate enough to study Barnes’s great collection of Soutines.

Soutine appealed to my early and very passionate relationship with painting. The sinewy strands and scribbles of paint coming freely from those Jewish fingers – whether describing the ceremony of a chicken tossed in circles around one’s head, the great crushed diagonal landscapes of Céret or the bleeding reds of the carcass of beef and of numerous women’s garments. Without realizing it – I identified with this scrambling Jew – who turned paint into the body and into food for the body. It was natural for me to equate my grand, athletic heroes then – De Kooning, Mitchell, Pollock and Kline – with this immigrant painter whose smaller canvasses held all the power and scale of their much larger paintings.

They all taught me to paint, but Soutine was a blood brother. Nimble, crude, masterful, ugly and unrelenting strokes that still don’t seem to meet the standards of a non-Jewish tradition and discipline, nor the acceptance of the art world. Soutine taught me the possibility of the freedom of no restrictions in making paintings; a way to use other artists (Rembrandt, Courbet, etc.) and still make paintings that were an expression of my deepest spirit, ambitions, failures, the despair of humiliation, and the possibility of grandeur.

(Statement to the curators, March, 2006) FISHMAN, GREEN’S APOGEE, 2005, OIL ON LINEN, 70 X 88 IN., 177.8 X 223.5 CM., COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

FISHMAN, HEROIC DEEDS, 2003, OIL ON LINEN, 66 X 39 IN., 167.6 X 99.1 CM., COLLECTION OF TIM WALSH AND MIKE HEALY, COURTESY SCHIFF ART PROJECTS

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LUCIAN FREUD

Lawrence Gowing wrote of Freud’s early years in London, c. 1938–39: “The pictures that stayed in his head were the things that disturbed him – things that were soothing had much less quality. And what were they, these disturbing things? He remembers Soutine’s dead animals and Huysman’s book on Grunewald …”

(Lucian Freud, London: Thames & Hudson, 1982)

Tom Fairfield, in a profile of Freud wrote: “His early work owed much to surrealism … but he soon evolved his own style, a hyperrealism owing much to Old Masters such as Durer, Watteau and Rubens, but arguably more to two twentieth-century Jewish artists: The German expressionist Ludwig Meidner and the Lithuanian-born French maverick Chaim Soutine.” (“Profile: Lucian Freud,” New Statesman, July 1, 2002)

FREUD, PAINTER’S GARDEN, 2003, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 18 IN., 61 X 45.7 CM, COURTESY ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, INC.

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PHILIP GUSTON

The other day I was in New Haven to see my daughter and son-in-law, who’s there, and they showed me through the new Yale Art School.

Attached to it is the Yale University Museum, and there’s a marvelous Soutine there that is a wonderful thing. I mean, here’s a room full of Braques and Picassos, and you don’t want to look at anything else but the Soutine. It’s just a house and trees, but it’s so mysterious and so inner. So inward, you know. It’s as if he ate up the building or squashed the building or … unnamable emotions about what? I don’t know. Not about the building, but it’s there forever. It’s a thing. There’s a powerful emotion in this little thing. And then I saw this big art building, the kind of work they do at Yale, five floors of designing. But which is art? I mean, here’s this big modern skyscraper and if that’s art then what the hell is the Soutine? If the Soutine is art, what’s this big building about? And the work they do in it.

(From an unpublished conversation between Guston and composer Morton Feldman, 1968; provided to us by Guston’s dealer, David McKee, and poet Clark Coolidge, April, 2005)

GUSTON, THE ROOM, 1954–55, OIL ON CANVAS 72 X 60 IN., 182.5 X 152.5 CM., COLLECTION OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, CONTEMPORARY ART COUNCIL FUNDS

PHILIP GUSTON, UNTITLED, 1951, INK ON PAPER, 18 3/4 X 23 1/2 IN., 47.6 X 59.7 CM., COLLECTION OF AMBASSADOR AND MRS. DONALD BLINKEN

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GUSTON, TOMB, 1978, OIL ON CANVAS,

SOUTINE, HILL AT CÉRET, C. 1921, OIL ON CANVAS,

78 1/8 X 73 3/4 IN., 199.4 X 187.3 CM.,

29 1/4 X 21 5/8 IN., 74.3 X 54.9 CM.,

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

GUSTON, LAMP, 1979, OIL ON CANVAS, 32 X 36 IN., 81.3 X 91.4 CM., COLLECTION OF MELVA BUCKSBAUM AND RAYMOND LEARSY

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BILL JENSEN

In early December 2005 Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow visited my studio to talk about Soutine. The day before John Cheim sent out a reproduction of a Soutine Céret landscape and a reproduction of a recent painting of mine. He thought they looked very good together and so did I. I have always known that my early work had a direct relationship with his painting. But seeing the recent work of mine with his, I saw his influence has been with me lifelong. Soutine is one of the great artists of the 20th Century, yet his work is marginalized by the Art World.

My first real aesthetic response to art was with Soutine. Our junior highschool class from a rural area outside St. Paul, Minnesota, was on a field trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I had never been to a museum and had no idea about this thing called art, but I thought that maybe I would be an artist someday. Our group went in and our teacher, Mr. Beltz, started talking about the Greek and Roman sculptures there. I started to wander off, I guess because I could see what he was talking about before he said it. I wandered around the museum by myself.

Walking up to a painting or a sculpture, I would look, understand it, and then walk on fairly quickly. Then I went upstairs and entered a room and I was completely floored. My knees got weak and I felt a great mass of anxiety. I could not understand what was going on in that room.

In the room were three paintings – a medium-sized Clyfford Still, a large triptych by Max Beckmann and a large Soutine Hanging Beef painting. Powerful emotions were coming off of the three paintings and these feelings seemed to be hovering in the air.

Years later after I moved to New York City to be an artist, my friend Ronnie Bladen asked what I thought was my introduction to the modern world. I immediately thought of that room and the way the space felt in that room. Somehow I still feel that that is the modern world and that is what modern painting can do. In rereading Maurice Tuchman’s wonderful essay on Soutine (1968) I noticed some quotes by Jack Tworkov and I also read the afterword Jack Tworkov wrote for the Soutine catalogue. He seemed to be saying that except for some early influences on Jack Levine, and maybe on De Kooning, Soutine was not an important influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Yet De Kooning himself said he was highly influenced by Soutine. In talking to Maurice he said that the quotes in his essay from Jack Tworkov were taken from the 1950’s and that Jack’s afterword in the catalogue was written in 1968. I noticed a difference in Jack’s tone between the two statements on Soutine; he seemed to be more distant in his appreciation in the later statement.

Soutine’s work was known to the artists in New York even though his dealer did not promote him very much. It seemed to me that Soutine’s

BILL JENSEN, THE FIVE, THE SEVEN VII (CERET), 2005 OIL ON LINEN, 37 1/8 X 28 1/8 IN., 94.3 X 71.4 CM., COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

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SOUTINE, SIDE OF BEEF, C. 1922–23, OIL ON CANVAS, 27 1/2 X 20 1/2 IN., 69.9 X 52.1 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

work had almost everything that the early Abstract Expressionists would have found affinities with: the existential jumping off the cliff of human expression; the rejection and destruction of imposed classical order through stressing the truth, the reality and the chaos of the modern world; the violent application of paint in a moment of fighting with one’s demons; and the flattening of the image into the surface of the paint.

Even though Soutine worked from observation like most artists of his generation, he would penetrate poignantly every subject (figure, landscape, etc.) and immerse this content into the surface of the paint.

Long before artists met to discuss naming the American movement we now know as Abstract Expressionism, Arshile Gorky had an idea of a way of expressing in art something that was abstract (coming from something) and could only be reached through working that was not planned, not formulized, but was fast and unexpected like the new modern form of warfare destroying Europe at that time called the “Blitzkreig.” Gorky coined the name, Abstract Expressionism, around the time of Soutine’s death during World War II. Soutine was a forerunner to Abstract Expressionism; his art embodied the Blitzkreig ideas that Gorky was talking about. De Kooning’s women paintings seem to me to be more influenced by Soutine than by Picasso. Alice Neel, whose work I also feel is indebted to Soutine, in an interview has talked about both Soutine and De Kooning. She said in a complimentary way, “De Kooning, he is a little sicker [than I],” and therefore a greater artist. “I should have been just a little bit sicker.” She continued, “that Soutine is a better artist than I am. He is in the grip of his art … pure Expressionism … [and was] completely taken over by his art.” In some ways Soutine might be a little sicker than De Kooning.

The thing that I saw when looking recently at Soutine’s work was a powerful expression that possessed a natural awkwardness. This awkwardness was his insight into the chaos of the modern world. He was not confined to formal ideas. De Kooning was asked about the many impersonators of Abstract Expressionism that were showing after it became a high style. He replied that, “ they could not make the paintings that did ‘not work’.” In hindsight, it seems that the reason Soutine was not more of an influence on the Abstract Expressionists was because of critical language by theorists to try to formalize the essence of Abstract Expressionism. Beginning with Alfred Barr’s formal interpretation of art of his period, which was labeled by Meyer Schapiro as being “essentially unhistorical,” this manipulation was pushed even further by Clement Greenberg. Greenberg led artists out of the essential core of abstract expressionism, with its unbridled vision of reality, into a Mannerist movement devoid of content (except Academic content). However, despite Greenberg’s critical attempts, there was no way to formalize De Kooning, Pollock, Still or Soutine. It was even hard for Soutine, himself, to accept some of his most awkward paintings. He wanted to destroy all of the paintings he did in the town of Céret where it seemed that this awkwardness was at its most extreme. This acceptance of what he saw and felt was one of his demons. This awkwardness, I feel, is its truthfulness.

Another influence that I feel was in play during that time was American artists searching for an art indigenous to America. They looked to Native American art, both North and South American, as a strong source. They weren’t looking for the formal qualities of Native American art, its flatness, its abstractness, but instead they were looking at the direct expression and the experience of a primitive state of awareness. This original state of purity is also deeply rooted in Soutine. He transmitted the primal vision in his landscapes, still-lifes and portraits of common working people. Early life in the shtetl in Russia, poverty and desperation were the feeding ground for his primal vision. Later on, his love of European painting tradition was no match for the origins of life he saw and imbedded in the paint. He battled with these issues of culture, substance and content. The forces he witnessed were far too powerful for him to compromise.

JENSEN, OLD MAN’S ASS (DEER ISLE, MAINE), 1987, OIL ON LINEN, 30 1/4 X 25 1/8 IN., 76.8 X 63.8 CM., COLLECTION OF RUSSELL LEWCZUK–JENSEN, COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

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Soutine’s paintings also have the rare quality of possessing an inner light, a light that emanates from deep inside the painting, a light that changes paint into living tissue. Not pictorial light, not glazed light, not optical light, but a divine light that very few artists are capable of creating. Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, and Albert Ryder are a few scarce examples of this quality. I feel it takes a combination of an enlightened way of seeing behind the physical world and an alchemist’s sensitivity to paint to create such a light. In hindsight, I see Soutine in a continuum of a tradition that includes Munch, Van Gogh, German Expressionism, Soutine, Abstract Expressionism, and beyond to fertile ground for contemporary artists. Soutine’s work does not deal with Academic ideas but it tries to deeply understand the world we live in and the forces around all of us.

(Statement to the curators, May, 2006)

LEON KOSSOFF

Kossoff selected the two paintings shown to articulate his involvement with Soutine.

Waldemar Januszczak, in a review of Kossoff’s work at the British Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale, wrote: “His nudes are lived-in looking London loners, shabby women sitting in shabby armchairs, human versions of Soutine’s wonderfully sacrificial chickens, unplucked rather than unclothed.”

(Sunday Times, London, June 18, 1995)

Klaus Kertess has noted Kossoff’s involvement with the Old Masters and the special attachment he shares with Soutine to Rembrandt: “Leon Kossoff has been deeply committed to the masters who took part in the continuous reinvention of the tradition of painterliness, starting with his formative experience at age nine of Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream. In addition to his engagement with Poussin …. Kossoff has employed works by such as Titian, Veronese, Constable and Cézanne as subjects for his work, translating their painterly experiences into his own. The impact of Soutine courses through the dark turbulence of his early figures and landscapes. Both Soutine (in 1931) and Kossoff (in 1982) reprised Rembrandt’s above mentioned bather.”

(Leon Kossoff, New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 2000)

SOUTINE, CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, C. 1934, OIL ON PANEL, 36 3/8 X 19 3/4 IN., 92.4 X 50.2 CM., EX. COLL. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

KOSSOFF, CHRISTCHURCH, WINTER EVENING, 1987. OIL ON BOARD, 56 X 37 IN., 142.2 X 94 CM., COURTESY LA LOUVER, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

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KOSSOFF, HERE COMES THE DIESEL, SPRING, 1987, OIL ON BOARD, 24 1/2 X 22 IN., 62.2 X 55.9 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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JOAN MITCHELL

In a review of Joan Mitchell’s 2002 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brenda Richardson wrote: “[Mitchell] presumably had the opportunity to consider the work of Europeans of shared sensibility, artists like Mathieu, Soutine, Soulages, de Stael, Vedova, and even Alechinsky and the Cobra group. …. Never did preliminary sketches or laid down any “starter” outlines on her canvas. She insisted she just painted what she felt…”

“Mitchell was a frenzied mark-maker.”

“She was never about drawing; she was always about paint.

Slashing strokes, color over color, and scratchy, tangled lines characterize these early works … pigment appears to be in motion before our eyes.”

(ArtForum, September, 2002)

SOUTINE, TREES AT AUXERRE, C. 1939,

MITCHELL, TILLEUL (LYNDEN TREE), 1978

MITCHELL, UNTITLED, 1964, OIL ON CANVAS

OIL ON CANVAS, 28 3/4 X 23 5/8 IN., 73 X 60 CM.,

OIL ON CANVAS, 94 1/2 X 70 7/8 IN.,

76 3/4 X 44 3/4 IN., 194.95 X 113.67 CM.,

240 X 180 CM., © THE ESTATE OF JOAN

© THE ESTATE OF JOAN MITCHELL,

MITCHELL, COURTESY CHEIM & READ,

COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

PRIVATE COLLECTION, MIAMI

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NEW YORK

MITCHELL, GREEN TREE, 1976, OIL ON CANVAS 110 X 71 IN., 279.4 X 180.3 CM., © THE ESTATE OF JOAN MITCHELL, COURTESY CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK

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ALICE NEEL

You know what I am … I’m an expressionist … but I’m still aware of what reality is. Now who is that wonderful painter that does the Side of Beef and dead ducks? … Soutine … Now Soutine, I think he’s a better artist than I am. But he is in the grip of his art. For instance, he does a landscape, the whole thing is falling downhill. It’s mad, you know. .. well, I don’t do a completely realistic thing. It has expressionist moments in it. But at the same time it’s not that pure expressionism like Soutine does. I love what he does. He can’t help himself, you know. He’s completely taken over by his art.

(From a video interview with Dr. Marc Miller, Curator, Queens Museum, 1984)

NEEL, THANKSGIVING, 1965 OIL ON CANVAS, 30 X 34 IN., 76.2 X 86.4 CM., COLLECTION OF MONIKA AND JONATHAN BRAND

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PASQUA, DOG II (JOHN), 2006, 78 3/4 X 98 1/2 IN., 200 X 250 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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PHILIPPE PASQUA

I discovered Soutine rather late through other painters, notably Francis Bacon. In looking at the catalogue raisonné by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, however, I realize that my view of painting as well as my pictorial process has unsettling similarities to Soutine’s.

First of all, there is this unbridled energy, almost insane, like an urgent and obsessive need to paint without recognition of compromise and established rules. The sole imperative is to breathe life into a piece of canvas. In Soutine’s works, this life seethes and flirts with the abstract.

The flesh palpitates, bleeds, writhes. It is violent, energetic, torturous, shaken by the traces of an underlying vitality. There is in it almost a crudeness, guilty of imprisoning internal truths. The thick stroke, disquieting, full of vigor, is driving and immediate and evokes an emotional resonance.

Soutine’s painting cannot leave anyone indifferent. For better or worse, it commands attention, provokes us, disturbs us and creates genuine emotion, free from the traditional conventions of estheticism.

It touches us immediately and deeply without passing through the filter of the mind. It’s painting from the heart.

Bravo to Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow for their catalogue raisonné on this painter, who is complex and difficult to categorize.

Theirs is a highly successful work which deserves a place of honor in the libraries of every lover of painting and of art in general.

(Statement to the curators, May, 2006)

SOUTINE, RABBIT, C. 1918, OIL ON CANVAS, 15 X 24 IN., 38 X 60.9 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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JACKSON POLLO CK

The painting we have included is an early work, an image that is powerfully evocative of Soutine and anticipates Pollock’s later work, in which the all-over centrifugal energy and movement described by Tworkov calls Soutine to mind even more explicitly.

Frank O’Hara, the New York School poet and MOMA curator, and Pollock’s first biographer, wrote characterizing Pollock’s last works: “Pollock painted his final homage to those whose art he loved and thought of in his need: the American Indian (Ritual), Matisse (Easter and the Totem) and Soutine (Scent).”

(Jackson Pollock, New York: George Braziller, 1959)

William Seitz, curator and art historian: “It can be said in fact that it was Pollock who purified the brushwork and impasto of the figurative Expressionists into a self-sufficient means. Much as Malevich and Mondrian pursued conclusions drawn from the Cubist movement to a categorical extreme, so Pollock’s identification of passion with nonobjective brush tracks gradually disintegrated his planar structure, pushing values inherent in Van Gogh and Soutine to an ultimate conclusion which was Abstract Expressionism in the most specific sense.”

(Abstract Painting in America, 1955; 1983)

POLLOCK, SCENT, 1955, OIL ON CANVAS, 78 X 57 1/2 IN., 198 X 146 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

POLLOCK, UNTITLED (COMPOSITION WITH CUBIC FORMS), 1934–38. OIL ON CANVAS, 22 1/2 X 30 1/2 IN., 57.2 X 77.5 CM., COURTESY WASHBURN GALLERY, NEW YORK

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MILTON RESNICK

From an interview with Milton Resnick, by Geoffrey Dorfman: GD: Could one see Soutine before the war in this country?

MR: Yes. The Valentine Gallery. But his real moment was after the war when he had that big show at the Museum of Modern Art. GD: That was in 1950, I think.

MR: That was an enormous show. By then Soutine was famous, at least among artists. I liked the way he painted – that was what interested me – because he somehow made me feel that he was giving me something that Cézanne didn’t. My trouble was that I felt I shouldn’t be influenced because he’s not modern.

(Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School, New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003)

In another interview, with David Rattray, July, 1992: When I was young I liked Soutine. I liked Cézanne. Cézanne was the father figure, the one we began modern art with. Soutine was the backward, unsophisticated one. He didn’t understand modern art at all. But he was doing something with paint no one else did. In the Thirties I felt awkward about him. He didn’t seem the right person to be stuck with. But after the War, he took on a new meaning for me, because of the way he worked. One of the stories I heard about Soutine was that he and a friend were sitting in a sidewalk café when a funeral procession went by, and they fell into hysterics, laughing. I wondered, What’s going on in this man’s head? Then I remembered something similar that had happened to me with a friend…We were hungry. We didn’t have a nickel. We’d had nothing to eat that day. We were walking past a barber shop, when in the window we could see a man with a bald head. The barber was massaging his scalp. We had to sit down on the sidewalk. We couldn’t stand up anymore, from laughing. That’s what happened to Soutine, seeing this ridiculous procession of people crossing themselves and crying. He and his friend just laughed themselves sick. The other part of it was that modern art is modern because it laughs at the funeral. So when people talked about Old Masters and great drawings, I laughed. I thought it was funny. (“A Talk with Milton Resnick, July 21, 1992” in Milton Resnick, New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1992 [exhibition catalogue])

RESNICK, UNTITLED, 1959, OIL ON CANVAS, 70 X 49 3/4 IN., 177.8 X 126.4 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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SUSAN RO THENBERG

As Giacometti pecked, squeezed and reduced – to find the true nature of his subjects, Soutine smacked, slapped, tortured and exuberantly blasted his way through his subjects – to find the true nature of things.

(Statement to the curators, April, 2006)

ROTHENBERG, UNTITLED, 2005, GRAPHITE AND OIL ON PAPER, 71 3/8 X 58 11/16 IN., 181.3 X 149.1 CM., COURTESY SPERONE WESTWATER, NEW YORK

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JOEL SHAPIRO

I actually never thought of my recent hanging wood sculptures in relation to Soutine. I see no influence, but some kindred spirit.

I began to use wire to suspend forms from the ceiling after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Prior to that I was suspending forms in space supported from the ground via an irrational matrix of wood posts. It was an attempt to overcome the inevitable figuration that occurs when you join individual elements to develop a more complicated form. The forms were held up independently of each other, sometimes sharing support but not attached. The work implied collapse and seemed insipid after the catastrophe.

The wire allowed the work to become free of the organizational constraints imposed by gravity. Gravity was no longer a deterrent but an asset. The wire could suspend, collapse and allow for more radical organization of form and expression.

The dead carcass is brought to life. The urgency and immediacy of the painting overwhelms the morbidity of the subject. This is the work of the artist.

(Statement to the curators, May, 2006)

SOUTINE, RABBIT, C. 1924, OIL ON CANVAS, 28 7/8 X18 7/8 IN., 73.3 X 47.9 CM., COLLECTION OF JOEL SHAPIRO AND ELLEN PHELAN

* SHAPIRO, UNTITLED, 2006, WOOD, CASEIN, AND WIRE, 66 3/8 X 23 X 23 IN., 168.6 X 58.4 X 58.4 CM., © 2006 JOEL SHAPIRO AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK, PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLEN LABENSKI, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PACEWILDENSTEIN

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SHAPIRO, UNTITLED, 2005, WOOD, CASEIN, AND WIRE, 12 X 17 X 11 IN., 30.5 X 43.2 X 27.9 CM., © 2006 JOEL SHAPIRO AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK, PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLEN LABENSKI, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PACEWILDENSTEIN

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JACK T WORKOV

It is precisely this impenetrability to logical analysis as far as [Soutine’s] method is concerned, that quality of the surface which appears as if it had happened rather than as “made,” which unexpectedly reminds us of the most original section of the new painting in this country. Viewed from the standpoint of certain painters, like de Kooning and perhaps Pollock, about whom there is no reason to imagine any real Soutine influence, certain qualities of composition, certain attitudes toward paint which have gained prestige here as the most advanced painting, are expressed in Soutine in unpremeditated form. These can be summarized as: the way his picture moves towards the edge of the canvas in centrifugal waves filling it to the brim; his completely impulsive use of pigment as a material, generally thick, slow-flowing, viscous, with a sensual attitude toward it, as if it were the primordial material, with deep and vibratory color; the absence of any effacing of the tracks bearing the imprint of the energy passing over the surface. The combined effect is of a full, packed, dense picture of enormous seriousness and grandeur, lacking all embellishment or any concession to decoration. (“The Wandering Soutine,” Art News, vol. 47, no. 7, Part I, November 1950)

TWORKOV, UNTITLED, 1959, OIL ON CANVAS 18 X 24 IN., 45.7 X 61 CM., MITCHELL-INNES & NASH AND THE ESTATE OF JACK TWORKOV, NEW YORK

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THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED IN AN EDITION OF 1500 TO ACCOMPANY THE EXHIBITION

THE NEW L ANDSCAPE / THE NEW STILL LIFE: SOUTINE AND MODERN ART JUNE – SEPTEMBER, 2006

CHEIM & READ

NEW YORK

CREATIVE DIRECTION, JOHN CHEIM GRAPHIC DESIGN, REED SEIFER EDITING, NATHAN KERNAN SEPARATIONS, IMAGECRAFT, NEW YORK PRINTING, GIST & HERLIN PRESS, CONNECTICUT ESSAY TEXTS © MAURICE TUCHMAN AND ESTI DUNOW, 2006

COVER IMAGE: SOUTINE, STILL LIFE WITH FOWL, DETAIL, C. 1918, OIL ON CANVAS, 25 5/8 X 21 1/4 IN., 65.1X 53.9 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION

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BACK COVER IMAGE: SOUTINE, SIDE OF BEEF, C. 1922–23, OIL ON CANVAS, 27 1/2 X 20 1/2 IN., 69.9 X 52.1 CM., PRIVATE COLLECTION FRONTISPIECE PHOTOGRAPH: SOUTINE POSING WITH HIS “MODEL,” DATE UNKNOWN

SOUTINE, DATE UNKNOWN