Chaïm Soutine finds the sacred in decay in his paintings

It takes a strong constitution to truly appreciate Chaïm Soutine’s paintings: following the artist’s painstaking, experimental brushstrokes requires almost physical exertion, not to mention enduring the stomach-churning corpses they depict. His canvases can be dazzling, as in his early landscapes, which transform a sleepy Pyrenean town into a dazzling swath of color that threatens to escape the frame. They can also be uncomfortable visceral feelings, as in his depictions of beef flanks in his Paris studio; Soutine occasionally doused the meat with fresh blood, infusing the image with a jolt of vermilion. His portraits cut in and out, beyond appearance, leaving a person naked on the canvas in trembling form.

In her new biography, Chaïm Soutine: a life of genius, obsession and drama, Celeste Marcus engages in this kind of in-depth observation, exploring and understanding the artist himself through Soutine’s paintings. However, little evidence of Soutine’s life survives. He kept no diary or diary, nor did he make any statements about his work, and the few letters he left were mainly about logistical matters. He is prone to ruining work he doesn’t like and easily severing friendships over the slightest offense. Nonetheless, Marcus believes that Soutine’s work tells us enough about an artist who was passionate, even “monomaniacally” committed to his work.

Marcus is writing Soutine’s story just as she is writing it. The distortions of his paintings were often conflated with his inner unease related to the situation of Eastern European Jews in the years before World War II. Elie Wiesel was a thinker who interpreted the tragedies of history as turmoil in Soutine’s writing. But Marcus separated the painter from the historical context in which he lived, defining his work by its indomitable vitality rather than the specter of death that surrounded him.

Soutine’s life was not without personal struggles. He came from a poor background, in a village outside Minsk (Belarus). He fought hard to become an artist—literally, once, when his brother beat him for refusing to accept a more practical career. At 20, he moved to Paris, where he often had to choose between buying paint and making ends meet (he chose paint). But Soutine’s life also had its pleasures, joys and famous supporters, including the painter Amedeo Modigliani, a resident of La Ruche, the Montparnasse artists’ colony.

Soutine also achieved success, especially after the American collector Albert Barnes invested heavily in his work in 1922. The purchase transformed Soutine’s reputation, placing him in a new ranks of artists and placing his works on the walls of the Barnes Philadelphia alongside Matisse and Picasso.

Marcus immerses himself and the reader in Soutine’s paintings, meticulously describing the “pearl-like” brushstrokes, the “warm and vivid” colors, and the construction of compositions as forms of “world-building.” She explains the success of Soutine’s work as an inherent cohesion. exist grove (1922), for example, each part of the image operates according to a relational logic, creating a rhythmic relationship between the trees and the air moving between them, with alternating blues and browns arcing in chaotic harmony. Soutine developed this relational logic in his painting practice and created a completely original artistic language. Still, every art writer faces the inherent limitations of translating images into words, and the sheer intensity of Soutine’s work often leaves Marcus with vagaries such as “the flow of life force” and “the intelligent energy that is the mystery and wonder of Soutine’s work” that can be forgiven the next time one stands in front of Soutine and feels its pulsating power.

Soutine’s figurative canvases may have fallen out of favor during the Abstract Expressionist craze of the 1950s, but now they are certainly back. Artists such as Cecily Brown, Chantal Joffe, Dana Schutz, and Amy Hillman have cited his influence, praising him for creating the possibilities for a type of painting devoted to the vibrant materiality of painting itself. Marcus points out that the greatest paradox of Soutine’s work is that materiality so primitive and brutal becomes almost spiritual; as Eli Faure, one of the few writers who has studied Soutine, said, “Soutine is one of the rare religious painters in the world, because Soutine’s materials are among the most carnal that painting can express.” It is worth following the artist into the depths of his chaos to gain the resulting transcendence.