An Expressionist in Paris:
The Paintings of Chaim Soutine
Jewish Museum, New York
April 26 - August 16, 1998
The Jewish Museum presents a major exhibition of works by the great French painter CHAIM SOUTINE (1893-1943). The exhibition is the first New York museum re-examination of Soutine's paintings in nearly 50 years, the last being the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective in 1950. An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine includes 56 of the finest and most important works created by the artist known for his highly expressive, gestural and thickly painted canvases. Focusing on the period between Soutine's arrival in Paris in 1913 and his death there during World War II, the show and its accompanying catalogue introduce fresh insights and new research about the artist, his style, his career, and his critical reception. Chaim Soutine raised to a new level of intensity the oil medium's mutability, elasticity, and sculptural potential, extending the "painterly" trajectory that runs from Titian, Rembrandt, and Chardin, through Courbet and Van Gogh. The Jewish Museum's exhibition examines Soutine's place in the history of French art between the wars, and within the larger context of 20th century art, in general, offering visitors a rare opportunity to enjoy his stirring and often provocative paintings. Works are being loaned from major museums and private collections in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States.
Chaim Soutine's oeuvre -- consisting primarily of landscapes, still-lifes and portraits -- falls squarely within the inter-war period. Coming to maturity in the immediate post-Cubist moment in Paris, just before the advent of Surrealism, the art of Soutine is not easily characterized. Often called Expressionist, Soutine's art has been described as nervous, distorted, raw and extravagant. However, Soutine is an Expressionist with a difference. The Lithuanian-born Jew was an Expressionist in Paris, not in the Germanic capitals usually associated with that movement. Whether he is grouped among the impoverished and sometimes intemperate peintres maudits ("painters under a curse") with Modigliani and Utrillo; alongside the French painters of brooding, thickly painted canvases like Vlaminck and Roualt; as one of the "naives," with Henri Rousseau; or in the company of the many, non-French, mostly Jewish members of the School of Paris (Ecole de Paris), including Chagall and Lipchitz, Soutine remains apart. He is the very prototype of what has recently been called a "liminal" figure, one at the edges of things, between categories and critical discourses.
Chaim Soutine's emotive, gestural paintings have also been seen as precursors to the works of such Abstract Expressionist masters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Like them, Soutine created a field of frenetic, energized swirls and splotches of paint. His art, like theirs, was the residue of a "process" in which the artist seemed to lose all sense of self in the ecstatic moment of creation.
The Jewish Museum exhibition examines Soutine's initial reception in Paris as a Jew and an immigrant Frenchman, a time during which his dealers and critics positioned his work as "primitive" and its creator as an untutored, foreign-born, divinely inspired genius within the context of painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau. The views of Soutine's work changed radically during the 1930s, when he was seen as a "master" -- the last great hope for traditional painting in France, sometimes pitting him against the anti-painterly avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. Finally, the exhibition explores Soutine's reputation in America from the late 1930s to his death in 1943, and during the emergence of American Abstract Expressionism and concurrent European trends of the 1940s and 1950s. Paradoxically, he was simultaneously seen as a link back to the past -- to European shtetl life and the Baroque masters -- and as a "prophet," a Parisian precursor of the expressive abstraction that was taking hold in New York in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.
Reflecting these different perceptions of the artist, the exhibition is organized in three sections. In terms of the works chosen and the design of the space, each gallery evokes the atmosphere of a different period of Soutine's critical reception - the modernist salon space of the early 1920s, when Dr. Albert Barnes, the eccentric Philadelphia collector, became Soutine's first major patron; the revived classic interiors of his more conservative French patrons Paul Guillaume and Madeleine Castaing in the late 1920s and 1930s; and finally the International Style exhibition spaces of the post-war art museum as exemplified by the Museum of Modern Art in Soutine's first major retrospective in 1950. Through these three distinct environments, the changing interpretations of the artist's work over time from "primitive" genius to "master" painter to "prophet"are explored.
The introductory section of the exhibition presents a preview of what is to come with a representative work from each gallery. The Page Boy at Maxim's, c. 1927, is the first work visitors see as they enter the exhibition. Displaying the emotionally charged brushwork and distorted image of the sitter, characteristic of Soutine's portraits, The Page Boy -- with hand outstretched -- ushers the visitor into the introductory section as he insolently demands his tip.
Some of Soutine's earliest critics saw him as a "primitive" genius. This is reflected in Still Life with Herrings, a c. 1916, which owes its somber palate and stark geometric forms to the late works of Fauves such as André Derain. The work was seen by critics as conveying the poverty of the artist's early career as well as the deprivations of his life in the shtetl of Smilovitchi. In the gallery representing Chaim Soutine as a "master painter," The Pastry Cook, c. 1927, belongs to a series of the artist's paintings depicting the uniformed, serving class, updating the tradition of representing Parisian "types" from popular imagery of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Where earlier images show anecdotal detail of the sitter's profession, Soutine focused on the individuality of his subjects and their personal assertiveness. Village Square, Céret, c. 1921-22, reflects Soutine at his most abstract and explosive, qualities examined in the third gallery of the exhibition. While certain details of the village square are discernable -- the clock tower, the houses and the mountains in the background -- they dissolve in the violent swirls of Soutine's brushwork. One can see in the slashing brushwork what Willem de Kooning found so appealing in Soutine's painting.
Evaluating Soutine's importance at mid-century, one French critic wrote, "Soutine touched the limits of figurative expressionism, and opened it toward the future." This important exhibition of paintings by Chaim Soutinel provides visitors with an expanded understanding of his works and introduce new perspectives from which Soutine's contribution to the history of painting may be appreciated.
Chaim Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilovitchi, near Minsk, in White Russia. In 1910 he enrolled at the Art Academy in Vilna; and in 1913 he moved to Paris, where he met Modigliani, Chagall, Leger, Cendras, and Laurens. During the 1920s he went to Céret, Cagnes, and Châtel-Guyon, where he produced much of his early work. Dr. Albert Barnes, the famous Philadelphia art collector, discovered Soutine's work in 1922-23, and he purchased fifty-two of the artist's paintings. During the next two decades, Soutine was supported by his influential patrons, Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing. In 1941 Soutine fled Paris, in fear of the Nazis, and spent the next years in hiding in the French countryside. He died, of perforated ulcers, in August of 1943.
An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine has been organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum, and Kenneth E. Silver, Associate Professor of Fine Arts, New York University.
Following its New York showing, An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from September 17, 1998 to January 3, 1999, and at the Cincinnati Art Museum from February 14 to May 2, 1999.
A 208-page catalogue with 32 color and 120 black and white illustrations, with a foreword by Joan Rosenbaum and an introduction and major essays by curators Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver, as well as contributions by Esti Dunow, Colette Giraudon, Romy Golan, Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Donald Kuspit, Pascal Neveux, Ellen Pratt, and Mira Goldfarb Berkowitz, accompanies the exhibition. Published by The Jewish Museum, New York, and Prestel, it is available from The Jewish Museum's Cooper Shop for $65 hardcover and $29.95 paperback. This comprehensive, groundbreaking book features unique presentations and information never before published, including a photomontage composed of rare photographs of the artist, newly discovered correspondence between Soutine and the French art historian Elie Faure, and the first radiographic analysis of the artist's work, which brings to light new evidence about Soutine's use of materials and his process of painting.
JEWISH MUSEUM
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