The Metamorphosis of Chaim Soutine: III. From Slaughter to Absolution
In part three of our ongoing series, explore how Soutine found an uneasy, yet successful truce: between emulating the Old Masters, and asserting his outsider perspective.
Chaim Soutine first manifested a fixation with slaughter in 1918, through still-life paintings devoted to dead fowl. Thus he began a decade-long engagement with variations on the theme of the butchered beast. During this time, Soutine lived in the artist’s residence called La Ruche, close to the slaughterhouses of Montparnasse. Another Jewish artist at La Ruche, Jacques Chapiro, described the neighborhood:
“Icy winds blew through it, carrying the stench of blood and the odor of death from the nearby abattoirs of Vaugirard . . . at other times came the brief bellowing of an ox, the lowing of a cow, the honking of pigs, the bleating of a goat, or the clamor of the roosters of the wasteland.” (Chapiro, 11).
The cries of the animals and the odor of decay were unavoidable. Perhaps they resonated with Soutine, triggering a traumatic memory from his childhood when he witnessed the slaughter of a goose. This was certainly the case for Marc Chagall, who recalled memories of a butcher in his autobiography:
“In his stable there is a big-bellied cow; she stands and stares stubbornly…I reach out to put my arms round her muzzle, to whisper a few words to her — that she shouldn’t worry, I won’t eat the meat; what more could I do? She hears the rye rippling, and she sees the blue sky behind the hedge. But the butcher, in black and white, knife in hand, is rolling up his sleeves. The prayer is hardly over before he holds her neck back and runs the steel into the throat. Torrents of blood…Nothing can be heard but their clucking their rustling, and grandfather’s sighs amid the torrents of fat and blood. And you, little cow, naked and crucified, you are dreaming in heaven. The glittering knife has raised you to the skies. Silence. The intestines uncoil and the pieces fall apart. The skin drops off…The cows were slaughtered cruelly. I excused it all.” (Chagall, 20).
Raised in an Orthodox home, where the act of pictorial creation was reserved solely for God, Soutine revolted against his community with every image he produced. In Paris, the carcass theme began in a pictorially restrained manner, and bears the influence of the still-life paintings of Paul Cézanne. Soutine’s initial concerns may well have been sparked by living conditions in war-torn Paris. In an atmosphere of rationing and poverty, the early carcasses document the hunger of the times. Throughout the decade of the 1920s, however, Soutine diverged from his interest in consumption towards an interest in the carcass, inspired by masterworks in the Louvre. Soutine’s paintings were not simply copies. Having discovered the subject, Soutine acquired the materials to re-stage the required composition for his own examination and affirmation of his status as an artist. In each of these works, the condition of slaughter is visceral. The carcasses seem to present a will to overcome and to control the artist’s confession of his own vulnerability — the “cry” that he had sought to liberate since childhood.
After prolonged stays in the south of France at the end of World War I, Soutine returned to Paris to find an art world divided by critics between the “École Française” and the “École de Paris.” The French school included the body of artists who sought to preserve French tradition. The school of Paris was comprised of foreign artists who had immigrated to France to pursue their artistic vocation. Many of them, like Soutine, had settled in Montparnasse. Conservative critics denounced the art of the foreigners by comparing them to French tradition artists or the great masters housed in the Louvre. During the early 1920s, the influential critic Louis Vauxcelles turned to vilify the Parisian art world, where:
“A barbarian horde has rushed like a plague, like a cloud of locusts, upon Montparnasse, descending from the cafés of the fourteenth arrondissement onto Rue de la Boétie, uttering raucous Germano-slavic screams of war…Their culture is so recent! Are they from our village? No. When they speak about Poussin, do they know the master? Have they ever really looked at a Corot? Have they ever read a poem by La Fontaine? These are people from “somewhere else,” who know nothing of and, in the bottom of their hearts, look down on, what Renoir has called the graciousness of the French, that is the virtue of tact, the nuanced quality of our race… [The peril has been exorcised and safe is the honor of the French school]” (qtd. in Golan, 142).
Gustave Fuss-Amoré, writing for the journal Mercure de France in 1924, responded by asserting that Montparnasse was central to the Parisian art scene:
“For some, at Montparnasse, it is the stranglehold of the foreigner, the organization of sabotage, of thought and of French art by universal debauchery. In the eyes of fervents who have all the illusions and naivety of youth… Meanwhile, Montparnasse reigns on the curious world of new forms and attracts the artists of the universe to him.” (Fuss-Amoré, 677–712).
Some critics supported the émigré artists. André Warnod, for example, who coined the term “École de Paris” wrote:
“How can we look on an artist as undesirable, if that artist looks on Paris as the Promised Land, a land blessed with painters and sculptors? They are drawn here for significant reasons. Our museums are justly famous, but even more than our artistic riches, these artists want to know the country where our great painters lived, breathe the art that they breathed, to be agitated by the arguments that agitated them, to feel the mildness of the climate, to admire the light, to finally know the happiness of enjoying and living in the liberty that art must have in order to blossom.” (Warnod, 7–11).
From 1922, the year that Soutine was discovered by the Philadelphian collector, Dr. Albert Barnes (1872–1951), the artist obsessively painted exposed meat. The emaciated fowl, sanguine beef carcasses, and splayed rabbits are often skinned in these images. The titles of many of these works include the term “écorché,” which means “skinned” or “flayed.” In academic tradition, the flayed body was associated with figure studies in the artistic examination of anatomy. In comparison to the carcasses of circa 1918, Soutine’s inspiration was no longer the comestible attraction of foodstuffs. His approach evolved to accommodate a conscious submission to the influence of the Old Masters. While setting his sights on an admiring emulation of the past as an artistic source, Soutine gave form to his desire to explore and transcend his present and shifting status as an artist and as an immigrant.
Dr. Barnes’ purchase offered an immediate and material advance towards alignment with the prestigious traditions espoused by the Louvre. Removing himself from La Ruche, Soutine rented an apartment near the cemetery in Montparnasse. He began to dress in tailored suits and worked to improve his French, refusing to speak Yiddish with his compatriots. Among his first major projects after returning to Paris were several variations on The Ray, a still-life by the great eighteenth-century painter, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779).
Soutine made four versions between 1922 and 1924. In the version dated to 1923, Soutine focused on duplicating Chardin’s color palette of pale blues, pinks, and greens, omitting compositional details found in the original. In the following year, Soutine developed his more personal style and color usage. The disposition of the fish, with its remarkable gills suggestive of a face, remains close to Chardin, but the tonalities and dynamism are emphasized. The expressive quality characteristic of Soutine’s work is conveyed through wide, curved brushstrokes.
In 1923, Barnes organized an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, featuring nineteen of Soutine’s paintings, including another still life with rayfish (1923). Barnes’ essay discusses his appreciation of the École de Paris:
“These young artists speak a language which has come to them from the reaction between their own traits, the circumstances of the world we live in, and the experience they themselves had…to quarrel with them for being different from the great masters is about as rational as to find fault with the size of a person’s shoes or the shape of his ears. If one will accord to these artists the simple justice of educated and unbiased attention, one will see the truth of what experienced students of art all assert: that old and new art are the same in fundamental principles.” (qtd. in Greenfeld, 99–100).
Among the carcass images of the decade of the 1920s, the depiction of fowl predominates above all other subjects. The birds of Soutine are depicted as spectacularly vulnerable. The specimen is often plucked of its feathers and hung by a rope, as in Chicken on Blue Ground, c. 1925. The emaciated chicken’s craw is open, as though shrieking. Naked and exposed, this depiction repulses and the viewer turns away. In the beef carcasses, Soutine was drawn to reveal the innards of the animal. But in Chicken on Blue Ground, the bird is portrayed in all its fleshiness in a state of nudity. During the 1920s, Soutine would frequent poultry shops or give specific instructions to Paulette Jourdain, the gallery assistant of his dealer Léopold Zborowski (1889–1932) to search for a bird to paint — one with a long neck, “and blue, flaccid skin.” By contrast with the distinguished source in Rembrandt provided by the Flayed Ox, there is no specific inspiration for the fowl paintings in the Louvre. Towards the aim of absolution with regard to his identity, Soutine sacrifices the bird of the 1920s. The remembrance is of the chicken selected as a scapegoat in the shtetl of his childhood: the memory of shlugn kapures, where at the end of the prayer one would point to the bird and say three times, “you for death, me for life.”
— Ori Hashmonay, Guest Contributor,
with Stephen Brown, Curator, the Jewish Museum
The present text is an adaptation and revision of parts from Ori Erna Hashmonay, “You for death, me for Chaïm: the carcasses of Chaïm Soutine,” [B.A.] Senior honors thesis, Department of Art, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 2, 2018, sponsor, Dr. Daniel Sherman (thesis advisor)
Works Cited
Chagall, Marc. My Life. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J., P. Owens, Humanities Press, 1985.
Chapiro, Jacques. La Ruche. Paris, Flammarion Doullens, 1960.
Fuss-Amoré. “Montparnasse.” Mercure de France, 1924.
Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995.
Greenfeld, Howard. The Devil and Dr. Barnes. Philadelphia, Camino Books, 2006.
Warnod, André. Les berceaux de la jeune peinture: L’École de Paris. Paris, Editions Albin Michel, 1925.
Chaim Soutine: Flesh is on view at the Jewish Museum through September 16, 2018. Purchase tickets to the final weeks of the exhibition online.
