The Metamorphosis of Chaim Soutine: IV. Europe in Darkness and Shadow
In the final chapter of our series, explore Soutine’s work before his untimely death: influenced by threats from Nazi Germany, antisemitism in France, and profound anxiety from within.
“I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath: so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.”
—Ecclesiastes 3, 18–19
With increasing tensions in Paris between 1933 and 1940, Chaim Soutine had been less productive than he was earlier in his career. According to Emile Szittya, Soutine “only saw world events when they touched him personally.” When Hitler came to power, he was forced to remember his Jewish ancestry. As a result of the tumult of the times and his declining health, the painter’s last period was devoted to subjects of landscape and domestic animals.
In 1937, Henry Miller, the American expatriate novelist, was Soutine’s neighbor in the artist’s complex known as the Villa Seurat in Montparnasse, in the fourteenth arrondissement. He wrote of Soutine:
“By those times his bohemian days were finished. And he was suffering from stomach and liver troubles and whatnot, and lived like a recluse. I used to go down to borrow a knife and fork or salt and pepper from him now and then. Once in a while he came upstairs to my place when we had a party. He had an obsession with Rembrandt, who he idolized…he seems tamed now, as if he were trying to recover from the wild life of other days. He hesitates to salute you in the open street, for fear you will get too close to him. When he opens his mouth, it’s to say how warm or cold it is — and does the neighbor’s radio bother you as much as it does him.” (Miller, 165).
In the same year, Soutine met Gerda Michaelis, a refugee from Nazi Germany. Within a month, she became Soutine’s primary caretaker as his medical condition deteriorated. In 1939, Soutine and Michaelis spent the summer at Civry-sur-Serein in Burgundy, stranded and forced to go into hiding after the outbreak of war. Soutine was granted permission to briefly return to Paris in 1940, and was separated from Michaelis. In May, Michaelis was trapped in Paris in a roundup of foreign nationals and sent to a camp at Gurs in the Pyrenees. Subsequently, the artist was introduced to another by the Castaings, who felt that he needed a companion. Marie-Berthe Aurenche (1906–1960) was the former wife of surrealist Max Ernst and a devout Catholic. Also known as Ma-Bé, she was able to help Soutine’s flight into hiding at Champigny-sur-Veude. In early August 1943, Soutine was taken from Champigny into Paris for surgery. The journey took two days and Soutine died following an operation for a perforated ulcer.
Despite his success with collectors, Soutine did not receive unanimous support from critics. Increased attention led to a discussion of his art that frequently referred to his status as a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe. In 1928, the art critic Waldemar George wrote an essay devoted to Soutine, questioning:
“What is the meaning of this art, whose origin is undefinable, which knows no law, no fatherland, and no directive principles, and is linked to no tradition? An exiled or a barbarian’s art? I challenge anybody to trace the filiation of Soutine’s art…The curse that weighs on his oeuvre extends to his whole race… A muted wind of revolt blows through his dramatic oeuvre (Isn’t the wandering Jew the archetype of the eternal rebel?… What can we say of this déraciné [uprooted person]?) … Soutine owes nothing to France, except his thirst for internal balance, which, thank God, he will never reach . . .” (George, 158).
One might consider Soutine as uprooted, but he was profoundly influenced by pictorial models that he sought out in Paris and was by no means critical of the “great tradition” of western art. In the carcasses of the 1920s, Soutine was attempting to strengthen his position as a creator, to overcome his vulnerability as an outsider. In 1931, the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche mentioned Soutine in an article that argued French art had been derailed because of the influence of the École de Paris (Blanche, 297–298). Both Blanche and George searched for Soutine’s Jewish identity in his art, while revealing their own and the French public’s fears. Blanche’s anxiety was that French culture would be overtaken by foreigners. George, on the other hand, tried to defend Soutine in his response to Blanche, in the same year:
“M. Jacques-Emile Blanche lets out a loud cry of alarm. M. Blanche is a man too subtle and especially too skeptical to obstruct the danger … Talent is one thing. The influence of a work is something else. Soutine has just entered the path of achievements. Never has his ‘form’ been so good. He never spoke with so much ease, fullness. And, yet, his professed interest in hallucinated art, mysticism tainted with hysteria; the master of Smilowitchi is visibly diminishing. This progressive evolution of taste is first manifested in young painters, those hypersensitive beings who record the smallest transformations of the physical atmosphere of their time. The public cannot be aware of these variations of moral and emotional temperature. Also, the witnesses, even the most far-sighted and the most insightful, wave the scarecrow Soutine, as if this attribute of fear was still able to exert an influence on the destinies of French painting.” (George, 429–32)
Demographically, the Parisian Jewish population was transformed during Soutine’s lifetime in France. Within twenty years, eastern European Jews came to outnumber native French Jewry in a ratio of three to two (Green, 59). The French public was wary of this changing population. Yiddish was frequently utilized in neighborhoods with large populations of Eastern European Jewry, such as Belleville and the Pletzl. Antisemitism escalated through the 1920s, peaking in 1931, when the global economic crisis following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 reached France (Metzler, 256). As a consequence of the Crash, the art market collapsed in both America and Paris, deepening the divide between the École de Paris and the École Française (Golan, 8–87). Additionally, after Hitler’s 1933 ascent to power in Germany, tens of thousands of German-Jewish refugees arrived in Paris. Antisemitism steadily increased during this time. A small, bi-lingual booklet appeared, “containing good advice for those who had fled intolerance and persecution searching for refuge in France.” It was published by the Comité d’assistance aux réfugiés and was distributed to foreign Jews:
1. Do not commit yourself to political activities prohibited by the law of our country.
2. Keep an eye on your outfit.
3. Be polite and discrete.
4. Be modest. Do not speak highly of the qualities of your country of origin you think France lacks. “Back home everything was better” is a shocking phrase to French ears.
5. Learn to express yourself in French quickly. Do not speak out loud. If you speak a foreign language, avoid using it in public, in the street, on public transportation, or on the terrace of a café.
6. Respect all our laws and customs… We want you to be useful and we ask you to help us by following these advices which are your duty to the French community welcoming you.
(Metzler, 256)
By 1933, Soutine was painfully aware of his precarious political status. He traveled to the countryside more and more to heal his ulcer and to escape Paris. After Gerda’s deportation, he was no longer comfortable in the city. From the early 1930s, Soutine returned to carcasses, but these paintings contrast greatly with those of the 1920s. Instead of the morbid images of the 1920s, Soutine produced images illustrating his own empathy, reflecting his physical and political vulnerability through animal imagery. He reverts once more to fowl to create Plucked Goose (c. 1933). By contrast with the earlier carcasses, the goose engages with the onlooker. With one bloodied eye, the bird stares out at the viewer, shedding several crimson tears. The painting forces the spectator to identify with the dying animal. The goose is not explicitly slaughtered; the only indication of its injury is its contorted neck, split in half and visually divided from its body with brushstrokes of vivid reds. The stark white of the feathers is emphasized by Soutine’s usage of vibrant purples, oranges, and reds, in order to designate the under layer of skin, the pink belly of the plucked, exposed, and dying goose. Unlike any of his previous carcasses, Soutine commiserates with the dying animal, in a churning sea of deep blue and brown paint.
In 1934, Soutine created The Donkey. The animal is positioned with its head sullenly bowed. Soutine alters his color usage in each painting, though the background is in darkness. Madeleine Castaing describes a similar instance, in which Soutine painted a horse:
“Come with me, I beg you, I’ve found such a lovely horse, it looks almost human. I’d like to paint it; I’ll never find such a lovely animal again!” We set off to the ends of the earth, and there in the wood was a family of showmen — children, parents — all sitting on the grass eating their lunch. In the clearing stood the gypsy caravan and the unyoked horse, exhausted, its coat covered with mud and sores too. “Its eyes are human eyes, they express such suffering and exhaustion, it hasn’t the strength left to lie down and wait for a merciful release” (Castaing, 15–18).
The atmosphere of The Donkey differs greatly from Soutine’s Plucked Goose. Unlike the goose, the donkey remains alive, although in solitude. Soutine’s creative empathy is in the feelings of loneliness, secluded from Paris, while the pathos of the goose seems prophetic of the fated and dying painter. The Sheep Behind the Fence (c. 1940) raises its head and bares its teeth, separated from the viewer in a further allusion to Soutine’s seclusion. The living animals share a common theme of Soutine’s period of hiding: helplessness. No longer struggling between the status of the executioner or the victim, as he once did, Soutine accepts his fate. In 1933, Soutine’s identity shifted. He no longer desired to position himself as a powerful creator or executioner. In The Sheep Behind the Fence, Soutine attempts to protect himself, while in The Donkey, the painter evokes his tragic desperation, recalling his childhood memory of animal slaughter:
Once I saw the village butcher slice the neck of a goose . . . I wanted to cry out, but his joyful expression caught the sound in my throat, this cry, I always feel it here. . . . When I painted the beef carcass it was this cry that I wanted to liberate. I still have not succeeded.
In 1933, Soutine liberated himself from that cry. The artist visually slices the neck of the bird and finally releases his sublime identification with the butcher and the slaughtered. In this powerful intuition of emotional sympathy, Soutine is no longer divided, overturned, as had been the child, by the executioner’s expression of joy. The world becomes the executioner through the artist’s acceptance of the vulnerable animal’s fate.
—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
Blanche, Jacques-Emile. “La fin de la peinture française,” L’art vivant no. 103, 1931, pp. 297–298.
Castaing, Madeleine. “Memories of Soutine,” in Chaïm Soutine, 1893–1843, edited by Esti Dunow, Klaus Perls, and Maurice Tuchman, Taschen, 2002, 15–18.
Waldemar George quoted in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity. Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1996.
George, Waldemar. “Lettre ouverte,” “La fin de la peinture française,” L’art vivant no. 103, 1931, pp. 429–32.
Golan, Romy. “The École Française versus the École de Paris: The Debate about the Status of Jewish Artists in Paris Between the Wars.” The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945, edited by Kenneth Silver and Romy Golan, New York, Universe, 1985.
Green, Nancy. The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the “Belle Epoque.” New York, Holmes & Meier, 1986.
Gerda Michaelis was twenty-seven when introduced to Soutine, who named her “Mademoiselle Garde” in consideration of her protective role towards him. Garde’s memoirs were collected as: Garde [pseud. Gerda Groth, née Michaelis, also, Marie Dupas] Mes années avec Soutine, edited by Jacques Suffel, Les lettres nouvelles, edited by Maurice Nadeau, Denoël, 1973.
Metzler, Tobias. Tales of Three Cities : Urban Jewish Cultures in London, Berlin, and Paris. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014.
Miller, Henry. My Life and Times. New York, Playboy Press, 1975.
Szittya, Emile, Soutine et Son Temps. Souvenirs et documents. Paris, Bibliothèque des arts, 1955.
Chaim Soutine: Flesh is on view at the Jewish Museum through September 16, 2018. Buy tickets to the final weeks of the exhibition online.
