Chaim Soutine: Flesh
The Jewish Museum, New York City, through Sept. 16
To the extent that Chaim Soutine remains an obscure figure in the history of 20thcentury Western art, “it’s probably because of the beef,” said David D’Arcy in Observer.com. After all, the short-lived Russian-French painter (1893–1943) never lacked admirers: Willem de Kooning cited him as his favorite artist, and Pablo Picasso actually walked in his funeral procession. But though Soutine painted many subjects, he had a special affinity for dead fish, fowl, and other fauna, reaching his pinnacle with a series of canvases depicting butchered cattle. Many of the 32 Soutine paintings currently showing at New York’s Jewish Museum are too gruesome in their imagery to be beloved by a wide audience, but “you can see why artists envied what Soutine could do with paint.” A writer once said you get the feeling from a Chaim Soutine still life that the artist is inventing painting as you look. “You certainly feel that here.”
If only we’d stop worrying about how to categorize him, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. Born into a poor Jewish family in today’s Belarus, Soutine briefly became a star in Paris in his late 20s and was celebrated again shortly after his death from neglected stomach ulcers. But he’s “occupied a blind spot in contemporary tastes” because art historians haven’t known where to fit his figurative