CHARACTER STUDY
I have a friend who’s so radically plainspoken that what he says often slides unintentionally into comedy or tragedy. I thought of him while viewing the small fine exhibit of Chaim Soutine’s paintings at the Jewish Museum, Flesh. Soutine is reknown for his still-lifes of slabs of meat and dead animals. As painted surfaces, they are incredibly charismatic. The impasto, in bold, often garish, hues, makes a scarred, shimmering skin. Their views are so dramatically foreshortened so that the objects crowd the air out of the space, leaving little relief.
Yet these bloody views are also darkly funny. They have the format of heroic paintings. The meat paintings are nearly life-size, and the smaller tabletop still-lives are enlarged. But each one takes subject matter that is not heroic and trumps it up without any deeper connotations. There are no confused and whirling passions here, are those brewing beneath the similarly opulent oil surfaces of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. Soutine simply seems interested in these objects before him – herrings on a plate, a vase of dried flowers, a dead hare, a group of slaughtered birds.
His unwavering attention to the objects themselves contributes to the power of the image but does not elevate the subject. This dead cow is not a metaphor for the devastation wrought by the wars in Europe; this is just a dead cow. And Chaim pictures all objects with the same intensity. Two forks lying across a plate of herring seem trembling with life; they’re as vivid and characterful as human arms. In the end these paintings give vibrant testimony to the painter’s personality – his peculiar view of the physical world – than to the world around him.
Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Herrings, c. 1916. Oil on canvas. Larock-Granoff Collection, Paris.