Chaim soutine paintings 1943 steel
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Soutine: “Dedicated Traditionalist”
When the painter Chaim Soutine failed to turn up after the liberation of France, many of us believed that he had shared the fate of another artist of Jewish origin, the sculptor Moise Kogan, who had been deported from France and killed by the Nazis. Reporting on an exhibition of Soutine’s paintings at the Galerie de France, a French newspaper said: “It is known that, hunted as a Jew by the Gestapo from to , he died under dramatic circumstances in August of the latter year.”
A letter from Paris, dated September 2, , confirmed the news of the artist’s death. But the circumstances of his death remained a mystery until October , when Jacques Guérin, an old friend of Soutine’s and the owner of thirty-five of his paintings, came to New York and told this story to the personal of the Museum of Modem Art:
It is true that Soutine died in August , but he died a natural death. During his last years he had lived in a small
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The Metamorphosis of Chaim Soutine: inom. The Shtetl and the Outsider
There must be something about us, he thought, that determines us to have a face, legs and arms, a belly, nose, eyes and mouth. He [the Renaissance artist] didn’t even mind that people were flesh-colored. Flesh was very important to a painter then. Both the church and the state recognized it. The interest in the difference of textures — between silk, wood, velvet, glass, marble — was there only in relation to flesh. Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented. Never before in history had it taken such a place in painting. For the Egyptians, it was something that didn’t last long enough; for the Greeks, it — and everything else — took on the texture of painted marble and plaster walls. But for the Renaissance artist, flesh was the stuff people were made of. It was because of man, and not in spite of him, that painting was considered an art.
–Willem de Kooning
Chaim Soutine (–) was one of the outstandi
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Chaim Soutine Paintings
Chaim Soutine (January 13, - August 9, ) was a Jewish Russian painter who lived and worked in Paris while contributing heavily to the expressionism movement. Even though he was inspired by classic European painting, he developed his own individual style placing shape, color, and texture higher in importance than the actual representation. This approach was pivotal in the connection to Abstract Expressionism.
Soutine was the tenth of eleven children. He emigrated to Paris around to continue his studies in art. Later, he would be on the run, forced to sleep out on the streets in an effort to avoid the Gestapo once the Nazis invaded France.
Soutine was very eccentric in some of his painting choices. He painted a series of works that prompted him to keep animal carcasses in his studio. The blood pooled and ran under the wall of his room causing fellow artist Marc Chagall to run from the adjoining room screaming that "someone has killed Soutine". Those painting