CHAIM SOUTINE: GENIUS, OBSESSION, AND A DRAMATIC LIFE IN ART

By Celeste Marcus

Public Affairs. 295 pages. £28. ISBN 878-1-5417-9322-3

Reviewed by Jim Burns

“Every major art museum in the world has Chaim Soutine in its collection”, we are told on the inside cover of this book, “Yet a full biographical study of the artist and his work does not exist”. I can’t dispute either statement, though I seem to have come across references to Soutine in numerous places. Just glancing along the shelves I can see Bernard Dorival’s The School of Paris, Marevna’s Life With the Painters of La Ruche, Stanley Meisler’s Shocking Paris : Soutine, Chagall, and the Outsiders of Montparnasse, and a couple of others, some of which admittedly have only brief references to Soutine.  Enough to intrigue me, though, and an exhibition in Paris some years ago gave me an opportunity to see at least a selection of his output. Illustrations in books and magazines can give an idea of an artist’s work but only a close-up experience of the canvas can allow one to see its size, composition, and, of particular importance in Soutine’s case, how paint has been applied.

Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilovichi, now part of Belarus. He was the tenth of eleven children and grew up underfed, and Celeste Marcus says that “malnutrition crippled him and ultimately contributed to his premature death”. She adds that he was “oppressed by the parochialism that is a perpetual feature of life in small, religious villages”. But something within him turned his mind to art, if only a crude notion of it. He “used to scrape a bar of charcoal against a wall or use a stick to trace figures in the mud”. He studied at an art academy in Vilnius for a time, but emigrated to Paris in 1913, and it was there his artistic life really began. The period leading up to the First World War in 1914 was a hotbed of activity. Picasso, Braque, Kees Van Dongen and others were productive and various movements – Neo-Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism – had introduced new styles into painting.

Soutine studied at the École des Beaux Arts and at the atelier of Fernand Corman, but as Marcus puts it, “his true education took place at the Louvre”, where he “devoted himself to Rembrandt, Chardin, and Courbet who whispered in his ear while he stood before his easel”. Also of significance was that he had found his way to La Ruche and the artists who inhabited the ramshackle building. According to Marcus, “The stink of unwashed tenants – no contemporary source mentions indoor bathrooms - and the filth were infamous, and they mixed with the pungent scent of oil paints that filled the whole building”. She adds, “rats, screeching cats, and mangy dogs” to her description of this bohemian home of many of the artists who French critics had dubbed L’École de Paris to distinguish them from L’École Francaise, “which according to street gossip as well as literary magazines, the émigrés were polluting”.  Quite a few of the artists were, like Soutine, Jewish. Marcus has some sharp things to say about French anti-semitism, then and later.

Soutine met Modigliani in 1915 and they formed a friendship that lasted until the Italian-born artist died in 1918. They were “inseparable” and Soutine was drawn into Modigliani’s “dramatic and glamourous antics – glamorous, that is, before his inevitable nightly devolution into a drunken slovenliness”.  Marcus is firm in her assertion that Modigliani did a great deal to spread the word about Soutine’s talents: “Modigliani was the first and only one of Soutine’s peers to advocate for him, to proclaim his genius, and to shepherd him from obscurity to a glowing career. Soutine’s debt to his friend was singular”. Perhaps it’s relevant to point out that Marcus quotes the Hungarian writer Emil Szittya, who knew both men, and claimed that, after Modigliani died, Soutine never spoke well of him.

The poet Max Jacob is credited with persuading the art dealer Paul Guillaume to buy Soutine’s paintings for his own collection, though he never did take him as one his clients. It was thanks to Guillaume that “the entire room devoted to Soutine in the Orangerie establishes Soutine’s permanent place in the pantheon of Parisian art”. He may have admired Soutine the painter, but was less enthusiastic about Soutine the man, saying he avoided “all the vain hygienic practices favoured by our century…It is an article of faith to him that ablution is a heresy”.

Regarding Soutine’s work, Marcus comments, “Soutine’s paintings are always, from the first straight through to the last, attempts to communicate a vibrancy that he saw in front of him. They are articulations of energy. He painted only from life, never from memory, never from a photograph, never even direct from the Old Master paintings he so revered”. It’s possible to deduce from this why he may be known to many people primarily as the man who painted slabs of beef and dead birds, and in doing so kept the carcasses in his studio until they decayed and the smell, flies, and even blood dripping through floorboards, caused neighbours to complain to the local health authorities. It’s part of the Soutine legend, but is only part of it. He created more still-lives, portraits, and landscapes than he did pictures of animals, or pieces of them, and birds.

A trip to the South of France had a profound effect on him : “The impact of this encounter cannot be overstated ; it was deeply affecting for Soutine, an artist for whom the act of painting was no more or less than the activity of straining to express the stirring energies of the outside world on canvas”. For all that, he was still struggling to survive. Marcus uses the words of someone who recalled that Soutine rented a room in their house when she was a small girl : “Mr Soutine was so poor that he couldn’t eat every day. My mother often told me to bring him a plate of soup or pasta when she made it. (It was on such an occasion) that one day he told me he wanted to paint my portrait”. Marcus notes that “The painting of the girl has since been lost”.

As a rider to the above it’s worth quoting what a fellow-painter, Jacques Lipschitz, said : “(he) was one of the rare examples in our day of a painter who could make his pigments breathe with life. It is something which cannot be learned or acquired. It is a gift of God. There was a quality in his painting that one has not seen for generations – this power to translate life into paint – paint  into life”.

Soutine’s breakthrough came in 1922 when the American collector Albert Barnes arrived in Paris and, on seeing paintings by him, promptly bought over fifty of them from Léopold Zborowski, Soutine’s dealer. It was an act which raised Soutine out of the poverty he had known since his arrival in Paris almost ten years earlier. And it brought him some fame, at least in the Parisian art world: “Soutine’s life was far and away the most altered. He greeted his notoriety eagerly and without grace. Fame meant he could afford a new social circle and he acquired one immediately. Many of his old Jewish acquaintances came to resent him for the neglect with which he treated them for the rest of his life. Caring for each other was part of their ethos, and abandoning one’s friends when good fortune struck was a breach of their social contract”.

His “new social circle” included Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing, a wealthy couple who “offered Soutine his first and ultimately a permanent, entry into a Parisian cultural universe that was primarily a Christian one and, If not overtly then at least subtly anti-Semitic”. There is a portrait of Madeleine by Soutine among the illustrations in the book, and it is hardly flattering, giving the impression of a rather pinched and nervous woman, and not the attractive and confident one she seems to have been. Another person who responded to Soutine’s paintings and became his friend was the critic and art historian Élie Faure, who Marcus describes as then “the most influential art intellectual in Paris”. However, the friendship foundered when the artist proposed to Faure’s daughter and was rejected.

Marcus refers to Soutine as a “peripatetic painter”, who “needed to move, to refresh his senses, find a new landscape, expose himself to a fresh kind of light”. He was in and out of Paris, visited Cagnes, spent time with Zborowski and his wife in Le Blanc, and went to Amsterdam so he could see the Rembrandt paintings on display there. He was particularly impressed by “The Jewish Bride” (“Isaac and Rebecca”), which Marcus says was “his favourite painting”, and that “He may have visited the painting as many as three times during the year he and Faure became close”. Soutine also visited London, again for the purpose of viewing paintings by Rembrandt. 

“Soutine was living in Villa Seurat, in a two-floor apartment coated with dust, splattered paint, and cigarette butts, when he met Gerda Michaels, a German Jew from Magdeburg who had escaped to Paris just as Hitler was coming to power”. She “moved in with him immediately, and loved him totally and forcefully – as a man and not as a painter. His work was never what interested her”. It’s interesting to read what she later wrote about their time together, and how Soutine, while having some Balzac novels, a few Russian writers, and the essays of Montaigne, didn’t own copies of any of the monographs written about his work, nor did he have the catalogues of his one-man exhibitions in Paris, London, Chicago or New York. He said little about his earlier experiences at La Ruche, nor about the various dealers who handled his work. Marcus adds ; “Throughout their entire relationship, she remained mostly ignorant of his oeuvre. They passed the two years before the war in happy companionship”. Once war came she was in danger, both as an enemy alien, and, when the Nazis arrived, as a Jew. Luckily, she survived with false papers provided by the Resistance.

When the war started in 1939 Soutine, aware of his status as Russian Jew with a visa enabling him to live in France, had to try to find ways to avoid the bureaucratic system likely to consign him to an internment camp. He was at the same time experiencing problems because of his stomach ulcer which often caused him to stop painting, so severe were the pains. He was reluctant to consult doctors until Gerda persuaded him to do so. They prescribed certain medicines, and also advised him to leave Paris. He and Gerda moved to Civry-sur-Serein, “a small village about 220 kilometres south-east of Paris…….En route, Soutine painted what is now one of his most-famous post-Céret landscapes, “Windy Day at Auxerre”, shown in the book. Céret was where Soutine had painted in earlier years, though he later dismissed the work he created there as unimportant.

When Gerda was interned, Madeleine Castaign was “worried that Soutine would not be properly looked after without the doting attentions of a woman”. She introduced him to Marie-Berthe Aurenche, a beautiful but  “tragic figure plagued by depressive tendencies all her life”. She had been married to Max Ernst, so had mixed in surrealist circles. It was said that André Breton “based the character Nadja from his canonical novel of the same name on her”. Not everyone thought that Castaign had acted wisely by “pairing a disturbed woman with a sickly Jewish artist, notorious for his short temper in a city under Nazi occupation”.  Marie-Berthe, however, took to the painter, finding him “polite, soft-spoken and so carefully dressed”, in contrast to his reputation. They left Paris together and headed for Bordeaux. And, to be fair to Marie-Berthe, she seems to have stuck by Soutine, despite his being increasingly ill and desperately trying to evade the round-ups of Jews by the French police and the Germans.

In 1943, they were hiding in Champigny-sur-Veude, where Soutine, always painting, produced his last landscapes, evincing “a new capacity, a delightful complicated beauty, that took him until his final years to develop. They have their own rhythm”.  By July 1943, Soutine was clearly very ill and was advised to go to the hospital in Chinon: “Marie-Berthe put a cross around his neck and signed him into the hospital as Charles”. From there he was taken by ambulance to Paris for surgery :”The surgeon operated on August 8. Soutine died at six o’clock the following morning.  He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery two days later, on August 11, 1943”.

There obviously isn’t a lot of information about Chaim Soutine in terms of his day-to-day activities. As the title of the book says, and as Marcus makes clear, he painted obsessively just about all the time, apart from when his health problems interfered with his schedule. He had friends and Gerda Michaels wrote a memoir, Mes années avec Soutine, but the man himself often had little to say about his past life. Gerda was surprised when he told her that he had a daughter by a Russian woman and she “was acutely conscious of how despicably Soutine had treated both the mother of his child and his own daughter”, refusing to recognise the child or provide any money to support her. Other people left accounts, some of which were anecdotal and referred more to Soutine’s hygienic shortcomings than his art, whereas some spoke admiringly of his painting.

Leaving aside the personal, and looking at the paintings, or rather what Marcus says about them, there is much to be admired in the vivid descriptions she provides of individual works, and her general comments about Soutine’s overall strategy in terms of what he aimed for. I admit to preferring his landscapes to his portraits. To quote Peter Schjeldahl, “He painted landscapes that are as vertiginous, to the brink of formlessness, as anything in art to this day : tornadoes of pigment which are beloved by every painter I’ve ever talked with about them”. Celeste Marcus has written a book about Chaim Soutine that is infectious in its enthusiasm for an artist who painted what he saw and felt about the world in front of his eyes.