Painting: Triumph of the Clumsiest

PAINTING Triump of the ClumsiestIn the act of painting, Chaim Soutine was something to behold. For months, he would ponder the idea for a painting, then in a wild outburst fling the paint onto the canvas with such vehemence that on one occasion he dis located his thumb. A model who posed for him never forgot the experience:

“He turned as red as a crayfish, opening his eyes wide, and his beautiful fingers rubbed his throat and face. The emotion seemed to stimulate a sense of the colors in him, and he muttered in comprehensible words between his clenched teeth.”

The finished paintings often struck viewers as painfully clumsy. His por traits looked like pillows pounded into more or less human shape. His great slabs of beef (inspired by Rembrandt) were hideously bloodsplattered. His landscapes were wildly out of perspective. Yet today, a quarter of a century after his death (at the age of 50 in Paris), Soutine no longer seems an ec centric maverick; instead he has be come a mainstream figure in 20th cen art. The shift in judgment has been largely caused by the emergence of the New York school of abstract expressionism, whose leaders built with the same slapdash compulsiveness.

Soutine’s first U.S. major exhibition in over a decade, at the Los Angeles County Museum, offers an opportunity to review his accomplishments. With 90 paintings, the show illustrates his range of styles and subject matter. But the hardiest pictures are 13 landscapes executed between 1919 and 1922 at the Pyrenees hillside town of Ceret (see color opposite).

Ritual Destruction. Soutine had a more difficult time finding his own style than did his fellow refugees from Russian ghetto life, who once they had arrived in Paris, turned toward cubism, like Jacques Lipchitz, or, like Chagall, romanticized the shtetl folklore with fiddlers on the roof. At the time that Lithuanian-born Soutine went to Ceret, he was still in his 20s, all but unknown. There he embarked on a series of extraordinarily dislocated mountain views, with houses and trees piled like limp wads of anthropomorphic soil.

In fact, in this series Soutine so abandoned his carefully acquired art-school disciplines that he apparently frightened even himself; in later years, he renounced his Ceret paintings, referring to them as having been “painted with my fingers.” As Los Angeles Curator Maurice Tuchman tells it: “Soutine would install his mistress in a cafe, go in search of a Ceret picture he had heard some dealer owned, exchange a new picture for an old one, and ritually, happily destroy it.”

Fortunately, Soutine was unable to lay his hands on the 100-odd landscapes acquired in 1923 by Philadelphia’s Albert C. Barnes, some of which were later resold to other collectors and found their way into Manhattan galleries. The purchase set Soutine on the road to financial independence and made his work available for New York artists, turning Soutine, Willem-nilly, into a link in the chain of artistic development that runs from Van Gogh to De Kooning.