Both an Outsider & a Painter’s Painter

Not a single painting by Chaim Soutine hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. This is true despite his pivotal influence on major artists over the past half-century. And a show pairing his work with several modern masters – “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art” at Cheim & Read Gallery – makes this influence clear.“It’s alarming to walk into the MoMA and not see a Soutine hanging,” the co-owner of Cheim & Read, John Cheim, said. “He’s such an important influence on artists from [Francis] Bacon to [Louise] Bourgeois.”Focusing on landscapes and still lifes, “Soutine and Modern Art” places the Lithuanian-born French Expressionist painter in dialogue with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, Lucian Freud, and Richard Diebenkorn. It reaffirms the importance of a unique artist known as both an outsider and as the quintessential “painter’s painter.”“Soutine is someone who has been marginally treated by the art world,” the co-curator of the exhibition, Esti Dunow, said.”He’s treated as a footnote and undervalued by the market, but with artists it’s different.”Soutine’s status, along with his mastery of the medium of painting, has in fact helped make him a seminal figure. “If you talk to painters, the praise for Soutine is overflowing,” Ms. Dunow said. “But artists in general identify with his outsider status, and with the fact that he’s not a household name.”Soutine, a Jewish emigre who was a friend of Modigliani, was widely exhibited in the ’30s and ’40s,and was included in an early group show at MoMA. The artist’s 1950 retrospective at the museum had a significant impact on the postwar generation of American painters; poet John Ashbery referred to that exhibition as “a heady revelation” for the artists of the time.But times have changed. A lack of academic and commercial interest has made Soutine a victim of neglect and misattribution in recent decades (the catalogue raisonne Ms. Dunow and her co-curator Maurice Tuchman are co-authoring is helping to correct that). To make matters worse, MoMA recently sold an iconic Soutine painting, “Chartres Cathedral,” a view of the eponymous landmark he painted in 1934.Yet many of the artists included in “Soutine and Modern Art” are effusive about the artist. Included in the exhibition’s 132-page catalog are glowing statements by artists such as Alice Neel, Jean Dubuffet, and Joel Shapiro.“De Kooning openly called Soutine his favorite artist,” Ms. Dunow noted. She added that while artists often don’t readily admit influences, “it’s hard not to meet a serious painter who isn’t influenced by Soutine or doesn’t have praise for him.”While Soutine worked in several genres, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s landscapes and still lifes, and the impact of their thick, painterly style on abstraction. “Soutine and Modern Art” also looks to some unlikely artists.“Even with artists that one wouldn’t immediately associate the influence with, like Joan Mitchell, visually you can see it,” Mr. Cheim said. He sees the show shedding new light on both Soutine and his effect on artists like Louise Bourgeois, Joel Shapiro, and Georg Baselitz.The painter Alex Katz sees the influence as of particular interest today. “He’s very fashionable right now,” Mr. Katz said. “People see Soutine as very fresh, and you can really see his influence in the artists in the show,” he added.Soutine is also fashionable at auction. One of the artist’s paintings of a slab of beef recently sold for $13.7 million at Christie’s in London.A few Soutine paintings from private collections in the show are for sale, including “Still Life with Fowl,” from 1918, which graces the cover of the catalog. (The gallery would not disclose the painting’s price, although guests at the opening estimated a mid-six figure price tag.) And while it’s uncommon for a commercial gallery to receive institutional loans, the Metropolitan Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery have lent major Soutine paintings to the exhibition.One of these, Soutine’s visceral “Carcass of Beef” (c. 1925) on loan from the Albright-Knox, is the highlight of the show. Perhaps the artist’s best-known painting, it was also the center of attention at the opening.“He painted that from observation, working with this dead, rotting thing that he kept throwing fresh blood on,” the London-based painter Michael Ajerman, whose own work harkens to Soutine’s painterly surfaces, said. “The amazing thing is, that painting looks like it could have been done two days ago – it’s so contemporary.”Until September 9 (Cheim & Read Gallery, 547 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-242-7727).

Both an Outsider & a Painter’s Painter

Both an Outsider & a Painter’s Painter

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