School of Paris Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) fits the stereotype of the bohemian enfant terrible. The Lithuanian-born artist immigrated to Paris in 1913, settling in La Ruche, the low-cost artist residence in Montparnasse that housed a number of the city’s avant-garde ‘starving artists,’ including Soutine’s close friend, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). The duo’s antics have been well chronicled in books and movies, including “Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art” by Dan Frank, which tells a number of amusing anecdotes about Soutine. But make no mistake, Soutine was a student of Europe’s museums and his artistic achievements deserve to be taken seriously. An exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, now in its final days, bears this out.

Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine is presenting sixteen paintings, half still lifes, the rest portraits and landscapes, all from private collections. Curated by Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, co-authors of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, the exhibition organizers say in his still lifes, “Soutine is seeing the life in inanimate objects—flowers as they strain across a table, feathers as the birds hang—extracting the juice from the paint, vitalizing the very textures and movements of the matter being depicted.”

Indeed, Soutine’s painting process was rooted in direct observation. But the subjects of his paintings often came from great canvases at the Louvre, including Rembrandt’s “The Slaughtered Ox,” 1655, and Chardin’s “The Ray,” 1728. Both Chardin and Rembrandt are masterful paint handlers. By hanging an enormous splayed cow in his own studio or arranging his own still life of a ray fish, Soutine, responding to the motif before him with inventive, varied paint, enriched art history through his personal dialogue with his artistic forbears.

Though this exhibition is uneven, a number of the paintings here are spectacular. In “Plucked Goose,” 1932-1933, the waterfowl’s snapped neck lays alongside its bare breast. Oil on wood, this painting seamlessly combines very different types of paint application- impastoed darts of white where the feathers were plucked away, a chromatic range of greys in the goose’s neck applied with a palette knife, an area that was scratched away with the handle of a brush, and thin, oily passages of dark, richly pigmented color. This remarkable picture has not been on public display for over fifty years.

“Two Pheasants on a Table,” ca. 1926, has a pale color scheme. Looking down at a tilted, tilt-top table, two pheasants are carefully arranged on a white cloth, one posed like an accent grave, the other like an aigu. The birds are painted with curling, wispy strokes of lavender and light yellow. The droop of the tablecloth over the bottom right corner of the table keeps the eye moving.

In the back room of the gallery, one of Soutine’s late works, “Maternity,” ca. 1942, is possibly inspired by art history’s great pietas. Here a mother with a distant gaze holds her slumping, sleeping baby. With frothy drool covering the sleeping child’s chin, the unidealized picture is palpably tender.

Credit American art collector Albert Barnes for being among the first to spot Soutine’s genius. After seeing the artist’s paintings hanging in a Parisian bistro, Barnes bought over fifty works. Soutine is said not to have made drawings and, as visitors will see in this exhibition, that makes sense; in the works here, Soutine’s feel for the expressive possibilities of paint materials are undiluted by tonal values and linear perspective. Perhaps British artist and writer Andrew Forge said it best: “You have the feeling that Soutine is inventing painting while you look.”

Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine is on view through June 14, 2014, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27th Street,
New York, NY, 212-563-4474, www.paulkasmingallery.com

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com