Chaim Soutine: Against the Current
Author: Susanne Gaensheimer
Format: Hardback, 220mm x 280mm, 1060g, 160 pages
Published: Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2023
An insatiable Hunger for Life
Clenched, raw and of a pressing urgentness: Chaim Soutine's expressive paintings are testimonies to a sense of human vulnerability and an existence on the margins of society. Intensely coloured, his meaty impasto portraits are thrown onto the canvas with broad brushstrokes, his agitated, frenetic landscapes and the paintings of slaughtered animals are expressions of an intense hunger for life and, at the same time, a deep alienation in an unsteady world that offers no support.
Despite the recognition his work received, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, a stranger to the social manners of his adopted home in France. This catalogue focuses on the early masterpieces and series created between 1919 and 1925: Under the overarching theme of emigration and uprooting, the contributions reveal the traces of Soutine's Jewish origins in his work, illuminate the significance of his motifs from the fringes of society as well as of blood and animal carcasses as metaphors; and show the influences of Soutine's art up to the present day.
CHAIM SOUTINE (1893-1943) grew up in a shtetl near Minsk - a youth marked by poverty, religious rigor and social exclusion. In 1913 he arrived in Paris and moved into the artist residence "La Ruche", the "Beehive", working alongside artists such as Chagall and Modigliani. Fleeing the Nazis, he died in 1943, but the international attention his work had received since the 1920s continued to have great influence on post-war art, inspiring Abstract Expressionism, new figurative painting as well as contemporary artists.
Author: Susanne Gaensheimer
Format: Hardback, 220mm x 280mm, 1060g, 160 pages
Published: Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2023
An insatiable Hunger for Life
Clenched, raw and of a pressing urgentness: Chaim Soutine's expressive paintings are testimonies to a sense of human vulnerability and an existence on the margins of society. Intensely coloured, his meaty impasto portraits are thrown onto the canvas with broad brushstrokes, his agitated, frenetic landscapes and the paintings of slaughtered animals are expressions of an intense hunger for life and, at the same time, a deep alienation in an unsteady world that offers no support.
Despite the recognition his work received, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, a stranger to the social manners of his adopted home in France. This catalogue focuses on the early masterpieces and series created between 1919 and 1925: Under the overarching theme of emigration and uprooting, the contributions reveal the traces of Soutine's Jewish origins in his work, illuminate the significance of his motifs from the fringes of society as well as of blood and animal carcasses as metaphors; and show the influences of Soutine's art up to the present day.
CHAIM SOUTINE (1893-1943) grew up in a shtetl near Minsk - a youth marked by poverty, religious rigor and social exclusion. In 1913 he arrived in Paris and moved into the artist residence "La Ruche", the "Beehive", working alongside artists such as Chagall and Modigliani. Fleeing the Nazis, he died in 1943, but the international attention his work had received since the 1920s continued to have great influence on post-war art, inspiring Abstract Expressionism, new figurative painting as well as contemporary artists.