Chaim Soutine’s life was a fairy tale but the happy ending came in the middle. Before it lay a tragic beginning in a Lithuanian shtetl, where Soutine was beaten for daring to draw. Afterwards, in a viciously appropriate conclusion, this painter of carcases and bloody entrails died of a ruptured stomach ulcer, untreated because he was on the run in Nazi-occupied France.
His single stroke of good fortune took place one afternoon in Paris in 1922. Albert Barnes, a wealthy American collector, had glimpsed at dealer Paul Guillaume’s a portrait of a pâtissier in a corner. Barnes described the little pastry-cook in white cap and apron as “outrageous, fascinating, real, truculent, afflicted with an immense ear, superb, unexpected, and right: a masterpiece”. He demanded an immediate introduction. Soutine, languishing on a bench in Montparnasse with a pair of fellow down-and-outs, was found, washed, and marched to the gallery.
Barnes acquired several dozen works, dressed his protégé in a suit from an English tailor, and installed him in a smart studio-apartment whose door Soutine shut resolutely in the face of any friend who had shared his former privations. The energy with which he flung himself into a new style of painting was matched only by his zeal to destroy all earlier work. Some buyers were offered new pieces only if they produced equivalents from before 1922, which Soutine then slaughtered before their eyes with savage delight.
If this sounds like myth, it is because Soutine is the most underrated and under-researched great artist of the 20th century. Frenzied and tortured, he was the least worldly of painters, and ignorance of his genius in life continued after his death in 1943. Paris’s last big exhibition was in 1973. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has no Soutine on its walls. Tate’s 1963 retrospective was the only significant UK exhibition. Now into this lacuna comes a new private gallery, the Pinacothèque de Paris, with a cramped, imperfectly hung, unevenly selected show of some hundred works that is, nevertheless, the most essential, unforgettable exhibition of 2007.
Who was Soutine? Two self-portraits here, “Auto-portrait au rideau”, where the young artist peers out shyly from a swathe of coats and scarfs, and “Grotesque”, where his irregular features, bulbous nose and fleshy lips are monstrously exaggerated and blurred into a Baconian image of violent despair, share a hungry, piercing look that attests both to physical wretchedness and an exalted, truth-seeking spirituality.
It is no accident that Soutine returned repeatedly to two types in his portraits: the pâtissier and the choir boy, purveyors of earthly and holy nourishment. Of the latter, this show has the wonderful example from the Obersteg Collection, “L’Enfant du Choeur”: cassock streaky red and white, delicate as filigree but brutal in its vitality against a sonorous blue; twisted face fragile, remote, vulnerable, without sentimentality as in all Soutine’s portraits. Rather, his art has an innocent gravity, its ringing contrasts and heavy layers redolent of Old Masters and of metaphysical longing.
Hunger, seriousness, lack of irony, all were legacies of the dirt-poor Hassidic upbringing, with its ban on graven images, from which Soutine fled. Arriving in Paris, he painted a plate of herrings, an open-mouthed fish swooning between a fork and a vase of flowers, a luscious red cabbage against a white jug, with the hallucinatory fervour of a man still starving. When he discovered the Louvre, Soutine obsessively painted versions of Rembrandt’s “The Flayed Ox”, his signature work. Carcases of meat and strung-up chickens and hares filled his studio, stinking so badly that neighbours called the police. Reproductions cannot do justice to the clotted, livid, dense impasto of bloody works such as “Le Poulet pendu devant un mur de briques”, so animated that the hanging, elongated bird looks as if it is still shrieking.
Soutine’s vehement transformations of these motifs are full of drama and variety, while his figures, grand and pathetic, bring a unique expressiveness to 20th-century portraiture. Willem de Kooning described “the glow that came from within” Soutine’s paintings, especially in the landscapes, the best represented part of Soutine’s oeuvre here. They divide most clearly into pre- and post-Barnes. Those before 1922, painted in Céret in the Pyrenees, are dense, skyless, claustrophobic, all heaving planes and overlapping colours – as compressed and flattened an experience of nature as anything in art.
Van Gogh’s turbulent rhythms come to mind but, in Tate’s 1963 catalogue, David Sylvester pointed to Cézanne’s condensed, lurching planes as the inescapable influence. Like all serious painters born in the 1880s-1890s, Soutine had to work through cubism, and he did so by returning to the movement’s ancestor. After 1922, however, Soutine spoke harshly not only of cubism – joyless, cerebral – but of Cézanne too. Barnes, collector of impressionism, had liberated him to go further back in French painting, and he substituted the tough Pyrenean landscape with the gentler Côte d’Azur. The same tumbling perspectives and dizzy close-ups are there in the burnished yellow and shimmering green “Vue de Cagnes” and “Paysage de Cagnes”, the sprinkled firework hues of “Place du Village, Vence”, the luxuriant black-blue of “Arbre de Vence”. But there is also airiness, light, grace – sweeping roads, curvilinear forms, open sky – and radiant colour.
Sylvester called the passage from Céret to Cagnes a “descent from the sublime to the whimsical”, by which Soutine, achieving virtuosity, opted for “a basically traditional as against a basically 20th-century style”: the conservatism of the self-made shtetl kid. This is true, but half a century later we see too that in melding pre-impressionism with post-cubism, Soutine created a potent modernism that stood apart and, in its painterly brilliance, pointed the way forward for every expressionist descendent since the postwar era.
But he has been a secret among the painters for too long. Fresh, ripe for rediscovery, breathtakingly relevant, the canvases here should bring Soutine to the attention of a new generation and, with luck, stimulate a public institution into mounting a more reliable and elegant retrospective soon.
Soutine, Pinacothèque de Paris, to January 27, www.pinacotheque.com
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief visual arts critic
