Chaim Soutine: An Expressionist in Paris [Anglais] [Broché]

It's tempting to put artists in their places, linking them to an era, a style, or a movement, but there are always a few, like Chaim Soutine, who don't quite fit. "Soutine's paintings are so different," writes Kenneth E. Silver, "that the first effect is likely to be utter bewilderment."

Soutine was born in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania in 1893 and died in 1943, in wartime France, where he was forced to hide in the countryside to elude Nazi occupiers. He has been called a postimpressionist, in keeping with his time, but his torturous, richly colored paintings--the studies of dead animals fresh from the butcher shop may be his best-known images--relate more closely to expressionism, or de Kooning's wild women.

This fascinating volume, published to accompany an exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum, includes 10 essays on Soutine's life and work. It is filled with black-and-white snapshots of the handsome artist and his many friends, including the painter Amedeo Modigliani and the American writer Henry Miller, that transport the reader to "that visual France words can but feebly trace"--the magical interlude between the two world wars. There are only 32 color plates of Soutine's paintings, but the photographs, reminiscences, letters to and from the artist, and critical perspectives make for a richly satisfying book. --Peggy Moorman

Long neglected in America, the Lithuanian-born artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, continuing on to Los Angeles and Cincinnati. This deeply moving catalog reexamines a remarkable artist who left an impoverished shtetl at the age of 20 to settle in Paris. There he became associated with the foreign-born Jewish artists Chagall, Modigliani, and Pascin and developed a unique style of expressionism. His works are characterized by turbulent landscapes, sorrowful portraits, and gruesome studies of dead animals and raw meat painted with furious brushstrokes. The controversial painter despised letter writing, did not create preparatory sketches, and destroyed many of his works. But the stimulating essays by co-curators Kleeblatt and Silver, among others, along with 32 color plates, rare photographs, and letters create greater understanding and compassion. An important acquisition for Jewish studies, art history, and large general collections.?Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The achievement of An Expressionist in Paris ultimately lies in its elegant manipulation of the various forms of secondhand testimony.