Chaim Soutine Research Articles

War Discourse in the Biographical Novels About Artists: Intermedial Aspect

War narrative in the biographical novels about painters has been analysed in their intermedial links with the paintings of said artists. The object of analysis is novels about the Spanish artist Francisco Goya written by Manfred Schneider, Carlos Rojas, and Jacek Dehnel; Ralf Dutli’s novel about Chaim Soutine; and a separate section dedicated to a selection of novels about Ukrainian artists: Ivan Holubkovskyi’s text about Oleksa Novakivskyi, Stanislav Stetsenko’s work about Mykola Hlushchenko, Kateryna Lebedieva’s book about Les Kozlovskyi, Volodymyr Yavorivskyi’s novel about Kateryna Bilokur. At the core of the study is the intermedial methodology based on theory by I. Rajewski, A. Hansen-Löve, S. Macenka, and A. Berger. Different aspects of war discourse in novels and its interaction with the creations of artists have been identified and highlighted, i.e., thematisation of war, description of painting creation, ekphrasis and references to works of art, use of art poetics in a literary text, aesthetics and psychology of creativity stipulated by war.

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2019. 552 pp. ISBN 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, <scp>MA</scp>: Harvard <scp>UP</scp>, 2019. 552 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Intermedial strategies in biographical novels about artists (based on biographical works about Vincent van Gogh written by V. Domontovych and about Chaim Soutine by Ralph Dutli)

The article is devoted to the study of peculiarities of intermedial relationships in biographical works about artists. Based on V. Domontovych’s fictionalized biography «A Lonesome Traveller Walking along a Lonesome Road» and Ralph Dutli’s novel «Soutine’s Last Journey» («Soutines letzte Fahrt»), it analyses the inter-artistic interaction of literature and painting, traces how the translation is done from the language of visual art into the language of literary work, and how the artist’s creative heritage and especially the peculiarities of his artistic technique influence the poetics of the biographical novel. Applying the methodology of intermedial analysis, it explores the ways in which art manifests itself on compositional, poetical, linguistic and stylistic levels in the novels about artists. The interaction of the verbal and fine arts is analysed at the level of thematization, construction of the artist’s image and description of the creative process. The intermediality of biographical novels about Vincent van Gogh and Chaim Soutine is considered through the transfer of features of a work of fine art into verbal art, through the employment of the main means of image creation in painting, such as colour, line, composition, etc. Based on the artistic practices of avant-garde art, the artists under analysis worked within, particular attention is paid to the identification of the poetical principles of artistic trends in the style of a literary work, that is, naturalistic and impressionist elements in Van Gogh’s biography and expressionist and surrealist elements in the novel about Soutine. In addition, the role of a pictorial quotation in the biographical fiction about the artist is worked out. A significant attention in biographical novels about artists is given to artistic detail and ekphrasis. Novels about artists provide rich material for the research of the dialogue between literature and fine arts not only for literary scholars but also for art critics.

Faibich Schraga Zarfin: Child and youth years. Materials to the artist’s biography

The article presents little-known or unknown facts of child and youth years of artist Faibich Schraga Zarfin. In addition to the already published reminiscences by the artist himself and other persons, the author also discovered a number of new archive documents and interviewed several of Zarfin’s relatives and friends, both while working on the documentary “A Roaming Star From Smilovichy” (2016, film director Zoya Kotovich and script writer Youri Abdourahmanov) and collecting the materials for a book about Zarfin to be published shortly. Schraga Zarfin was born in a Belarusian settlement of Smilovitchi. As a child, he was acquainted with Chaim Soutine and reflected this in his reminiscences. Following Soutine, young Zarfin decided to become an artist and left for the Vilnius Drawing School to study. After that there was a sharp change in his life: in 1914 Zarfin moved to Palestine, was enrolled as a student in the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, and worked in the first Kibbutzim (communal settlements). In 1918 he joined the British Army and took part in the military actions in Egypt and Palestine. After the end of World War I, Zarfin resumed his studies in Bezalel and participated in the earliest art exhibitions in Jerusalem. In 1923 Zarfin left for Berlin to continue his studies, and in 1924 moved to Paris. The article is supplemented by the originally published photographs.

Untitled: Women’s clothing and ageing femininity in the portraits of Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine’s (1893–1943) representation of clothes in his portraits has attracted very little scholarly or curatorial attention to date. For the first time in the near century of literature that has accumulated about the artist, this article discusses the women in Soutine’s portraits, focussing on their clothing and age, and ageing femininity more generally as a subject within Soutine’s practice. The status and fashions of women in inter-war France provide a context to demonstrate that youth, newness and fashionableness were not subjects for the artist, who instead favoured white women of middle- to older-age wearing their ‘Sunday best’ as his models. His practice of framing, containing and presenting women for inspection is also demonstrated for the first time, as well as the nuanced balance he strikes between accurately representing the details of studied garments and intensely working wider areas of colour in the same painting. The article’s wider conclusion is that acknowledgement of the complexity and rigour of Soutine’s art – including his detailed depiction of his sitters’ clothing – has consistently been blocked by the image of Soutine as purely expressionistic, uncontrolled painter, an image that must be released if new analysis of his work, such as that undertaken in this article, is going to take place.

Chaïm Soutine, Flailing Trees, and: “Chaïm Soutine, Le Vieux Moulin 1922-1923”

“Chaïm Soutine, Flailing Trees”: This poem blends lyric and essay in an evocation of Chaïm Soutine’s paintings in the context of his life.

Willem and Elaine de Kooning Visit the Barnes Foundation

Although Willem de Kooning’s admiration for the paintings of Chaim Soutine, particularly those in the Barnes Foundation, has been recognized, the precise timing and circumstances of his journey to the private, restricted-access institution in Merion, Pennsylvania, have eluded historical analysis. Archival documentation reveals that Willem de Kooning, together with his wife, painter Elaine de Kooning, visited the foundation on June 3, 1952, thanks to the intervention of Sara Carles Johns. Their visit was likely prompted by an Art News editorial campaign to open the institution’s premises to the public in the aftermath of Albert C. Barnes’s death, but the occasion also proved significant for both artists. The couple’s encounter with the extraordinary group of paintings by Chaim Soutine in the foundation’s collection provided inspiration for Elaine de Kooning’s ongoing work in portraiture and for her husband’s third series of Woman paintings. While she focused on Soutine’s “gesture,” her husband adapted the Parisian expressionist’s tactile sensibility to his own figurative series. Willem de Kooning’s visit to the Barnes Foundation arguably proved catalytic to his resolution of the series, and the visual impact of the foundation’s Soutine collection lingered in his memory for decades. From the activated surfaces of his 1950s abstract landscapes to the luminosity of his 1970s abstractions, de Kooning’s work of later maturity displayed the painterly qualities that he prized in the art of Chaim Soutine in the Barnes Foundation.

Where the River Parts

Joann Sfar presents a rumination on both the life of the artist and the nature of sex in relation to the artistic creative processes. Throughout the work we see different perspectives on art, models, and sex from Pascin and his friends. Chaim Soutine prefers static objects, having issues with what can only be considered “performance anxiety ” with live models, a nervousness about their immediacy and nudity. In the segment entitled “The Austrian,” we’re shown a painter who both needs to possess and is possessed by his model, a life-sized doll— this doll, “The Silent Woman,” having a deleterious impact on his social interactions with living women. Pascin’s criminal friend, Monsieur Toussaint, attempts to learn how to draw, first through observation and then direct manipulation of the model. Toussaint tries to understand why Pascin would choose to draw a model, instead of just having sex with her, if he’s attracted to her. To explain his own relationship with art, sex, and the model, Pascin explains, “When I’ve drawn a girl, I don’t need to jump her anymore.” Once the subject has been committed to canvas, he can distance himself from immediate carnal desires. In a way, what unites these characters is the understanding that you can be a slave to your vices and passions, either being ruled completely by them or in fighting against them, or you can accept them for what they are and choose not to be driven by them. Pascin is presented as largely unapologetic of his vices, honest and frank in his conversations, and to a certain extent could be considered lewd. Like the Pascin presented in the work, Sfar’s artwork presents an immediacy, a “warts and all approach” that doesn’t shy away from depicting nudity and sexual acts. To a certain extent, the openness acts to distance the reader, with stark depictions of sexual acts. Yet the “bareness” and the “frankness” present in both Pascin and Sfar’s artwork are not gratuitous , exploitative, or even really erotic; the work just is. D. Emerson Eddy Hamilton, Ontario Radhika Swarup. Where the River Parts. Dingwall, UK. Sandstone Press. 2016. 307 pages. In 1947 India and Pakistan gained their independence from England and from each other. Millions fled from one side to the other to escape the violence; thousands more were murdered, abducted, or dismembered. Authors on both sides have written about the violence and continued tensions between the two countries to try to reconcile the bloodshed. Radhika Swarup’s novel fits within this body of literature, known as Partition literature, narrating the forbidden love between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man, the woman’s flight to India, and her attempt to rebuild her life. If you are an avid reader or scholar of Indian literature, this story will feel familiar with the predictable characters and themes that comprise Partition novels. Where the River Parts is told through the perspective of Asha, a Hindu woman born to a wealthy family. It begins before Partition , when Asha falls in love with Firoze, her Muslim neighbor and best friend’s brother. Despite their religious differences and the laws that forbid their relationship, the two plan to marry. However, Pakistan and India split before they wed, and Asha’s family flees as the violence grows and their home is attacked. Before they reach the border, her family is murdered. Asha witnesses their death and barely escapes being assaulted. She reaches Delhi, where she finds Om, a family acquaintance and former suitor, and marries him. Like other novels on the Partition, Swarup’s is filled with common tropes, from Asha’s miscarriage on the way to Pakistan to the stories of both violence and rescues by Hindus and Muslims alike. Swarup appears to be aware of this commonality and uses the shared sense of horror to try to connect characters. Sanam, a Muslim refugee hired to be Asha’s servant, becomes a key, albeit minor, figure for expanding the horrors beyond religious borders. Like Asha, Sanam witnesses her family’s murder and is raped. She gives birth to a girl, Priya, whom Asha adopts as her own to conceal her infertility. Sanam narrates a...

Found in Translation: Chaim Soutine and English Art

The article is the first to consider the impact of the early work of Chaim Soutine, produced in the South of France around 1920, on a circle of painters working in Britain some 30 years later, notably Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, as well as on the writer David Sylvester who promoted both their work and the key French artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Soutine who seemed to epitomise the new ‘existentialist’ climate. After the war Soutine became a cult figure in London, as he did in contemporary Paris and New York. He embodied the idea of the ‘tragic’ artist in his still-life imagery of flayed animals, his uncompromising, heavily-laden paint surfaces, and in his identity as a Jew who had died in 1943, an indirect victim of the Nazi occupation of France. I try to identify which works in particular were known to the English artists, themselves all Jewish except for Bacon, and to describe the very different ways in which they reacted to Soutine's art and adapted its lessons to their own artistic purposes.

Found in Translation: Chaim Soutine and English Art

The article is the first to consider the impact of the early work of Chaim Soutine, produced in the South of France around 1920, on a circle of painters working in Britain some 30 years later, notably Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, as well as on the writer David Sylvester who promoted both their work and the key French artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Soutine who seemed to epitomise the new ‘existentialist’ climate. After the war Soutine became a cult figure in London, as he did in contemporary Paris and New York. He embodied the idea of the ‘tragic’ artist in his still-life imagery of flayed animals, his uncompromising, heavily-laden paint surfaces, and in his identity as a Jew who had died in 1943, an indirect victim of the Nazi occupation of France. I try to identify which works in particular were known to the English artists, themselves all Jewish except for Bacon, and to describe the very different ways in which they reacted to Soutine's art and adapted its lesson...

Cheonggyecheon: Streaming Currere

In this paper I share my personal journey into rhizomatic thinking. Here I illustrate how a rhizome opened new possibilites to my previously confusing learning process. As a vehicle I ask the question, when considering the pedagogical nature of place, how does the new facilitate currere? I am also taking the opportunity to write in a way that is new and unfamiliar to me because the conventional and acceptable have been unable to help me understand the meanings I am seeking. I felt uninspired among traditional styles of academic writing until I encountered the doctoral thesis of Warren Sellers where another way of seeing and writing is explored. This generative experience gave me the momentum to link past learnings in new rhizomatic ways and begin a discussion within this journal about how place and pedagogy connect. My visit to Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul provided me the place and my reading of the texts of Warren Sellers, Noel Gough, Chaim Soutine, Margaret Sommerville and Lloyd Rees gave me examples of others who have searched. As I remember my physical experience of this new place, the stream becomes the search, the bridges spanning it, the new understandings and scattered along the banks, the rhizomes grow. A new place facilitates currere. This journal provides a forum where possibilities are viewed as exciting (Doll, 2009, p. 71). Tentative steps into new spaces are welcomed. Above all, conversation oils the machine, here I can share my thoughts with others who are exploring learning in diverse ways and from non linear perspectives.

First There Was the Word: Early Russian Texts on Modern Jewish Art

The influx of Jewish artists of Russian origin into the modern fine arts in the beginning of the twentieth century was remarkable in its magnitude, lack of historical precedent, and an ex-nihilo quality. The list only begins with Marc Chagall, Boris Aronson, El Lissitzky, Mane-Katz, Robert Falk, Abram Manevich, Chaim Soutine, Issachar Ryback, Joseph Tchaikov, and Osip Zadkine, and can be supplemented many-times fold. How do we explain that a generation of Jewish artists from Russian and Eastern Europe, like none before, suddenly developed an interest in making fine art? This question is usually answered in broad strokes by reference to demographic and social changes, including the loosening of restrictions, mass migration, growing secularisation and the rise of Zionism and Bundism. The two nineteenth-century precursors in Russia, Marc Antokol'sky and Isaac Levitan, are also mentioned and several in Germany, including Moritz Oppenheim, Maurycy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirsenberg, Isidore Kaufman, and Ephraim Moses Lilien. Researchers do not have a complete picture, however, of the textually embedded ideational environment out of which Jewish art in Russia emerged. In contrast, we know a substantial amount about this intellectual context in Germany and Austria, with its anti-Semitic, political and academic debates on Jewish art. This essay aims to help correct the imbalance, whereby the inquiry into the genesis of Jewish art historiography relies overwhelmingly on Germanand English-language sources. While gauging the interaction between the various discourses on Jewish art across the continent is a task for future study, here I follow Avram Kumpf's hunch that in Russia 'the concept seemed at one point to have a stronger foundation than in Western Europe'. By focusing exclusively on Russian texts, I am not assuming that they were produced in a vacuum. Certainly, there was a lively intellectual exchange taking place in Jewish journals and conferences across the Russian?German border in the years leading up to World War I. Still, it is important to acknowledge the degree to which the concept, as it developed in Russia, was locally anchored. My aim is to appreciate the unique ways in which ideas about Jewish art evolved from about 1880 to 1920 in the writings of Vladimir Stasov, Nikolai Lavrsky, Ilya Gintsburg, and others and provided a foundation for later scholarship. I also suggest that early Russian criticism, i.e. 'the word', laid the groundwork for the 'deed', or the artistic praxis of Russian Jews starting in the 1910s. The texts help fill a lacuna in our understanding of where Jewish art came from in Russia. As I contend, it is not enough to attribute Chagall's success to practical circumstances, i.e. his study at Yehuda Pen's (mostly Jewish) art school in Vitebsk and to fortuitous and generous sponsorship. The conditions that made Chagall possible were also ideational and more specific to art than political nationalism. They were set in motion decades before his first painting, 1 Overviews of this generation are provided in Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth Century Art (Lund Humphries: London, 1990 [1984]); Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan (eds), The Circle at Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945 (The Jewish Museum: New York, 1985).

Complex identities: Jewish consciousness and modern art

Focusing on 19th-and 20th-century European, American and Israeli artists, the contributors explore the ways in which Jewish artists have responded to their Jewishness and to the societies in which they lived (or live), and how these factors have influenced their art, their choice of subject matter, and presentation of their work. The contributors reflect the broad range of contemporary art criticism, with a variety of perspectives by art, cultural and even literary historians. Among the essays are Donald Kuspit's and Avigdor Poseq's perspectives on Chaim Soutine, Sander Gilman on R.B. Kitaj and the body, and Ziva Amishan-Maisels on the origins of the Jewish Jesus. By analyzing how Jewish experiences have been depicted and have shaped art, the collection begins to answer how art, in its turn, depicts and shapes the Jewish experience.

Emily Braun. Review of "An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine" by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver.

Emily Braun. Review of "An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine" by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver.

Judging Life: From Beauty to Experience. From Kant to Chaim Soutine

Judging Life: From Beauty to Experience. From Kant to Chaim Soutine

An expressionist in Paris: the paintings of Chaim Soutine

Born near Minsk in White Russia, the painter (1894-1943) created his major works in France between the two World Wars. He is identified with the School of Paris, the group of artists, many of them foreign-born and Jewish, who lived and worked in the French capital between the wars. Known as a painter's painter, worked with unreserved gesture and emotion, using exuberant colour, thinkly applied paint, and sweeping brushwork. Chaim Soutine is a comprehensive, ground-breaking book that rediscovers this important artist, providing an overview of his life, work and aesthetic influence, as well as his critical reception. Essays by leading scholars and curators assess Soutine's art from new vantage points, including the changing critical reception of his work in Paris between the wars, as well as in the US and France in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. The essays also examine the influence of Soutine's Jewish and French immigrant background on his work and reception, and introduce us to his important patrons and major collectors. These included Albert Barnes, the famous Philadelphia collector, who discovered Soutine's work in 1922-23 and purchased 52 of his paintings. The book features presentations and information never published before, including a photo-essay composed of rare photographs of the artist, newly discovered correspondence between and the French art historian Elie Faure, and the first radiographic analysis of the artist's work, which brings to light new evidence about Soutine's use of materials and his process of painting.

Exhibitions/Catalogues

Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor David Sylvester Francis Bacon: The Human BodyNorman L Kleeblatt and Kenneth E Silver An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim SoutineVivian Endicott Barnett and Josef Helfenstein The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee in the New World

Right and left in Soutine's last landscapes

Abstract Chaim Soutine, whose centenary has recently been marked by an extensively illustrated catalogue raisonne,1 is remembered as a painter of distorted portraits, still-lifes of withered plants and dead and decaying animal flesh; in the catalogue, however, landscape paintings outnumber the other works. The survey also shows that the early views of rustic Parisian suburbs and quaint little towns gradually made way for more emphatic representations, focusing on the expressiveness of individual trees or small woods, often enlivened by tiny human figures. Several paintings belonging to this category were done in the last two years of Sou tine's life when he left German-occupied Paris to live under an assumed name in Champigny-sur-Veude, in Touraine. In a period of food shortages the fertile farming region offered obvious advantages2 and Soutine liked its placid scenery, but social isolation and the constant fear of denunciation operated a powerful stress on him.

The Art of Celebration: Twentieth-Century Painting, Literature, Sculpture, Photography, and Jazz (review)

214 Nabokov Studies Alfred Appel, Jr. The Art of Celebration: Twentieth-Century Painting Literature, Sculpture, Photography, and )azz. New York: Knopf, 1993. $35.00. 246 pages. The early Appel was an earnest, eager student of Nabokov (having actually been an earnest eager student of Nabokov). We had coffee once in Chicago, a quarter-century ago, and one of us—I remember the detail, not the possessorhad a bushy black beard. We quoted large passages of The Defense back and forth from memory. When we got to Luzhin forgetfully burning his hand in the terrifying deep of a chess game, Appel even cited the page number. I couldn't match that In his writing, he had one notable idiosyncracy, inventing mediocre puns and claiming they ranked right up there with those by Humbert, or Kinbote, or Nabokov himself; whenever he started out a sentence, As Nabokov would say, you remembered his better moments. I see he still does it although now mostly with Joyce, the central literary figure behind this book: The bird's Chock Full o'Nuts coffeetin torso is intact {in Calder's assemblage Chock], a canned symbol of three-dimensional new life and an art chock full of values opposed to the one-dimensional, ironic detach ment of Andy Warhol's soup-can approach—chock full o' nuttin', Joyce would say, putting on a New York accent (186) Molly's wombmate, Mr. Bloom (Joyce would say it that way, he would, he would) only has to relax ... (189) But here's a merge for auld lang syne: Brancusi's cusp runneth over, as Joyce or Nabokov might have said. (42) The later Appel of Nabokov's Dark Cinema was much more freewheeling, and also much more visually oriented—indications of things to come. This new book, The Art of Celebration, is even more visual and freewheeing (or rather, lreeassociational —a cross between a jazz riff and Tristram Shandy). It is about Nabokov only in passing, but Appel's old fans will find it a good read anyway. Appel's thesis is that modernism is divided into yea-sayers and nay-sayers. In literature, the yea-sayers are Joyce and Nabokov—Molly Bloom's "Yes" that ends Ulysses being the ultimate affirmation—but also W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur, and the Ernest Hemingway of the Nick Adams stories (6). Nay-sayers include T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Nathanael West. Jazz seems to be all yea-sayers. But the focus here is primarily on painting, sculpture, and photography—with interesting connections all the way round, and with lots of illustrations in bright colors. Sizable discussions are devoted to Matisse, Brancusi, Cartier-Bresson, Klee, Mondrian, and Léger, as well as to the perhaps lesser known Malevich, Kertész, and Stuart Book Reviews 215 Davis. One nay-sayer, George Grosz, slips in for contrast. If we try to read The Art of Celebration for clues to its author's life, we may conclude from one brief passage that two Mondrian reproductions on a hospital wall once became for Appel "uplifting objective correlatives for [his] need, [his] search for order, psychic ease, calm, and renewed strength" (194)—and may have been the initial inspiration for this restorative book as well. Among nice things argued here is that the most celebratory color of modern art is bright yellow, a little key with which Appel opens any number of paintings. Although Lolita is cited a few times for its celebration of ordinary Americana, the only Nabokov text that undergoes any analysis is "A Guide to Berlin," to which Appel devotes three excellent paragraphs. The first of them, among other things, invokes the following names in its whirligig comparisons: Joseph Conrad, David Letterman, Eliot, Apollinaire, André Kertész, Matisse, Wallace Stevens, Chaim Soutine, Francis Bacon, and Puni. Here is the third: The titles alone, from THE PIPES to THE PUB, trace a happy physical and mental progression, a resurrection of a kind: from hard, icy ground—where the pipes are laid out like dead infantrymen—to warm, closed space, an inviting room where newspapers and magazines hang "like banners" to celebrate the idea of community, friendship, and...