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Chaïm Soutine, Les Maisons, 1920/21, oil on canvas, 58 × 92 cm, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

December 11, 2023

Chaïm Soutine at K20 in Düsseldorf – Art in NRW 12/23

In Germany we had to wait four decades for a comprehensive exhibition on Chaïm Soutine. Soutine, who was born in 1893 into a Jewish family near Minsk, emigrated to Paris in 1913, remained a loner despite his occasional great success and died of a stomach ulcer in 1943, is a world-class painter. With his expressive, color-intensive, immensely present painting, he is an unwieldy special case of modernism that is still highly revered today.

The exhibition, which can now be seen in the NRW Art Collection, focuses roughly on 1915-1930 and thus on the motif groups that reveal so much about the time when they were created. They illustrate the poverty in Paris in the years during and after the First World War, while industrial progress favored certain population groups and disadvantaged others. Soutine lived in Montmartre under initially miserable circumstances, after all as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, who moved in the circles of Chagall, Léger and Zadkine and came into contact with galleries through his friend Amadeo Modigliani. From 1918 onwards he stayed repeatedly in southern France; It was there that his wavering, out-of-kilter landscapes and urban scenes were created, which express the fragility of these years and have parallels to Cubism, Futurism and, in any case, Expressionism.

The exhibition in Düsseldorf begins with these pictures and the still lifes of sparse times. It shows the skinned oxen that Soutine is famous for. She is dedicated to his portraits of underprivileged serving classes such as the altar boys, pastry chefs, chambermaids and elevator boys and the sudden outsiders such as the old actress – and the way Soutine paints them is a stunner. The bodies are shifted and emaciated, surrounded by loose clothing, the faces appear to be grimacing and self-confident. In places the depiction is abstract, but always shows individuals with compassionate intensity: as metaphors for the beauty and vulnerability of people and their exclusion. With these pictures Soutine already has a place in the Olympus of painting.

Chaïm Soutine – Against the Current | until 14.1. | K20, NRW Art Collection in Düsseldorf | 0211838 12 04

Thomas Hirsch

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