{"id":10493,"date":"2018-05-21T06:18:53","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T13:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=10493"},"modified":"2018-05-21T06:18:53","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T13:18:53","slug":"who-was-chaim-soutine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=10493","title":{"rendered":"Who was: Chaim Soutine"},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of the last exhibitions I saw in Germany before I came to the US in the early 1980s was a Chaim Soutine retrospective of many of his meat paintings. The artist was curiously missing from the German art museums, and the curator’s notes were stretching psychological analyses of the reasons why he painted the way he did and, particularly,\u00a0what <\/i>he painted, namely dead meat. Discussions of his life-long hunger, speculations about his dietary restrictions due to stomach ulcers (the ultimate cause of his untimely death) and veiled references to the physical abuse he experienced as a child in a dirt poor family of 11 siblings abounded. His urge to draw persisted despite beatings by an orthodox Jewish father who felt this was not in line with religious proscriptions.<\/p>\n

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I had trouble digesting the body of Soutine’s work – it seemed brutal and yet exuberant in its colorization.<\/p>\n

And here we are in 2018 where I saw many of his paintings at a recent visit to the Barnes foundation, realizing now with a more adult and educated eye the power of his vision as well as the depth of his craft. Although Barnes bought 52 of his paintings at once, and, I believe, more later, the collector and artist did not exactly take to each other – see a description here:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/arts\/la-et-cm-ca-shocking-paris-exerpt-20150503-story.html<\/a><\/p>\n

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Here is short french film re-enacting Barnes’ visit with various French artists and dealers, showing many of the treasures now on view at the Foundation. Most interesting for the actual photos of the artist(s).<\/p>\n