Soutine's legacy: affinities between Soutine and the painterly "big guns" of the next, postwar generation were explored in a recent exhibition - Chaim Soutine

The importance of Chaim Soutine's Ceret landscapes for postwar American abstraction is a familiar modernist trope. But to demonstrate it in an exhibition that juxtaposes Soutine's work with that of Pollock and de Kooning is another proposition, and to chart Soutine's influence on postwar European figuration is a different story entirely. In trying to follow both paths in a single show last fall, "The Impact of Chaim Soutine," at Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne, the American organizers, Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, took the high road, as it were, focusing only on documented influences and major figures. Their other, unstated purpose seems to have been to present a number of relatively unknown Soutine paintings that were not included in their 1993 catalogue raisonne of the artist's work. By sticking to the big guns--Soutine himself as well as Pollock, de Kooning, Bacon and Dubuffet--the Cologne show and its jazzy catalogue, designed by Richard Pandiscio, argued for a newly rigorous reading of Soutine as a deity of spontaneous painting.

Soutine (1893-1943), a Lithuanian Jew who came to Paris in 1913 and died there at age 50 during World War II, has long been held up as an exemplar of the hard-living, impoverished boy-made-good from the shtetl, alternately irascible and saintly, revered as much for his self-destructive lifestyle as for his consummately worked canvases. The best recent reading of Soutine is the catalogue for the 1998 show at the Jewish Museum in New York, authored by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver, among others. Soutine's legendary persona was not challenged by the Cologne show; rather, it was upheld and reified still further. A devotional mood was established in the stairwell connecting the two levels of the gallery, which was lined with portentous quotes from art-world worthies, including William Seitz, Clement Greenberg and David Sylvester. It was Sylvester who in 1959 first enunciated the direct influence of Soutine's Ceret pictures on de Kooning. The artist saw these works in the 1950 Soutine retrospective at MOMA in New York, and he later corroborated the affinity in conversation with the critic. Sylvester pinned his awareness of Bacon's interest in Soutine to a day ca. 1953 when Bacon took him to see several of Soutine's Ceret pictures at the Redfern Gallery in London. Bacon was represented in the Cologne show only by one small self-portrait study from 1978, but the Soutine connection was immediately apparent. (The publication reproduces many more examples by all the artists involved.)

As for Dubuffet, he spoke directly to Tuchman about Soutine in 1968. According to Tuchman, it was Soutine's fusion of landscape and figure that influenced Dubuffet's "Corps de dame" series in the 1940s. Dubuffet was, not surprisingly given his prolific output, one of the strongest presences in the Cologne show. (The Dubuffet-Soutine connection was also made abundantly clear to me in the recent Dubuffet retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where a room full of caricatural 1940s portraits of male artistic and literary types strongly evinced a debt to Soutine's equally discomfiting portraits of bellhops and waiters.)

The only weak link in the Cologne show was in the selection of works by Pollock, whose Scent of 1955 (reproduced in the catalogue but not in the show) was said by Frank O'Hara to be directly influenced by Soutine. Unfortunately, only two small Picassoid Pollocks, Head with Polygons (1938-41) and Dancing Head (1941-49), were on view in Cologne, and they didn't make the strongest argument for a relationship between the two artists' acts of painting. In Soutine's case, the act famously included working with his fingers, destroying portraits in the midst of posing sessions and fainting dead away in the studio after particularly arduous painting workouts.

The most spectacular juxtaposition in the Cologne show was the pairing of Soutine's The Old Actress (ca. 1922) on a wall with Dubuffet's Minerva (1945). These are both ghastly figurative icons: Dubuffet's is a demonic archetype with huge bared teeth, breasts in the form of abutting black circles and benignly crossed hands. The rudely painted full-frontal depiction conjures up some Mayan or Minoan deity such as would have been on many young artists' minds, including Pollock's and de Kooning's, in the apocalyptic, Jungian mood of the mid-'40s. Soutine's ravaged thespian suggests a throwback to Toulouse-Lautrec: flayed anatomy, arthritic hands, decaying flesh, lurid makeup, all dramatically lit from below. The blur of the upper lip, the triangles of rouge on the gaunt cheekbones, the arms hanging limp as if they were trophies of dead game or fish, the runic brushwork on her drooping white collar--all this makes for an unforgettable frisson, and one I hadn't experienced since I saw the painting in a memorable Soutine retrospective at the Marlborough Gallery in 1973 in New York. (What a feast of painting that was in the midst of a largely nonpainterly decade.)