Chaim Soutine: Against the Current - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3775755411 ISBN 13: 9783775755412

Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023

Synopsis

An insatiable Hunger for Life

Clenched, raw and of a pressing urgentness: Chaïm Soutine’s expressive paintings are testimonies to a sense of human vulnerability and an existence on the margins of society. Intensely coloured, his meaty impasto portraits are thrown onto the canvas with broad brushstrokes, his agitated, frenetic landscapes and the paintings of slaughtered animals are expressions of an intense hunger for life and, at the same time, a deep alienation in an unsteady world that offers no support.

Despite the recognition his work received, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, a stranger to the social manners of his adopted home in France. This catalogue focuses on the early masterpieces and series created between 1919 and 1925: Under the overarching theme of emigration and uprooting, the contributions reveal the traces of Soutine’s Jewish origins in his work, illuminate the significance of his motifs from the fringes of society as well as of blood and animal carcasses as metaphors; and show the influences of Soutine’s art up to the present day.

About this title

About the Author

CHAÏM SOUTINE (1893–1943) grew up in a shtetl near Minsk – a youth marked by poverty, religious rigor and social exclusion. In 1913 he arrived in Paris and moved into the artist residence “La Ruche”, the “Beehive”, working alongside artists such as Chagall and Modigliani. Fleeing the Nazis, he died in 1943, but the international attention his work had received since the 1920s continued to have great influence on post-war art, inspiring Abstract Expressionism, new figurative painting as well as contemporary artists.

From the Back Cover

Themes of exile and alienation in the early work of Soutine.

Inspired by Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, Chaïm Soutine forged a new Expressionist idiom that bridged art history and modernity in its articulation of human vulnerability and existence on society's margins. His impasto portraits, executed in broad brushstrokes, his agitated, frenetic landscapes and his famous paintings of slaughtered animals all express, in vivid colors, an intense hunger for life and profound alienation in an uncertain world.

Despite the recognition his work received, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, a stranger to the social manners of his adopted home in France. This catalog focuses on his early masterpieces and series created between 1919 and 1925. Addressing the overarching theme of emigration and dislocation, essays reveal the traces of Soutine's Jewish origins in his work; illuminate the significance of his motifs and the metaphorical resonances of his animal carcasses; and show the influences of Soutine's art up to the present day.
Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) grew up in a shtetl near Minsk. In 1913 he arrived in Paris and moved into the legendary artist residence La Ruche (the Beehive), working alongside artists such as Chagall and Modigliani. Fleeing the Nazis, he died in 1943. His work has proved enduringly influential for artists such as de Kooning, Pollock, Bacon and Dubuffet.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Publication date: 2023
• ISBN 10: 3775755411
• ISBN 13: 9783775755412
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160
• Editor: Gaensheimer Susanne, Meyer-Büser Susanne