DÜSSELDORF.- As of last September 2nd, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen opened a presentation of a comprehensive exhibition of works by the artist Chaïm Soutine (Smilavičy 1893–1943 Paris). His expressive paintings reflect his Jewish origins and his life in emigration, and at the same time bear witness to an existence on the fringes of society. With some sixty paintings, the exhibition at K20 deliberately concentrates on the artist’s early masterpieces, focusing on the various series created between 1918 and 1928. The overarching theme of the exhibition is emigration and the permanent uprooting of people that results from it. This phenomenon, both individual and societal, extends to the present day, where homelessness has become an integral part of modern life in the twenty-first century.

Soutine’s paintings are explosions of color and, despite all the adverse circumstances, declarations of love for life and for people who, like him, find themselves on the lowest rung of society. Bellboys, chambermaids, cooks, altar boys, and choir boys are his models. With them, as with his paintings of swaying landscapes and slaughtered animals, he captured the attitude toward life of an entire era: a generation marked by war, social ills, and the relentless conflict between religious and political worldviews. The people and motifs are deeply moving because their vulnerability expresses the existential anxieties of our time.

Chaïm Soutine grew up in a shtetl near Minsk in Belarus. He was the tenth of eleven children. Although poverty and discrimination marked his childhood, he managed to take painting lessons at the age of fourteen, first in Minsk, then at the Academy in Vilnius, and from 1913 in Paris. The metropolis became his surrogate home, but Soutine remained an outsider, who initially had a poor command of the language and was unfamiliar with social conventions. Among his few friends was the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. He ignored artist groups as well as the leading trends of Surrealism and Cubism. The poverty that had dominated his everyday life since his youth seemed to catch up with him again in Paris, making it difficult for him to participate in social life. This did not change when, in the winter of 1922/1923, the American collector Albert C. Barnes acquired fifty-two paintings by the hitherto unknown painter, and Soutine’s financial situation improved overnight.

After moving to Paris, Soutine studied the Old Masters in the Louvre and created extensive series of works based on motifs by El Greco, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jean Siméon Chardin. He devoted himself with great passion to color as a medium and vehicle of expression in his paintings. The exhibition shows that Soutine forged an individual path between abstraction and figuration earlier than other contemporaries. While Soutine’s solitary nature made him an anomaly of modernism during his lifetime, he became the forefather of Abstract Expressionism and New Figuration after his death. Subsequent generations of painters revered him and referred to him as a role model and source of inspiration. These included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, and especially Francis Bacon. Later, they were joined by Georg Baselitz, Marlene Dumas, Amy Sillman, Anish Kapoor, and others.

While Soutine is considered one of the key representatives of classical modernism in France and North America, he is known in Germany primarily in artist circles. Apart from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, only a few other museums have paintings by Soutine in their holdings. The last museum exhibition took place in 1981 at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster.

Even today, Soutine’s name comes up unusually often when contemporary artists are asked about key figures with regard to in their own biographies. Although Soutine’s work was created some 100 years ago, his painting seems to be surrounded by a fascinating timelessness, both in terms of technique and subject matter. One of the central themes of this exhibition is therefore the question of the relevance of Soutine’s painting. To build a bridge from classical modernism to the present, the Louisiana Channel has produced an interview film to accompany the exhibition. The film explores the question of why the fascination with the works and the person of this extraordinary artist continues unabated to this day. Dana Schutz (b. 1972, US), Amy Sillman (b. 1955, US), Emma Talbot (b. 1969, GB), Leidy Churchman (b. 1979, US), Jutta Koether (b. 1958, DE/US), Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957, CH/FR), Chantal Joffe (b. 1969, US), Imran Qureshi (b. 1972, PK), and others discuss the influence Soutine has had on their careers.

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
Chaïm Soutine. Against the Current
September 2nd, 2023 - January 14th, 2023