THE JEW AS ARTIST
GELERNTER, DAVID
The Jew as Artist Chaim Soutine on Display in New York BY DAVID GELERNTER Any man who has the capacity to make art also has the capacity to destroy it, and Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was a...
...the ones that survive bear the scars of a knock-down brawl with their creator...
...Soutine's shudder is a sublimation of the trauma of being born a lowly shtetl Jew and becoming an absurd Jew—not a real Jew—by becoming a painter...
...Thus Michelangelo smashing his sublime Florence ^-ieta with a hammer, Cezanne slashing canvases with a knife, Gia-cometti burning drawings by the fistful and slamming clay figures to the ground...
...Sometimes he would toss a brush aside after one stroke...
...Kuspit is referring to the fact that Orthodox Jews-unlike, say, Ohio Presbyterians?— disapprove of art as a career...
...The show on balance is a first-rate accomplishment...
...Cezanne inherited the richer "visual art tradition...
...His paintings seem like the results of a remarkable experiment: What if an artist were to strip himself of all technical expertise...
...We will never understand the paradoxical essence of culture today until we understand how Jews and the Jewish experience shaped it...
...The word "Israel" is said to mean "struggler with God," and fights between God and man are profoundly important in the Bible and Talmud—far more so than most modern readers understand...
...A visitor to the Jewish Museum's show is left, nonetheless, with the nagging feeling that there is something Jewish about Soutine's art...
...They are never trivial or conventional, but very few people would give such pictures a second glance if they were not by Soutine...
...such artists as Soutine were advised to learn "moderation" from Cezanne...
...Who had the "artistically richer" upbringing...
...Donald Kuspit demonstrates in his catalogue essay how to take a wrong turn and crack up...
...There are good essays in the catalogue—Ellen Pratt's technical study of the paintings, for example, and Romy Golan's discussion of Soutine's posthumous reputation in France—as well as silly ones...
...To convert the bloody mess of a carcass into a beautifully colored tour de force requires an odd sort of detachment, a failure (in this case turned to advantage) to connect emotionally with the subject...
...Soutine the artist is the test-driver who takes every curve too fast and spins out three-quarters of the time...
...Jewishness is an important topic of study, but the study has to be done carefully because the facts are complicated...
...To put aside everything we have ever learned about line, color, and composition, and approach his subject on the basis of sheer will...
...The show isn't easy to look at or figure out...
...at the top, a house and chimneys bend like palms in a hurricane before a force so powerful, it twists the sky out of shape...
...Soutine was bizarrely resistant to shuddering...
...In Soutine's time, Cezanne was regarded as quintessentially French...
...His paintings range from vehement to wild...
...The portrait of Emile Lejeune, for example, is typical of Soutine's worst portraits: The sitter looks— not to put too fine a point on it— dopey...
...When the Nazis took the city in 1940, he fled to the countryside, moving from town to town to avoid detection...
...When such people get angry at their work, they hit hard...
...The Jew as Artist Chaim Soutine on Display in New York BY DAVID GELERNTER Any man who has the capacity to make art also has the capacity to destroy it, and Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was a master-artist of destruction...
...The emotional tone is darker than anything in van Gogh, dark as Kafka...
...His stomach ulcers got worse, but he was afraid to seek treatment...
...He died that same month, murdered indirectly by the Nazis...
...It is a piece of organized violence...
...I have a theory that fits the facts better than Kuspit's, but is just as speculative...
...The failed pictures are mostly a matter of the artist caroming out of control...
...Nor is "shuddering" any kind of Jewish characteristic...
...Does that put "Jewish art" at the inner core of modern painting...
...His studio floor was littered with discards...
...Soutine's tendency to be out-of-focus extends into many areas...
...Large heavily loaded brushes hit the canvas like crash-landing airplanes and go plowing, skidding forward at top speed...
...Despite all the words about Jews that get cranked out annually, this understanding remains largely beyond us...
...But Modigliani's education was supervised by his highly cultivated mother, and he studied art in Florence and Venice...
...Soutine's pictures of animal carcasses are famous, and the subject suits him down to the ground: For a man whose pictures seem to be caught in the act of self-destructing, a decaying carcass is the perfect model...
...But the only way Sou-tine knew how to paint was at the top of his lungs, and the unmodulated fortissimo gets on a person's nerves...
...But when he succeeds, the result is a memorably exhilarating ride...
...It is thus inevitable that talk about Soutine confronts the grand old questions of Jewish art: whether it exists, and, if it does, what it is...
...1923), the finest of the series, is startling because it is gorgeous—a storm of red and golden swirls like the surface of a seething star, with no hint of blood or gore or death...
...The colors—vermilion surrounded by ochres and browns, yellow-greens and green-blues—are not harmonious but form a memorably dissonant chord...
...But Cezanne's artistic evolution was shaped in part, in the crucial early years of the 1870s, by a Jew—Camille Pissarro...
...There are other extraordinary images here too: Chartres cathedral,for example, caught in a 1934 painting as if by strobe-camera just as it is about to leave the ground...
...Kus-pit's theory is that Soutine's paintings express "a spontaneous, massive shudder at the folly of his Jewish existence and Jewish existence as such...
...The question has even been raised, at times, by Jewish artists themselves—but it is outlandish all the same...
...Wrestling with Soutine's art is refreshing, illuminating, and good training for the big bout to come...
...His masterpieces, however, rank among the century's memorable images, so original and violent they are stunning and sometimes shocking: Hill at Ceret (c...
...Modigliani, for example, was a Jew from Italy, Cezanne a Christian from southern France...
...Of course, technical competence, while it allows painters to win artistic battles and make good images, also in a sense hems them in...
...Cezanne in turn shaped twentieth-century art to a greater extent than any other of its forebears...
...when he went at last to a Paris hospital in August 1943, it was too late...
...Successful artists are usually high-pressure, steam-driven personalities...
...We are perhaps all derived from Pissarro," Cezanne once said...
...But Soutine is the extraordinary, puzzling artist who seems to destroy his canvases in the act of making them...
...These are important issues, especially today, when intellectuals tend to see groups instead of individuals—and to understand groups only in terms of the worst disasters they have suffered or inflicted...
...Most important, these pictures deserve to be seen, and the Jewish Museum is a good place to see them...
...In his striking Red Stai^ay at Cagnes (c...
...the picture is possessed...
...In a painting like Les Gorges du Loup sur Vence (c...
...by an enormous magnet...
...They help illuminate the remarkable Jewish achievement of modern times, which constitutes in turn a kind of public service...
...But Head and Carcass of a Horse (c...
...Sou-tine paints with less guile and grace than the average child, but with a colossal, adult-sized will...
...It is not surprising that he wanted to be a boxer if he couldn't be an artist...
...The idea of building static objects out of swarms of electrified brushstrokes suggests van Gogh, but Soutine operates at a completely different pitch of hysteria...
...Jews and Jewish ideas are intimately entwined with the creation of the modern world in all its splendor and tawdriness...
...After all, people "shudder" (with revulsion or disgust or nausea) when they are overcome by a thing's unpleasantness...
...Looking at this painting is like staring into a tornado...
...This is a bad approach, as some of the essays in the Jewish Museum's catalogue for the Soutine show demonstrate...
...It opened on April 26 and will remain in New York through August 16, after which it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum...
...Art historians have long worried about whether the Jews' "relatively modest visual art tradition" (as Kenneth Silver puts it in his catalogue essay) is an obstacle to Jewish artistic accomplishment...
...Most of his paintings fail...
...1921), for example, where a hill, house, and sky are built out of twisting, writhing brushstrokes and every molecule screams simultaneously...
...Who else could have been inspired to make a lyrically beautiful picture by a butchered horse...
...But the same disconnectedness can be disastrous...
...Soutine was a Lithuanian Jew who settled in Paris at age eighteen in 1911...
...Nor does Kuspit present any evidence that it is...
...1923), a stairway running upward and spiraling inward pulls the adjacent houses and trees towards it...
...The other several dozen paintings in the show are partial successes at best...
...Three paintings struck me as first-class masterpieces, and a dozen or so others are thoroughly extraordinary...
...I don't know how he managed it, but it is an amazing feat...
...His images look as if they had been bashed by a wrecking ball or warped David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Jews will never come to grips with their bad accomplishments until they have a better grasp of their good ones—and it is important that they grapple with both...
...Although Jews have no special propensity to "shudder," they do have a long tradition of fighting with God...
...For Sou-tine, roughly speaking, art was god...
...The evidence has been clear for the last century: Hard as it may be for moderns to accept, family and region of birth count vastly more than group memberships, even for Jews...
...He was a champion annihilator of his own paintings (he burnt, slashed, and over-painted them...
...1920), the lines are messy and indistinct and the colors muddy, with no grace and no force...
...One day, when a dead cow he was painting started to dry out and lose color, Soutine sent his assistant to a slaughterhouse for a bucket of blood to splash on the car-cass—which perked right up like a potted geranium...
...Cezanne grew up in the rural backwater of Aix-en-Provence, and devoted himself as a young man to making "excruciatingly faithful copies" (as John Rewald puts it) of hackwork paintings by Dubufe and Frillie...
...Stripped of all armor and weaponry a warrior is defenseless, but free and unencumbered as well—free, if he has it in him, to put on a spectacular show of will power and go down in stunning style...
...But it is one of Sou-tine's most striking traits not to shudder when a normal man would...
...Now playing at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan is the first big Soutine retrospective in America since the late 1960s...
...It is a nice question whether Kus-pit's theory rises to the level of nonsense...
Vol. 3 • July 1998 • No. 43
