Is Chaim Soutine the Great Overlooked Jewish Painter of Modernity?

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

A new gallery show helps reassess the Lithuanian-born artist’s important work—and reveals it as anything but tragic

By Abby Margulies for Tablet Magazine

On a quiet block in Chelsea, nestled among dozens of contemporary art exhibitions, a small but ambitious show has just opened seeking to give one of the great modern masters his due. Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine, is the first in a series of exhibitions the gallery will present meant to re-contextualize the work of Lithuanian-born artist Chaim Soutine.

Soutine’s work was first introduced to American audiences in 1950 in his eponymous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In his seminal essay, exhibition curator Monroe Wheeler wrote of Soutine, “from an early age he used his hardship, pessimism, and truculence to set a tragic tone for his painting, irrespective of its subject matter.” Looking at Soutine’s body of work, it does in fact emanate tragedy, from his flaccid blue chickens nailed to a wall, to his gaunt women whose twisted hands seem to contain the sadness of the world. Though further exhibitions, catalogs, and scholarship have emerged in the past half century—notably significant exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968 and at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1998 that have contributed tremendous scholarship to his legacy—the vision of Soutine as a tragedian has nonetheless prevailed.

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