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Soutine’s Splash


SOUTINE’S SPLASH

The show of Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) now at the Jewish Museum in New York is full of delights—some pretty standard images in all the art history texts, but other, lesser-known surprises. And one of the nifty things about this show is that very few of the pieces are under glass, so you can really eyeball the surfaces–sometimes to Soutine’s advantage, but not always. He gets messy.

The piece right inside the door (okay, under glass, but sensitively lit) is his famous and magnificent “Still Life With Rayfish.”

The closer you look, the more fascinating is the loose, splashy handling—color and brushwork wonderfully expressive but having little, if anything, to do with physical description.

 

 

Then the odd “Hanging Turkey” c.1925. with its human female torso.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And “Turkey” c. 1925. The turkey almost gets lost because the dark neck against the dark surround separates the head from the body, the leg shapes and color are repeated along the side, and there’s that odd mechanical piece coming in from the corner.

But once you’re hooked in, you come closer and closer, fascinated with how Soutine dances between representation and abstraction.