Art As Rhetoric Prepared Medium Rare

Soutine once shocked his neighbours by hanging a side of beef in his garret so he could paint it. The carcass collected fleas, putrified , and this death on exhibition alarmed the tenants to bring the gendarmes to put an end to the stench and proceedings. His loft was an abbatoir of art where the dead animals suspended from the rafters were in order to directly experience the visceral color of putrefying flesh.A discussion ensued  intitiated by Soutine; a lecture   on the relative importance of art over hygiene, and the gendarmes,  who in turn showed  Soutine how to inject formaldehyde and preservatives into the animals. Urban legend? Soutine painted  ten works in this series, which have since became his most iconic. His carcass paintings were inspired by Rembrandt’s still life of the same subject, which he discovered while studying the Old Masters in the Louvre.

Soutine, The Mad Woman/ La Folle, 1919

 

‘‘Soutine painted hallucinatory landscapes reminiscent of Van Gogh (whom he said he loathed) and dark brooding portraits, but his slaughterhouse still-lifes have proved to be his most potent, personal, and enduring works. In the eviscerated fowl, flayed rabbits, gutted fish, and hanging cows, the depressive Soutine found his perfect subjects, which both gave form to his darkest anxieties and alluded to his cherished forerunners, the paintings he’d copied for tourists in his early days in Paris.” (David Marcus, Tablet ).

Soutine, The Ray, 1924

 

The formal art of convincing is called rhetoric.The case of Soutine, is the power of the rhetoric, the phenomenon, what creates the value of his work or is it the fictive language in Soutine’s narrative which has strong emotions and a coherent, grounded structure of its own. Or, is the value of the art based on rhetorical language of his work in which the content is relatively unimportant. Think Yoko Ono’s Odyssey of  a Cockroach Exhibit, an allegory for the concept of hype as artistic achievement. Is the convincing power of rhetoric determinant in the creation of myth and archetype, folklore and comprehension of history? To clothe the work of Soutine in a sublime narrative action, not easily understood, to create value for art based strictly on form and structure? An art buyer purchasing an envelope without a letter, or a blank letter. In art, content is intangible and elusive and subject to rhetorical manipulation and if the form seems more important than the content, it is because form is more easy to understand and classify, commodify, and content which in the case of Soutine is complex and only fully understood through the course of time, and therfore more difficult to monetize.

Soutine, Rabbit with Forks

 

”Sure, enjoy the rhetoric/salesmanship wherever you find it, but mistrust it too. Because at its best, correct rhetoric is an art; and, as in all art, form is more important than content. The painter Chaim Soutine painted a side of beef, yet created a masterpiece. Picasso painted a broken guitar from six viewpoints at once, and created another. It’s not the “what,” but the “how.’ ” ( Avner Mandelman, GlobeInvestor ) There is some question about a cartesian, linear and hyper-rational view from captain of markets projecting identical rationale from stock hustling to vote peddling  and art values from deceased painters. Nonetheless, the view is ”prevailing wisdom” and somewhat unsettling that broader perspectives are limited to the relationship between the testicles and the credit card limit. In his analysis, the third member seems effectively neutered and preserved like Soutine’s carcass. The rhetoric guides the content and the content’s structure must be rhetorically correct. Tails wag dogs. Which shows that those with the means to buy art, often know the least about it. They are buying a market value and are willing to sit on their dividends.

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Soutine, Madeleine Castaing, 1929

 In February 2006, the oil painting of this series ‘Le Boeuf Ecorche’ (1924) sold for a record $14 million to an anonymous buyer at a Christies auction held in London – after it was estimated to fetch £4.8 million. Chaim Soutine was was a basically a poor, expressionist painter from white Russia who has been interpreted as both a forerunner of abstract expressionism and as a proponent of painting in the European tradition, particularly Rembrandt.  Soutine developed a passionate color dynamism with susceptible, restless shapes, though in  his late works, distortions and the strong emotionality are more subdued; at least the intensely personal and tormented vision is more muted, though not resolved. The rhythmically flowing lines, distorted angles of the body and use of raw colour became an artistic signature, characteristic of Soutine’s highly expressive and emotive artistic vocabulary.

Soutine, Pastry Cook, 1922

”In Still Life With Fowl (1918), two chickens lay next to each other, red gashes across their slim throats, draped together like lovers who’ve committed suicide. In Pheasant (1926-27), the animal’s extended body is attractively laid out as if it were a reclining nude. Soutine’s paint strokes are uneven and the heavy texture of the paint reminds the viewer of de Kooning or Pollock. The carcasses are maimed, ugly, bloodied and their ultimate end is always in sight. In  Rabbit  With Two Forks ( 1924 ), the utensils practically grasp the animal, reminding one of what it truly is: a meal. There’s a complex interaction between artist and subject in these paintings. Soutine recognizes that by taking the dead animals out of the butcher shop and painting them, he takes much of their essence away—transforming their grotesque appearance into art. Yet he also understands that in the act of painting, the artist must also recognize the harsh reality of the world.” 

 Soutine, later on,  dismissed his early works, and destroyed all the pieces he managed to get a hold of., fulfilling a Kafka style desire to destroy his own creations in possessed spells and catatonic states of self-hatred. Chaim Soutine died in Paris on August 9, 1943, after working in poverty and hiding from the nazis who, in turn, wanted to string up his carcass as an example of degenerate art, but not before looting his work.An expressionist painter, a perfectionist,constantly dissatisfied with his talent, Chaim Soutine projected his own violent emotions in his work using vivid colors and distorted images. His artistic style mixed a Jewish heritage with Fauvism and Cubism. Soutine was prone to violent rages, frenzied abuse and bouts of depression including at least one documented attempt at suicide. . Despite his rages, bizarrities and eccentricities, he managed to sell many of his works to a well-known American collector by the name of Dr. Alfred Barnes who helped Soutine’s work find an appreciative audience in the United States.

Soutine, Boy in Blue, 1924

”While artistic movements, some of them originating in Paris, made waves throughout Europe – Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism – Soutine remained relatively unimpressed by these ramifications of modernism and instead cultivated a distinctive, highly intense painting of his own, informed with an unprecedented degree of profound and palpable emotion.His pictures are freighted with the tension of collapsing perspective and hyperbolically distorted figuration, reinforced by a powerful, gestural brushstroke.  The revolutionary potential inherent in this painting exerted an influence well into the 20th-century and was a seminal force in the work of artists like Francis Bacon or Willem de Kooning. ”Paradoxically, Soutine is as much a visionary as he is a traditionalist: he was quite indifferent to one of the greatest achievements of modernism, the freedom of subject matter; he maintained an unwavering, lifelong devotion to the triad of still life, landscape and portrait. There is, in fact, not a single subject in Soutine’s art for which one could not find a 17th-century model. It almost seems as if art historically sanctioned genres afforded him the security that he needed in order to venture into uncharted territory as a painter. ” ( Kunstmuseum,Basel ) 

Reality and fantasy blend as visions of places and people from Soutine’s past preoccupy him.  Tales are told and recounted.Much like Elie Wiesel’s ”Beggar in Jerusalem”  where some of the novel’s passages achieve a supernatural, ethereal level,while other descriptions reamin grounded in traditional form. Like Soutine’s work,Beggar in Jerusalem” swings from fantasy to reality and its non-linear timelines are somewhat difficult to comprehend. The same zeitgeist of anxiety, and suffering looking for redemption.

As narrative, Wiesel and Soutine are questioners of memory, whose works are lyrical in nature and disjointed in structure. Both artists tell stories of beggars, madmen and outcasts who gather at dusk in the backyards of our minds.Soutine seems to have felt a bond with portraits of despised workers, victims of a rejection he himself had experienced, evoking the boundless mass of the oppressed; beggars at the Golden Gate, below the Temple Mount. Both writer and painter wander; through enchanted and haunted streets and alleys in search of a lost friend-himself. Each in his own way appropriates a part of the storytelling technique of the Hasidic Eastern European tradition.

According to the Soutine myth—which may have been perpetuated by the artist himself—at 13 he attempted to paint a local rabbi and wound up in the hospital after being beaten by the rabbi’s sons. His assailants, upon threat of being reported to the police, paid Soutine’s parents 25 rubles, which the young painter used to run away to Vilna, where he lived for three years as an art student and projectionist before finding a patron and moving to Paris.