Chaim Soutine, Flayed Rabbit, 1924 (Barnes Collection).
Jay Bernstein writes:
If these works are bearers of conviction, then what is left of nature to be affirmed is only its ruination as what cannot be -- artistically or aesthetically -- forged or faked or sentimentalized. But the role and stand-in for base nature in painting is paint matter; hence painting that fully acknowledges paint matter acknowledges painting (and so culture) as an inflection of nature, fully of it and only meaningful thereby. Soutine takes painting to the limit of intelligibility, to the very place at which meaningfulness must collapse if culture (and so meaning) is the great and autonomous and wholly human enterprise we believe it to be and ruins it; all the pathos of the human emerges from the wholly inhuman: gelatinous stuff configured.
