#soutine

'"those pictures of meat. I must say that he paints meat well, especially when he's hungry. Have you ever noticed his terrible jaws? Well, he buys a piece of raw meat and fasts in front of it for two days before he starts to paint it. Look at that red: hasn't he put all his cannibal appetite into it?"'

'And while he fasts the meat rots'

'And then in probably the most persuasive words of his study, George concluded that Soutine painted without any "studies of style or plans for perfection …. Each of his works looks like a haemorrhage," the critic said. "Before portraying his soul, the painter spits out all his blood, and each rivulet of blood gives birth to a vision that is new, singularly intense, tragic and painful."'

'He seems never to have painted anything as something removed from himself, at a distance. Everything he paints becomes part of himself. Another way of putting it is to say that he was never able to see a thing as an inanimate object removed from the world of living things or human feelings. Rather he endows everything with life, in the most literal sense. Even a dead bird becomes a living bird dying - or, dead only by the attention of a living observer. Either way it seems to be enacting or suffering its death.'

'And indeed there is a terrible poignancy in Soutine's closeness to the things he paints, his identification with them. He seems to cling to them, to bury himself in them. Everything that he paints is like a close-up, not only because he eliminates the space that separates him from the object but because of the extreme plasticity of the image that he makes of it.'

'Unlike Rembrandt, who stood away from his subject, Soutine puts his face into it, seemingly standing close enough to touch it with his brush, as though the ox's own blood might be transferred to the canvas.'

'When necessary, he leaned into the canvas and twisted the paint with his hand. The research team discovered his fingerprints on some canvases.'

'He knew nothing of that critical feed-back which is the basis of the most stable forms of art. This is not to say that he was not critical of his work, once he had done it. The reverse is true. But while painting, he was controlled by sensation. Sensation was what he painted about and what he was painting with. It was the fusion of the two that agitated him. Stable art, classic art, by contrast, involves a controlled, deliberate splitting of the painter's relationship with the subject. It insists that his attention to it should oscillate between feeling it as part of himself, part of his continuous experience of the world, and as something outside himself, a discrete object with a life of its own in which he has no part. Equally, his relation to the picture oscillates between distance and closeness, between knowing it as an object and as a deed, or as an intention and as sensation, or as past and future and as also present. This is what Matisse was talking about when he said simply that the tomato he painted was not the same tomato as the one he ate. Against this remark we might oppose the account of Soutine deliberately fasting in front of the steak that he was painting. For him the picture became the very steak that he hungered for. Painting the steak, he also gobbled it.'

'In contrast with the earlier pictures, this carcass is not modelled in depth. Here Soutine is exploring the most direct relationship between the paint and the subject, working as though the paint itself had become meat in his mind, as though the yellow paint was fat, rather than the means to describe fat, and the red was lean.'

'Look at the meat in this picture: he spent two weeks painting it, and after that it was completely unfit to eat. Did even Rembrandt do that? No, I want to keep this one for myself.'

'He became obsessed with Rembrandt and was determined to try to match one of the Dutch artist's haunting canvases, "Le Boeuf écorché" (The flayed beef), in the Louvre. A friend, Hughes Simon, recalled sitting with Soutine on a bench in Montparnasse and hearing him praise the painting for more than an hour. "It was impossible to raise the slightest objection on this subject," Simon said, "because it would send him into an overexcitement that resembled an outburst of anger." The sculptor Chana Orloff said years later, "I can still see him gazing at the canvases of Rembrandt with respectful awe. He would contemplate them for a long time, go into a trance, then suddenly stamp his foot and explain, 'This is so beautiful it drives me mad."'

'Ah, the giant is Rembrandt. He's a god, he's god. I said to him: "No, there is no one god; there are all the gods of Olympus." He disagrees. For him Rembrandt is the idol, excelling all painters. Velázquez is nothing beside him. The Betrothed Jewish Maiden is probably the most beautiful canvas in existence, with its penetrating study of the clothing, and the hands, which are so beautiful!'