|
|
|
|
|
The Death of Nature
John Haberin New York City
Chaim Soutine: Flesh
Wayne Thiebaud: Drawings
Chaim Soutine painted in Paris, where still life is nature morte, or dead nature. In his hands, though, it cannot lie still and all but refuses to die. As a postscript, Wayne Thiebaud prefers candy stores to the butcher shops of Rembrandt and Soutine. His drawings, at the Morgan Library, show his roots in commercial illustration and art history, but also the lush surfaces of everyday life.
Soutine was obsessed with dying. Before he can paint a side of beef after Rembrandt's The Slaughtered Ox, he must hang a real one in his studio until it attracts flies. Before he can accept the way of all flesh, he must splash it again and again with blood. Before he can let go of a familiar subject, he must return to it several times, knowing full well that what he painted the first time is long past the point that it could serve a butcher. 
He cannot let go of a single painting until he has wrested out of it every strain of muscle or sign of life. The Jewish Museum exhibits just thirty still lifes as "Flesh," all in that awful moment between life and death.
Fish, flesh, or fowl
The museum keeps things simple, to capture that moment. "Flesh" has a room for flesh, after rooms for fowl and, before that, "a modern still life." A final room broadens the subject to "the life of beasts"—including a donkey, a sheep behind a fence, and a fish. Looking back, one can hear again the perplexity of torment and gustatory pleasure: "fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long / whatever is begotten, born, and dies." The echo of William Butler Yeats sailing to Byzantium may be just a coincidence, but it fits.
The divisions go by subject, to allow a close study of its handling. With few exceptions, they also provide a chronology. The first room has the newcomer from western Russia—working at a modest easel scale, spending hours and hours at the Louvre, and looking for models in Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne as well. The next two take him into the 1920s, with his most salient work, and the last from 1927. He paints a duck pond at Champigny, a suburb of Paris, the very month before his death in 1943. And his growth over time is modest but real.
Even apart from the scale of his early paintings, they are looking back. Outlines are firm, and the background does not threaten to take over. Soutine learns discrete brushstrokes from van Gogh and the cascade into the picture plane from Paul Cézanne. He sets his signature at an angle, as if it, too, were tumbling forward. Still, he learns slowly, and even then, at the height of Cubism, he cannot get past Post-Impressionism or something far older. van Gogh had his brother, Theo, to insist that he get over the thick darkness of late Rembrandt and Dutch painting, but Soutine has only himself.
He does get over it, though, and the show's greatest lesson is his color. Nothing prepares one for it, least of all reproductions, which can only get it wrong. Cherries even at their brightest give way to the collision of yellow and green in a dead fowl or of red, yellow, and orange in a side of beef. A yellow or blue background can be more intense still. It can isolate a creature, merge with it, compete with it, or provide a stage curtain for its drama. Light or dark eyes in a dead animal may suggest a ghostly future or a clinging to life.
The new independence of paint is a second subject to itself. It becomes harder and harder to figure out just what is going on. What has Soutine painted in the wild diagonals above a turkey or the sea of blue surrounding a rabbit, and where is the ground? How many limbs does another turkey have, and are they flailing or merely splayed? A calf's head to the left of a side of beef might be a butcher's work or an onlooker. A long, thin stroke of light blue beside a carcass might come from the handle or the brush.
Things darken again in the last room, but as an accumulation of color rather than mud. Now things may take place outdoors and at night. Game is no longer all on its way to the chef's table, but the life of beasts may still not last the night. A bull from around 1940 joins an uncertain number of others in a dance macabre out of a medieval allegory or Milton Resnick in the 1980s. Reflections in the duck pond might be shimmering or violent. The sheep strains against its fence, and the donkey might be grazing or on its last legs.
The game is on
The show feels larger than it is because of its brutal persistence. One experiences it as a death blow. Wall labels often note the selection of a single work among others, but one could well feel by the end that one has seen them all. It may seem larger, too, for those who can remember a Soutine retrospective at the same museum twenty years ago. He is a popular artist, with his command of realism, expression, and art history just when Modernism was turning them all upside-down. Must, though, the public refuse to let go?
The show's subject is its own excuse. This is the Soutine one remembers, more than his landscapes from the south of France and his equally stylized portraits—the artist whose raw flesh earned him a call from the police (who suggested he try formaldehyde only to make him hungrier for blood). The retrospective also staked a claim, to his anticipation of Willem de Kooning and Abstract Expressionism. It was revisionist history worth hearing, but also worth taking apart (and my earlier review stuck largely to just that). This time out, he belongs entirely to Europe at war and between the wars—from his arrival in Paris in 1913, at age twenty, to his death in the countryside, where he hid from the Nazis. Where the retrospective sought his relevance, this show wants to restore him to himself.
That claim sounds loaded, too, but it has two further aspects: the show looks for contexts in still life and the artist's life. One can see them both in a brief introduction. Facing the entrance, Still Life with Rayfish from around 1924 adapts Jean-Siméon Chardin in the 1700s. To the side, a thirty-first canvas shows the artist's street amid the studios of Montparnasse, from around 1916. The curators, Stephen Brown with Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, get more personal still.
The first context, they argue, points to Soutine's roots in the past, starting with his studies at the academy in Vilnius, and the first main room hammers it home. So do his further showpieces, freely copying Rembrandt and Gustave Courbet. He gives the side of beef an ornate frame, asserting its place in the museum. The second context points to him as an immigrant and a Jew. His neighbors in Paris included such Jewish artists as Jacques Lipchitz and Amedeo Modigliani, he may have known that Rembrandt favored the Jewish community in Amsterdam, and his own history runs from a family's eleven children in a Jewish village to Vichy France. Could his art be an allegory of the twentieth century or himself?
The museum connects his handling of food to his knowledge of Jewish law. It also connects the violence implicit in his still life to pogroms and the Nazi occupation. He lost a significant other to the camps, although he found another soon enough, and he died of chronic illness and complications from a stomach ulcer rather than genocide. Biography is back in fashion after formalism, and his offers tempting clues. Still, it supplies little guide to his intentions or to the ambiguity of mastery, torment, and pleasure. It also sits uneasily beside the first context—of art as an escape from events.
Still, the ambiguity is the stuff of his art, and art of the museums is the stuff of his unease with Modernism. He remakes his models, drastically, with his colors and denial of perspective. The rayfish looms over a table setting like the robe in a religious ceremony, and a utensil sticks up at a disturbing angle to its side for a blessing or a curse. He remakes them, too, by the visceral thrill that adds to his realism. Painting for Soutine might be conservative at heart, even at its most daring, but it is always a matter of life and death. The game is bloody, but the game is on.
Sugar and satiety
In 1986, well after the height of Abstract Expressionist New York, he sketched a double portrait of Clement Greenberg. He had come a long way years before to witness at first hand a new art and Greenberg's lectures. The distinguished critic did not repay his mark of respect, and no wonder. The exponent of high seriousness shared the sheet with candied apples. His jowls have their parallel in the excess of sugar and satiety. They also reflect Thiebaud's simultaneous devotion to conservatism and the immediacy of the present.
The Bay Area artist had little patience for snobbery, no more in food than in art. He illustrated Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lawyer and epicure, but one knows him better for candy counters and ice cream cones. Art for him is just icing on the cake. Even with a pastel nude in 1982, with echoes of Pierre Bonnard and Edgar Degas, he brings his usual slow burn of red and yellow against purple shadows, just as with his apples. And even in early cartoons, he is less funny than fun. He still has much of the cartoonist left in him when he fills several sheets with quick studies.
Not that his excess on paper has been neglected. A 2001 Thiebaud retrospective at the Whitney had plenty (as I describe at the link), and he exhibits at least once a year with his dealer, the late Allan Stone. Still, an arrangement by chronology clarifies his flexibility and consistency. In graphite, he can make just a quick outline and casual crosshatching look deceptively detailed. He can mime the denser caricature of Honoré Daumier or the silence and stability of Giorgio Morandi, but always just a scent away. He sees little conflict between pleasant-day pleasures and a storied past.
He may count as Pop Art, something else that Greenberg would not have approved, but with a difference. He sees consumer goods not through mass media, but in shop windows and food markets. He also lacks the overriding energy of in James Rosenquist, the fears of death in Andy Warhol, or the threat implicit in both. Still, the optimism and experiment of New York helped set him free. His subject may belong to Pop Art, but also to the urban pageant of Walt Kuhn and the early American modern. Later, when he shows a newspaper headlined by Ronald Reagan's budget cuts, he must object to austerity on more than political grounds.
Back in San Francisco in the 1970s, he draws the clashing and descending avenues of a Diagonal City, but he delights in their vertigo. His still life is devoid of human presence, but his landscapes are never devoid of the human imprint. A river scene includes a barge, a crossing bridge, and a highway along its bank. He still has his detachment—only starting with the thickness and muteness of oils. He walks the streets, but then returns to the studio to rearrange what he has seen. A display of fish becomes a many-pointed star.
Born in 1920, Thiebaud often seems stuck in the year of his birth. Pencil drawings of girls and a cute dog are especially slick. Yet he can always place a motif on the tip the top of one's tongue. "Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" Unlike T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, he had no reason to shy away, but then why should he? He not believe in crises.
Chaim Soutine ran at the Jewish Museum through September 16, 2018, Wayne Thiebaud drawings at The Morgan Library through September 23. Related reviews look at the Soutine retrospective in 1998 and a Thiebaud retrospective in 2001.