Fingerprints on Ocean Waves: Soutine and the Furious Dance of the Still Life by Dov Zeller

Art: Streets in Cagne by Chaim Soutine

FINGERPRINTS ON OCEAN WAVES: SOUTINE ADN THE FURIOUS DANCE OF THE STILL LIFE

Why I Am Not a Painter

 

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

 

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

“You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”

All that’s left is just

letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

 

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

—Frank O’Hara

 

“And so the human being discovers, at last, that its existence has always been subtended by its non-existence, that it dies the moment it lives…” —Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy

 

“I want to show Paris in the carcass of an ox.” —Soutine

Fingerprints

Here is a man who knew that wherever there was an “us” there would be a “them” and whose work allowed for neither.

Here is a man who grew up in poverty, in a family of observant Jews, in a shtetl in Russia at a time when making an image of a rabbi got him two black eyes and a bloody nose.

How many times Soutine got beat up by his brothers, his classmates, the butcher’s son, and who else, it isn’t clear. But that he felt alien and outside of any warm communal embrace, that is clear. The shtetl he came from was not a place that could accommodate or appreciate his artistic needs or gifts or temperament.

Some say Soutine was brutalized in his shtetl community because of the Torah’s prohibition on creating images. Maybe there’s some truth to that. But not because the history of Jews and art is a straight shot, or that Judaism always equated images with heresy. As is so often the case, Jewish cultures throughout history shifted and changed depending on the moment, the location, and the cultures with which they came into contact. Jews are, after all, a diasporic people. Jews integrated, some might say assimilated, in countries that were Roman, Greek, Christian, Muslim…Jews drifted and waded–influenced and were influenced by. And Jews in diaspora were often marked and attacked, which likely influenced the experience of owning a separate identity. Even so, influence flows in all directions when cultures come into contact with each other. The borders are porous. Everything is porous. And yet, though there were shared ideas and although Jewish artists were influenced by “dominant” paradigms of the national and cultural worlds in which they built a life, here was a separateness, too—Jewish artists often created what they created in a Jewish language or sensibility.

Jewish art exists throughout time. Some of it is architectural, some craft work having to do with rituals—menorahs, chanukkias, illuminated Haggadot, aron kodeshim, stained glass windows, tombs. In the ghetto where Soutine lived, in that time and place, in the early part of the twentieth century, there was crushing poverty and ever-present fear, bleak superstitions tangled up in religious piety. There was very little room for anything like art for art’s sake, for life’s sake, for the sake of a yearning soul, for any sake.

And in this time and place it was not acceptable to make images of people. Certainly not of rabbis.

What drove Soutine to do it anyway? What kind of madness is this drive to “capture” life in images, to pursue that which would alienate him from his family and his community, any comforts of home? Here is a stubbornness for the ages. Insistence on the near impossible and eminently painful.

I can’t help but think of queerness. And in some families, some communities, being an artist is a kind of queerness. It’s an identity that puts you at odds and outside the bounds of what is acceptable or allowable. And one can’t simply untangle themselves from the core of their identity (though some do try). Before he set out for Paris, Soutine already knew what it was to be “other.” At what point, I sometimes wonder, did he wake up and say, I don’t care what happens to me. I need only to represent what I see. What I see beyond what I see. I need only to take a still life and make a shocking, unnerving symphony of it…

Sometimes I wonder how it was he knew that he could be nothing, nothing at all, if not an artist.

How do we find these essences of ourselves in cultures that do not speak to us of ourselves?

Every day in the shtetl was an existential struggle, and yet, Soutine needed to do this superfluous, extraneous thing. This essential, vital thing. And how did he know? Did god press a warm hand upon his heart when Soutine sketched, pencil on paper, the dimensions of a coat while helping his father at the tailor’s shop? But no, his father wasn’t a tailor. He was a mender. (A tailor is wealthier and has more social standing.) Still, maybe Soutine did some sketching for his father?

Did a bolt of lightning strike? An apple fall off a tree and hit him in the head?

Did he dream feverish dreams and wake up drenched in sweat and monomaniacally focused?

It’s not as if he grew up in the city or somewhere he might have come in contact with roving packs of hungry, threadbare artists or with the act of making art, though he likely grew up understanding the nature and importance of craft and study. I don’t imagine spare paper and ink were lying around the house. Paints. Pigments. And his shtetl school would hardly have been a place that nurtured a young artist.

There must have been artists in Smilavichy, or in closely surrounding towns. Or evidence of the fact of the artist. Somewhere was a work of art attached to a name, an artist’s identity. Something Soutine could extrapolate from. Maybe a street artist peddled their wares, sunsets and landscapes and portraits done on the spot. Or young Chaim turned the pages of an ornately illuminated Haggadah and marveled at the art within. (Or, more likely, thought, “That’s not the way it must be done!”)

What brought him to the place of leaving home at any cost, and going alone with nothing in hand but a street address in a strange city where he spoke nothing of the language but “Passage de Dantzig”? And how is it he came not only to paint, but to make of a painting a sculpture. A storm. Drawing out the thick colors and leaving his fingerprints on each individual wave like a vanishing road map to the unknown world of his soul.

Flight through Interiors

Soutine. A mystery in his own time and a mystery in ours. An artist born in a threadbare shtetl to an already large and impoverished family. He is, by some, claimed as a Russian artist, and by others as a Lithuanian one and it is unclear to me how and whether it matters—were shtetl Jews (ghettoized and unassimilated) really part of a larger national identity? (In what ways were their identities and lives influenced by the shifting of national borders?) Soutine was a shtetl Jew until, around the age of sixteen, he made it to Vilna to study art, and then, at 19, to Paris. But his work is, in its way, anti-social, anti-communal, a-historical or even anti-historical. In his work there beats an anxious Jewish heart. But was he a Jewish painter? Some say yes, some say no. I would say not in the sense of, for example, Chagall. But who is a Jewish painter in the sense of Chagall? And was Chagall a Jewish painter or a Jewish folklorist? (The two are not the same.)

There is a barbed simplicity in Chagall’s work that draws the gaze in and tears it apart. There is a complexity in Chagall’s work that hides in layers within and beneath the romantic simplicity and teases us with an ambivalent and overwrought nostalgia. He was not a simple artist any more than Soutine is, but he was willing to put on a show of simplicity and Soutine was unwilling to put on a show of any kind, except for the show of madness which defined his artistic persona. I don’t think, though, this was a putting on. (Is the madness of a possessed artist, the blessed, incurable, crazy-making sanity, the clear-eyed seeing past and through a current moment and the drinking of the deeper waters of being, a persona? Or a form of personhood?)

Who was Soutine when he was not in the act of creating (and therefore destroying)? It’s hard to say. He seemed to live in a sequence of ever more inscrutable interiors. Everyone who gave an account of him gave a very different account. And the truth is, very little is written about him. Unlike Chagall and Picasso, and even his beloved Modigliani (Modi), he seems to be seen less as an artist with a specific artistic and personal identity and history, and more as a forefather of modern abstract artists—an influencer of artists. Artists in whose abstraction lies a music of fractured self, a music that sings of longing for some spiritual wholeness, all while reveling in the beauty of the broken.

It is curious that in a tradition (visual art) that in so many ways grows out of a history of nation-building—Christianity, Islam—this idea of capturing “holiness” and celebrating the beauty of the holy God-created world, of beautifying and sanctifying architectural structures—it is in subversion of traditional modes that the artist comes closes to accessing a deeper spiritual connection. So much of art was, for so long, about control—controlling people (through organized religion and the unifying “power” of the “divine” employed in the interest of nation-building), defining social strati, celebrating wealth and power. Yet what is often celebrated in art whose value lasts beyond its historical moment is that which transgresses social norms and previously formed structures. Art can never fully be about control because nothing we do well or passionately can evade playfulness and spontaneity—the inherent transgressiveness of being. And Soutine, in his approach to art, was almost furiously transcendent and completely outside of the bounds of identity regulation, even the extra leeway given to the artist. Like Kafka, he painted in a “minor” idiom. I’m thinking of Deleuze and Guattari here). He was an outsider who engaged with a dominant artistic language and created through this engagement something brilliantly prescient and meaningfully hard to digest. So many artists, despite their striving, get swallowed up into a machinery of cultural production and consumption, but Soutine seems to escape this fate. There’s a wisdom in this Houdini magic that comes from the need to speak of his outsiderness through an insider’s language. In this way he changed the language of art. I can’t help but think of the sword of Godric Gryffindor. “It only takes in that which makes it stronger.” Soutine let people say and do as they would and seemed to absorb only that what fed his focused artistic fervor—even if it meant social, emotional, existential and physical pain.

Wonder

Van Gogh was another madman, though many say his madness came from ingesting lead-based paint.

Was Soutine really a madman? Probably not.

He was, for a while, indigent and grim and unable, it seems, to communicate in a way that didn’t frighten or unnerve a lot of people. He gave up any kind of normalcy for the sake of doing his work—or maybe normalcy was never an option for him.

People often compare Soutine to Van Gogh and name Van Gogh as a major influence. I’ve been trying to understand why Soutine “disowned” Van Gogh and his influence, and expressed deep dislike for Van Gogh. Artist and art critic Mario Naves says a lot about Soutine that I don’t agree with, but his theory about where Soutine and Van Gogh are at odds is compelling:

Like Van Gogh, an artist whom Soutine supposedly hated and without whom his art is unimaginable, Soutine found in landscape a subject pliable enough to withstand his vision. He saw in nature underlying rhythms that echoed the turbulence of his temperament. …Van Gogh, one feels, found solace in his cypress trees and starry nights. Soutine was not so fortunate. His paintings evince an artist arduously longing for a release that was never forthcoming. Frustration gives these tumultuous paintings their power; it also explains their marginality.

 I think the marginality of Soutine’s work is more complex and important than Naves paints it. Naves seems to think Soutine was too self-absorbed or obsessed to be a terribly important painter—to see outside of himself. I think Soutine is a terribly important painter and that he sees very deeply into the world. But I like Naves’s idea of setting the turbulence and frustration in Soutine’s work against something a bit more to do with deep connection and pleasure in Van Gogh’s. Not that Van Gogh wasn’t also a turbulent soul, but in his art there is a certain satisfaction and joy that is very different from Soutine. In both there is something —a certain anti-establishment feeling. The fact of struggle and outsiderness. Rage against the deadening weight of conformity. Attention to the working classes— which at the time wasn’t common in portraiture. And deep attentiveness to the music of the spheres.

But Soutine’s work is much more tumultuous indeed, obsessed with the violence in all creation. Maybe that’s why, in hearing a comparison between his work and Van Gogh’s, Soutine’s hackles rose. Van Gogh’s work wasn’t ferociously impatient. Soutine had no patience for any kind of patience.

Who was Soutine willing to admit did influence his work? One painter he named, fascinatingly, was a contemporary to him, Georges Rouault. Rouault had also grown up in poverty or something closer to poverty than wealth, and apprenticed as a glass painter, which influenced his style. He was concerned with spirituality and at some point became a religious Christian. Rouault was interested not in representation of a physical reality, but more of a spiritual one. Or, for him painting was an act of spiritual seeking. As artist Makoto Fujimora says in an interview for Image:

Rouault is inviting you not only to the surface of the painting, but to the sacramental vision that understands the painting as mediating a greater reality…For Rouault making art was prayer, too. It was a daily discipline and ritual that drew him closer to God…He was influenced by the Expressionists, but he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t want to express himself; he wanted to be sanctified in the process. He’s about being faithful to internal realities, but also the brokenness of the world. He was very committed to the margins of society. By identifying with the poor, with prostitutes and marginalized people, he thought he would meet Jesus—which is very much a Catholic perspective, and biblical, as exhibited in the writings of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

But Isaiah and Jeremiah are part of the Jewish tradition as well. And the idea of brokenness, of finding wholeness in brokenness, and working toward wholeness from brokenness…this is also deeply Jewish. In Judaism, the idea of repairing a broken world has a name: tikkun olam. There is a medieval fable about tikkun olam. When God sets out to create a perfect world, God puts divine light into vessels. But the vessels are fragile and they break. “…All the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars….That is why we were created — to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden…And when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the broken vessels will be restored, and tikkun olam, the repair of the world.” (Howard Schwartz). There is also commentary I’ve heard that each shard of the broken vessels reflects the world in all of its wholeness. A tiny broken fragment holds an entire universe in its palm, and protects it.

Rouault was coming from a place of spiritual turmoil and religious striving. He cared not about creating something to be admired or to enhance worship in the way of the controlling religious narrative, but rather about the anti-flattening of an image. He created things that were irreducible, whose meaning came from profusion and confusion, from a lifelike richness, and not a more simple representation or propaganda.

Just so, Soutine was concerned not with beauty or identity or the specifics of representation so much as with a carefully structured ritual of furiously destructive and spiritually motivated improvisation. The exquisite productiveness of existential unease. A kind of wailing love song to this beautiful and horrifying world. It’s as if he were always seeing the destruction of the Temple (the horrors recited on tisha b’av, a Jewish holy day on which Eicha or Lamentations is chanted in a mournful trope and we find fault with ourselves for all the ways we have so humanly engendered misery, violence, and failure) and the beauty of its creation all at once, holding them both at the same time. The shards, and the whole.

Soutine invoked the wonder of creation and the heart-break of destruction in a rapid-fire cycle until their images blurred into one.

Subject and Object

What would it be like to write the way Soutine paints? To stare at a landscape. A violin. An animal whose spirit has left this world. To go about lovingly, tensely, fastidiously setting a scene, like the stage for a beloved play, to recreate a painting by Rembrandt or Chardin, and yet to see only something beyond it. Emotional possibility or chaos? Vibrancy or decay? What is it that Soutine finds when he looks into his carefully re-constructed sets? Is each image a drama unfolding? Is there symbolism in it, or history reflected, echoed, and reiterated with love and contentiousness? Or just a vast sweep of a music only he can hear? Why did he go to the Louvre over and over again and stand in front of Rembrandt’s carcass of an ox for hours on end, and then carefully recreate a completely different painting?

Perhaps Soutine found comfort in continuity with the history of the painted image. Or perhaps painting was for him an existential nausea. A reckoning. And as he fell deeper and deeper into it, he needed something solid—something old to hold onto, to keep from a kind of madness, from getting utterly lost in the performance of his work. Maybe he held onto these exteriors as he fell into a fright of interiors (so he could, essentially, eventually fish himself out).

Or maybe it has more to do with what Maggie Nelson calls a “leaning into.” A response to other people’s words or creations that comes not because of some conventional notion of generational influence so much as from a sense of continuity and rebellion—taking from and redefining:

Now, of course, if you steal like this, you have to do something to or with everything you’ve taken in—it has to come out the other end, it has to get chewed up by your own enzymes. You can’t just pile other people’s thoughts up, or even make a rough quilt or latter-day modernist collage of them and just cross your fingers that it’s good enough. It won’t be good enough. It won’t be good enough without your having done the work of digestion, of transformation. You need to engage, and then perform, textually, the alchemy of your body thinking through another’s body. The stakes have to be high. It has to matter…You’ve got to hear the music of someone else and marry it to your own. I sometimes call this “sound-stitching.” (Nelson)

Or perhaps he is engaging in a Talmudic conversation, similar to Nelson’s sound-stitching. An act of exegesis, a new unfolding of a sacred, historical text. (Calling upon his past in a community of observant Jews who tended to look to old texts to have new conversations. He does lean into his sages as the rabbis lean into theirs.)

Aren’t we all simply remaking what others before us have made? Taking old stories and shaping them in our own dialects? What else can we do? Even when we want to pull away from the bulldozer of history, its shapes the shape of our thoughts and words, and set the grooves for our futures. Or, as Maria Popova puts it, “We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after.”

I see this so often with illness. How the shape of illness succumbs to the shapes of its past. We take the spiritual and existential and religious worries of old, from a time before microbiology and before our more nuanced understanding of public health and contagiousness or contamination, and we still apply these old superstitions today. Because they aren’t just superstitions. They are the grooves that shape the flow of water. It is not so easy to shift the flow of a river—the foundations of our belief systems. In fact, this pressure of flowing water and the grooves it creates keep trying to suck us back in time. Back to the source, wherever that is. And thus, sick people are still seen as people who have been abandoned by god, or punished by god, or who have led, as the ancient Greeks would have put it, an “unbalanced life.” We still shrink away from people with chronic, non-contagious illnesses as if their illness (my illness) will bring the wrath of god down on those who come in contact.

Can’t we make something new? Really let go of the shape of history’s organizations of thought and culture and identity?

Probably not. The umbilical cord is made of time itself. (I tend to think time cannot be sliced or knotted, or perhaps we don’t have the right instruments.)

But every once in a while there is an artist who stands out. Who seems to lift just a few feet above this ribbon of time even as he engages with older texts. Whose voice still echoes and whose presence or absence in the moment of his work shakes us to our core. And I would argue Soutine is one of them. He pulled away from time, by, in a sense, pulling away from the present moment, or stepping through it and into an even more present moment. A mirror moment in which everything exists outside of time—or, so deep in time it becomes a singularity, like the universe at that moment it shrinks to the prick of a needle. Pressure builds. Compression taken to its physical limits. This is the moment just before everything explodes. That shock of awareness. Icy waters. Warmth and worry and ample confusion. A grasping for breath. This is the beginning. This is the end. This is the cycle of nowness. And this is all there is. Every moment is its own eternity, but it is not always easy to feel the texture of it.

I ask again, what would it look like to write the way Soutine paints? Would the subject, regardless of its specificity, become my sorrow? My hope? My dread? If I sculpted words the way he sculpted paint, drawing the paint toward him, away from the canvas, into the world, would the next wave of dimensionality wash up on the shore and take away our knowing? Is helping others unknow what they think they know, as Soutine’s work does, a profounder contribution to the life of the mind than offering what sometimes passes as knowledge? It’s as if he makes the engines of history visible, and we see the world as a real puppet show. We are history’s puppets. And we know this now, but we also know we are something more. We are temporarily, tentatively, but perhaps vividly alive. And never have we been so aware of what comes next. Obliteration. Zero gravity. Nothing.

The turbulence and frustration in Soutine’s paintings brings to mind what it is to be trapped in history and confined by its forms—of knowledge and identity. How often do we try to struggle out of the full-body glove of the oppressive historical moment that transforms to the oppressive personal moment? Full of longing to reach into a more freeing dimension, like an arm into a cracked (as in slightly open) car window, to unlock the door.

Soutine captures the gathering storm of awareness that we are, in a sense, existentially trapped. But perhaps momentary awarenesses of how mired we are to this historical moment are also moments of being beyond being. A moment of heightened living. Which is also, generally, a moment of death awareness. As the philosophical writer Eugene Thacker says, “And so the human being discovers, at last, that its existence has always been subtended by its non-existence, that it dies the moment it lives.”

As we gaze at a Soutine, a Soutine looks back at us—a distorted, watery reflection. Is it him, or is it us? He is offering a moment of heightened—and troubled—awareness. But what are we to do with it?

Does Soutine turn subject into object, or object into subject?

Are we voyeur or are we that which is being scrutinized?

Are we lost or are we found?

I wonder if he sees himself in everyone he paints.

Do his subjects become a blank page that he fills with his own existential suffering as some critics argue?

What is this wrestling between the I and the thou, between eye and thou, that unfolds here?

Does Matter Matter?

Soutine needed an exterior image to paint an interior world. That’s one possibility. If so, he’s not alone. Even his more abstract descendants, DeKooning, Pollock, Debuffet, for example, have the need for something to begin with, an object to abstract. Abstraction comes from the concrete, even if the concrete is abstractly concrete. Everyone needs, (we all need), somewhere to begin. O’hara’s Orange. Michael Goldberg’s Sardines. Without an idea, an object to dance around, to build a world around, or through, with and perhaps without, how would the color open up to canvas? How would the story begin?

For both Soutine and Bacon, the motif is the starting point, whether it be the Rembrandt Slaughtered Ox in the Louvre or a Cimabue crucifixion or the living model. It is the image which, in Bacon’s words, “unlocks all kinds of values of sensation at different levels.’ Another time he declared: The subject is the bait, but the bait withers away and the reality of the subject-matter is left and the bait-the subject matter—disappears. The reality is the residue of the subject-matter…This residue…perhaps has something tenuously to do with what one started with but very often had very little to do with it.” (From The Impact of Chaim Soutine)

What happens when we place the ineffable first? How is a piece that begins with an interior different than one that begins with an exterior.

Clarice Lispector says “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.” Perhaps, in art, subject matter, some image or flash of images, is that yes? Perhaps painting without that yes would be like building a set before knowing the nature of a play.

I can’t help but think of Chagall’s set designs which he created not to help bring a piece of drama to life as much as to stage his art as the drama itself. People said his set designs distracted the audience and detracted from the plays because they made no attempt to become intertwined with them, which is not to say they weren’t compelling. Just that they weren’t helping.

Soutine, too, struggles to meet his subject matter halfway. The drama doesn’t necessarily lie in the set, but somewhere unnamable. And yet, he celebrates his “materials” with an almost religious fervor, both the spiritual kind, as well as the more studious and exegetical. He worshiped, or seemed to worship, specific paintings, mostly still lifes and portraits. He had a deep reverence and a will to recreate the paintings he loved and stood in awe of (on his own terms). Or perhaps “leaned against” in the sense that Maggie Nelson describes.

Also, this relationality, this “leaning against” and its performance, is quite different from performing “influence,” or an “inherited tradition,” or some such. The leaning against I’m talking about doesn’t mandate any reverence for your elders per se, nor any particular kind of relation or transmission. The leaning against I’m talking about takes place on a horizontal plane of action, not a vertical one. It brings one into the land of wild associations, rather than that of grim congenital lineage. It is a place, as Gertrude Stein would have it, in which “the difference is spreading.”

There is real comedy in the fact that Soutine, a descendent of Van Gogh, expressed such disliked for him. He called Van Gogh, essentially, an old lady’s hand bag. He would deny Van Gogh as one of his forbears, but I think it’s hard to find evidence to back such a denial. They both took painting to a sculptural level. They both had a sense of the motion in color, the waves and currents, the buzzing and swirling of the particulate universe, a penchant for unsettling abstraction, though Soutine’s buzzings were a bit more “tumultuous”. Soutine’s universe is more internal and torrential even than Van Gogh’s. There’s a balance to a Van Gogh painting that is missing in Soutine. Or an imbalance in Soutine that is missing in Van Gogh. Often in a Soutine painting the world seems to open up, and everything starts falling toward the heart of it.

If Soutine is moving away from his subject toward an internal world, why does it matter so much to him what he is painting? Wouldn’t the dissolution and vibrancy be one and the same regardless of subject matter? (Just as Chagall’s set designs would be all and only Chagall, regardless of the play.) And yet, Soutine is very demanding and very exacting. He knows what he wants to paint. He stands in the Louvre endlessly staring at Rembrandt. He uses what little money he has to buy props so he can create his “set.”

Eventually, after escaping his crushing poverty, he traveled to other countries just to look at paintings. To study them. To memorize them so he could reimagine them.

When he was painting a portrait, he looked on at the portrait sitter for hours, days, he demanded they hold still, became almost raving in his demands. He let a bit of his madness show through. He forgot that his “subjects” were living beings who don’t flourish while sitting still for hours on end, uncomfortable, pained, hungry, bored…and then, when he finally managed to finish the image, they were distorted, barely recognizable, grotesque.

Some say this is evidence of his awareness or sense of subjective monstrosity (my words, an extrapolation) as a Jew in Europe. An internalization and then externalization of the monstrosity that non-Jewish Europeans see when they look at Jews. (This is a distillation of Donald Kuspit’s argument—he is an art critic and poet who I quote below). Others say it is wrong to insist that Soutine doesn’t captures essences. To many portrait-gazers, Soutine is an artist who does capture meaningful qualities of the sitter—the essence of his “subject”—even if he imbues them, as others suggest, with his own anxiety and existential misery.

Balancing Act

There was a period of about three years that Soutine spent isolated in the French countryside. First he was on the coast and distraught because he didn’t like painting the sea. He wanted to be somewhere with more trees. Then he moved to Ceret and he was content with the landscapes. Over and over again, he painted the same Ceret landscapes, conducting his orchestra of reds and yellows and greens. Raising hills only to topple them. Destroying the earth with its own violent beauty. He was unhappy there—from loneliness—and yet, he was inspired. A bit of an allegory for an artist’s life? The joy and the misery of isolation in the creative act.

His dear friend—perhaps his only friend—Modigliani, and Modi’s artist girlfriend Jeanne Hébuterne, visited Soutine once or twice. Then, while Soutine was still in Ceret, both Modi and Jeanne died. Modi died of illness and Jeanne killed herself two days later. Soutine was crushed when he heard news of their deaths. He was, at the time, working under the (meager) patronage of Léopold Zborowski, who was also Modi’s patron. Modi had pushed Zborowski to take Soutine on. Modi adored Soutine (when few others did) and believed in the power of Soutine’s work. So he convince Zborowski to take Soutine on and support him with a meager stipend (five francs a week).

Zborowski’s wife couldn’t stand Soutine and requested that he be kept as far away from her as possible. So, under Zborowski’s patronage, Soutine was exiled to the French countryside, and while he was there, his beloved Modi died. Soutine was not able to get to the funeral.

Soutine was frightfully isolated and unhappy in Ceret, but thrillingly productive. He made hundreds of paintings and destroyed many of them—something he often did. As if the madness that came over him when he was creating turned in on itself when the paintings were done. Or he wanted, like the symphony itself, for the music to exist only as it was being played. Or perhaps when he was finished with a work he saw something in it that didn’t speak of the fevered act of creation, but rather, of something more muted. More blandly representational.

Once he set hundreds of paintings on fire all at once. Some of them were rescued.

Soutine wasn’t known for his balanced demeanor or interpersonal graces, and yet, once he had enough money to live in some comfort, he seemed to blossom socially. Before he had any money, and before he went to Ceret, Soutine was very limited in what he could paint and often painted what he ate for dinner before eating it. He was desperate for material.

When I think of Soutine bringing home animal carcasses and painting them before eating them, or sometimes just painting them and letting them rot (he was not thanked by his neighbors, and once the police came and Soutine ranted at them as only a mad artist could, accused them of interfering with an artist’s work), I am overcome by the sensation of my own restlessness. Of course, I’m theorizing with a cartload of salt. I am so little like Soutine. I am not a stranger in a strange land, though it’s not that I have never felt that way. As a queer trans person, I know what it is to be “other.” But not in the ways he did. And I am, at this time, and so far in my life, thankfully well-fed. And yet, though I have managed through my life to find some semblance of community belonging, I have never felt easy around people, and in the last few years illness has made me an outsider again, even more, perhaps, than queerness. I do feel like a stranger here. The apartment I live in is my whole world, and everything outside of it feels strange or just painful. And in the apartment itself lives a landlord who has made it very clear that she doesn’t value my experience—that this place where I am essentially trapped is my home only to a degree.

As a homebound photographer, I desire so entirely to have subject matter to take photos of. I take pictures of the sunrise any time there’s a bit of color. Of the moon here and there, particularly around Jewish holidays that fall on the full moon (the Jewish calendar is lunar, and several holidays are set to coincide with the full moon). I photograph clouds when they’re lit up, pink or orange, or yellow by the sun. Huge icicles sometimes hang down the side of this house, textured with ridges, tapering into sharp points. I take pictures of them. I take photos of the few flowers that grow in the tiny garden in spring and summer and the wildflowers on the stamp-sized lawn. I take self-portraits. I ask my friends, before they leave, can I take some photos on your way out. Just a few? I dream of moving to the country. Somewhere where I can look out the window and see, I don’t know, in addition to squirrels and few birds that visit the feeder, perhaps rabbits, foxes, more extravagant birds, a babble of wildflowers (I needed a collective noun). Anything, really. How many photos have I taken of the same hanging planter of petunias? House sparrows and starlings bickering at the feeder? The pink and yellow vetch popping up to mock the clover (they’re siblings, after all.) My own guitar?

Maybe painting is closer to writing. There is more material at hand at any given moment because there is a depth of imagination and interpretation that is much vaster than the visible sequence of things. And, of course, nowadays, if someone wanted to paint an image based on an image, there is access to endless material online. But with photography, well, I’m not going to start taking photographs of photographs.

As a writer, I feel grateful that the world is such an intriguing and narratively rich—though at times demoralizing—place. Even from my bedroom, so much is still within my reach. But some days when I’m exhausted and not up to reading or writing, when I want almost desperately to be able to take a few photos, and when I am bereft of material, which I so often am, this tension builds within me and I think of Soutine. Who, for a time, painted whatever he could, whenever he could, depending on his circumstances. Who scrounged for material. Whose patience and impatience both seemed endless.

Bait

For Soutine, an image’s value clearly goes beyond external properties. He cares not for the image itself, but for what vibrancy comes through it. As Bacon says: “The subject is the bait, but the bait withers away and the reality of the subject-matter is left and the bait-the subject matter—disappears.” Clarice Lispector says something similar about writing: “Writing, then, is the way followed by someone who uses words like bait: a word fishing for what is not a word. When that non-word—the whatever’s between the lines—bites the bait, something’s been written…” (From The Stream of Life). Soutine uses the image, essentially, and yet, not exactly, as bait. The material he paints has some bait-like qualities, yet, there is a reverence for the thing itself that goes beyond “bait.”

But why, you might be asking, am I talking about fishing? It is true, Soutine wasn’t much for “outdoor sports.” unless by “outdoor sports” one means the sport of mad-scientist-ing a landscapes in a trance-like state of extreme spiritual and artistic fervor.

So what does this mean, this notion of bait? Is it close to Nelson’s idea of “leaning into”? Material that is brought in from the “outside” for the artist to playfully or improvisationally respond to? Or her connected idea of “sound-stitching.” “You’ve got to hear the music of someone else and marry it to your own.”

Is it more a reiteration of what O’Hara is saying in “Why I Am Not A Painter,” which is, I think, that both the artist and the painter use words or objects as a way to get to a place more meaningful and experientially real?

Is bait the point from which an artist begins their improvisation? Their exploration?

Maybe these ideas are all connected. There are many ways to relate to “material” (which can be an image, an idea, a quote, a theory, a being, an object…)

Lispector was known to be a Spinozan and I think it is fair to say that for her, this idea of “subject” as “bait” has something of a Spinozan flavor to it. It’s not that “material” transforms into a kind of magnet for meaning—is exploited to attract meaning. The word, for Lispector (or, in Soutine’s case, the images that he works from) are, in a sense, spiritual objects. Conduits. Something through which to listen to the warbling of the universe, to seek out a kind of spiritual non-being. Maybe they are conduits for truth—some might call it spiritual truth, some emotional, some maybe even universal. But by universal, here, perhaps I mean something Spinozan as well, and Jewish.

When Soutine has “material,” he listens for the universe in it, the way someone listens to a shell for the sound of the ocean. Or how, when Jews say the Shema, we listen for the god in it. god’s “quiet” voice not easily found. (As opposed to when god is apparently raging, “splitting the Cedars of Lebanon.”) It’s an act of parsing out the holy from the mundane.

Or perhaps one is listening for the gravitational waves of the universe. For the Spinozans, god’s voice is also the voice of universal time. A past that goes all the way back to the singularity (the moment before the big bang), and still murmurs in the present, ever so subtly, but also distinctly.

There is a kind of frenetic chasidic joyfulness in Soutine’s work. This is not a quiet joy, but a spiritually intensified joy, one that acknowledges destruction as part of creation.

How, when we grasp the vastness and violence of it all, do we make sense of the small place and moment where our senses and aliveness exist? This profound little existential blip we find ourselves surfing?

“I live between mountains and take my smallness, like a pill, on waking.” (Catherine Pierce)

Was Soutine, like Kafka, reaching past the historical moment and predicting the end of Europe’s relatively untroubled idea of itself as “civilized” (whatever that means.) Did Soutine see vividly the harm that can come from the very idea of “the culture of the civilized”? (Enacting systemic brutality while insisting that “goodness” is a bland, dusty tyranny of “eloquence” and “good manners”?)

Civilized, cultured, these words so often used to praise, as if they aren’t dangerous weapons.

Perhaps there is, in Soutine, a cry against the violence of high culture, which Hitler, in his way, tried to diminish into kitch. And what is more dangerous? Believing that culture isn’t violent or believing that kitch isn’t? I don’t know. But Soutine pulled away from both worlds and drew himself into a kind of bold, disheveled  spirituality. He allowed himself to be drawn through the veil of human social and cultural organizations into a place beyond. And in this way, like Kafka, he shows us all of the moldy clothing of “civility” we are wearing. Of bureaucracy. Helps us shed it. Step past it into something more minute and more vast.

How can we hold the expansiveness of the universe and still have any sense of our own being? How can we have any sense of the smallness of our own being, our own time, our immanent mortality, without tumbling into an incontrovertible horror?

For artists like Soutine and Lispector, the horror in existential nausea is vast and compelling, but it is also freeing. If one can survive it.

If one uses the object as bait, they can get beyond the fabric of human-constructed meaning and experience that more primal connection with nature, the universe, time. The ultimate sense of belonging. The disappearance of the troubled self. The being in non-being.

Or, as Donald Kuspit says:

One sees, in a Soutine picture, the same intimate thing, over and over again: an ordinary object—the human figure, but also, famously, a dead animal, its bowels sometimes exposed, or else a landscape or still life—precariously set in space. The object itself seems a precarious space—inwardly unstable, as its distorted appearance, latently grotesque, suggests. It holds its own, however unestablished it is in itself. We are claustrophobically close to it, and it threatens to impinge upon us, sometimes seems to erupt or thrust toward us, as though determined to impress its presence on us—to force us to engage its being with the depths of our being. Whatever it is, it wants to make itself felt.

Not Always A Whisper

Being in artist is sometimes closer to craft work and sometimes closer to dancing at an all-night rave. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve never been to an all-night rave. But I have an idea. Sometimes it’s about practice and precision, and sometimes about the most abstract improvisation. Sometimes it’s both of these things at the same time.

Soutine tells the story of seeing a slaughtered bird and experiencing the joy of release, the primal cry that is the height of living and the moment of death.

When he painted, he was consumed in the act of painting. The act of searching to “liberate…this cry.” Which, in essence, is the act of trying to disappear into the work. And from it.

This is not to say his work isn’t structured or practiced.

“The capturing of spontaneity: the radical way Soutine handles paint is captivating; yet one of the fascinations… is how schooled, how carefully constructed, his pictures actually are. (Some are even too tasteful.) In stark contrast to those painters who think it enough to splatter their feelings across the canvas, Soutine was a perfectionist who worked hard to create what looked like spontaneous eruptions of paint,” says Mark Stevens. But, I think Soutine’s perfectionism is unique, or at least distinct. It does not relate to the specificity of representation in the way Stevens posits. Soutine is not trying to represent an image in worldly accuracy—he is trying for an otherworldly accuracy. He strives to perform the act of representing the spiritual performance of representing an image. Or, to put it differently, he is a performer seeking the experience of transcendence or primal knowledge of being (and therefore, non-being), and he wants to create an image of this transcendence in the act of performing—to surpass the frame and enter a state of unfettered, almost demolishing being. This may be the closest he comes to non-being, which is a feeling of one-ness with his work, and what is beyond it. A sense of aliveness of the work.

When Soutine painted, he painted as if living in a moment of death or non-being. He forgot everything. He danced wildly, flung paint around (where he painted in Ceret, there were, years later, still splatters of paint all over. But surprisingly not a litter of paintbrushes, which he also frequently tossed aside with abandon). He painted the way a concert musician or a dancer might, when they are in the midst of a performance. How one forgets that they are performing and forgets, in essence, themselves. In the rush of performance, one accesses a different part of oneself. A mode of being that is, some might say, purer. Less self-conscious. But it’s a strange place in which to exist—in one of these active, performative moments. It’s not outside time or learning. All of the practice that has come before it shows in this moment, and yet, still, there is an unconsciousness to it as well, a vivid nowness.

Soutine carefully constructed the moment of painting, prepared elaborately, practiced and prepared as any musician or athlete would, but when he began to paint, he let all of his conscious thoughts go and became the Paganini of paint. He had a wild, performative presence. When he is in the act of making art, he is, in essence, in a state of “flow” as some would put it. Utter absorption.

Pollock, another artist deeply influenced by Soutine, says:

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess.

There is this envy humans sometimes have of other animals, for their “presence” or “immersion” in the moment. Basically, there is a human belief (which can only be called a myth) that other animals are always in a state of “flow.” Never self-conscious. Perhaps this is the state Lispector speaks longingly of when she wants to get past the sticky tapestry of language. And what Bacon refers to when he, too, speaks of fishing. And the state that Soutine and Pollock occupy when they work. Where the objective of their art is to get beyond the object. Beyond the moment. Beyond language.

Soutine, as he paints, is not actively placing his ideas into the painting, but trying to listen for something. Part of his performance is the act of listening. He is not, when he speaks of the butchered animal, mourning the fact of death. He is not trying to recreate his own experience of hurt or early self-awareness. But he is trying to connect with the feeling of awe and confusion, the connection he felt in that moment—with the strange, celebratory ache of existence that comes with the shock of death—with the butcher’s violent, yet life-affirming act. The violence of living. The horror of death. The strange and vivid beauty of a wound. It’s not that death heightens ones sense of aliveness exactly, but that one’s relationship to the moment of death brings an existential connectedness. A sense of recycled molecules throughout time. The cycle of growth and decay.

It is not just a whispering voice of god Soutine hears. It is also the grander, more destructive voice. The voice “that shatters cedars, the cedars of Lebanon.” Strange that god’s voice is both hard to hear and hard to miss. Because it’s everywhere at once, and how does one catch that one little line of an ever-present song meant just for them to hear? There is this great, terrifying, destructive voice to be feared, and then there is this smaller voice that we can only hear when we pray, and when our prayer is an effort to listen.

But how far can one go on listening for this voice before losing oneself to madness?

Lispector speaks of putting one’s whole self into the act of listening and how the attempt to hear what is beyond language, an unmediated connection with nature and time, brings you to madness, or close to it.

Going through that veil of “civilization” into the place where you hear god’s unmediated voice, is dangerous. There is, in fact, a talmudic tale of four sages who, in essence, go through such a “transformation.” One dies, one goes mad, one becomes an apostate, and only one remains “in tact.”

It is a kind of death, and it is a moment that is most rich with life. It is like the cry Soutine hears when the animal is being slaughtered. It is a moment of both extreme being and non-being. To let of oneself become part of the endless canvas, the vast universe, not diluted by human narratives of selfhood, by laws or rules or ideologies or identities. Maybe this is the place where one can create something spiritually meaningful. Or maybe, it is the act of creation that is meaningful because it brings one closer to this place.

“There is something electric and violent and fragile that touches me deeply in all of Soutine’s works,” said Louise Bourgeois. Yes, all of these things are true at once. Electric, violent, and fragile. Like life itself.

How easy it would have been for this universe not to exist. For the moment of singularity to have gone off a little more ferociously, leaving all matter to extend past any meeting point or interactivity. Or for the big bang to have gone off a bit more weakly, a bit less bangy, all the matter sucked back in.

How is it that our universe managed to explode forth so that the destruction and the creation came into a beautiful, horrible, fantastic dance?

And then, how did we happen to be here. The fact of each of our lives is almost as uncanny as the fact of the universe.

David Cohen says Soutine “was the victim of enormous prejudice even from critical supporters who mistook his expressive intensity for primitivism rooted in ignorance of painterly traditions. He was seen as a wild primitive who painted from inner necessity, oblivious to conventions, whereas his style was in fact rooted in sophisticated observation of old masters, who he increasingly revered.”

But what if both things are true at once. What if, to him, as to Lispector, primitivism simply means getting past mediated understandings to something else—the immediacy of being and non-being that lives beyond language. We are born, we are subject to violence, we die. Both Soutine and Lispector survived traumas that intensified their need to escape their own hungers, to engage in the performance that would take them through and beyond their anxieties into a universe that has a nurturing indifference to them.

What Kind of Artist?

Whether or not we like to think so, the past is always in us. It’s in our blood stream. In our bones. Our molecules. Atoms. Our genes. It shivers and blurs. Stardust is us and we are such strange amalgamations of matter. Matter that matters. Or matters that matter little. This moment. This one. This one. It’s here. It’s gone. It’s nothing. It’s all that we have.

We’ve found ways of trying to distance ourselves from nature, but everything is nature, really, and distancing ourselves from the hum of life, the cycle of birth and death, only hurts us.

Sometimes I long to crawl through the canvas that we’ve woven, “civilization” as we call it, which is often rather uncivilized. I feel like Clarice Lispector, trying to get past the “mediated” world of language and turn wild, become intimate with the grasses and the trees, know the smells of fear and longing, of danger and the earth’s quickening heartbeat just before the onset of spring. To be alive but not spend so much time thinking about it.

And then I argue with myself because when I go there, to that wilderness away from our often deadening cultures, I want to bring my camera with me.

How can we possibly live with the chaos of being and knowing that we are (and therefore, that we won’t be for very long)? How can we live in this strange place of knowing how to talk about eternity, but not knowing how to live in it. Of knowing we are animals but believing we can control our animal hearts.

Soutine found a way to contain the chaos of his knowing. He spoke to Rembrandt. He found paintings he could love and argue with. Or he leaned into them, tangled with ghosts surrounding them. He found multiple structures to outline his chaos and bring it into a canvas, a surface, a rage of needs, to capture, to release, to frenetically realize.

His name, Chaim, comes from the Hebrew word for life. His name means life. Even after he moved to Paris from the shtetl, he held onto his name, he held onto his life, but he also let it go. He let himself go, and lived a strange, intoxicated, monkish existence, where all that mattered was the performance of creating (and destroying) his art.

Some see Chagall’s paintings as more Jewish and more narrative. They speak of the lost mythologized world of the shtetl. But Soutine’s paintings also have a narrative bent. Landscapes dance a dangerous dance. Trees wave and hover and lean and groan. They shatter. They dramatize god’s grandeur and the danger of it all. There are so many trees haunting Soutine’s landscapes. Alley of Trees, Poplars, Cagnes Landscape with Tree, Tree in the Wind, Landscape with Reclining Figure (the one in which there is a reflection in the water, a wonderful, distorted, boney reflection of trees, all chaos and majesty and destruction and decay, as a woman quietly reads a book on the other side of the stream as if living in an entirely different landscape. Even her hat is safe.) Every time I see Soutine’s trees—rows of them on flat land, trees climbing up hills that will collapse any minute, trees shading, sheltering, surrounding, threatening, I think: “This is a voice that shatters cedars…This is a voice that shatters cedars…This is a voice…” And I also think of what it felt like visiting the redwood forest when I lived in California, looking up, up so high it made me unsteady and prayerful. These trees, worlds in and of themselves, beings older than some of our most dearly held religions, so much older and more beautiful and more patient than any other animal (with entire, unique ecosystems living in their heights.)

Soutine looked at paintings and recreated them as his own. He saw landscapes and set them down as monuments to transience. He sought cultural and spiritual alienation. No, he didn’t seek it. He accepted it and moved on, because all that he needed to do was his fevered dance.

Maybe he did want to get to the heart of something separate from life as we understand it in its narrative forms. But what is that? What lives beyond story? Even the least likely animals need the narrative arc of eating and mating and homing to continue into the next historical moment.

But what was that thing he was reaching for so desperately? What did he think would happen if he didn’t manage to capture that one living breath beneath a raucous sea of color?

Kafka said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Sometimes it does feel that simple. Soutine’s work is the axe. Art can be the axe. But how does it find that frozen sea?

If Soutine is an ocean’s heaving surface during a storm, maybe Chagall is the sadness of beauty that lies underneath. But no, I don’t think it is all so easy to distinguish and define.

There is no end to what can be found in a Soutine painting with close inquiry. And if you listen, if you listen you will hear the quickening of his breath—or is that the wind blowing through the needles of a nearby tree? Or tugging at an old hill that bends down to listen—or in an act of letting go. It is too tiring to stand for all these thousands of years.

Or maybe, the muffled voice of a dynamic universe lives still, and always in this one moment—the last note of the performance that leaves us with a strange and struggling artifact…and if you listen to it in just the right way, you can hear it…saying yes.

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About the author:

Dov Zeller is a writer, photographer, and artist who lives in western MA. Before becoming homebound with ME/CFS he loved being outdoors and learning about local flora and fauna. He still enjoys exploring the little ecosystem in and around his home. His novels The Right Thing to Do at the Time and Book of Hats were published in the spring of 2018.

 

Dov Zeller on Chaim Soutine: