Rx 38 / Woman in Blue

Chaim Soutine, Woman in Blue (La Femme en bleu), c. 1919 Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (BF886)

At the Barnes I spend more time in front of Soutine than anyone else ... Hands, in Soutine, break in a thousand different ways. They curve wildly, both at and straying from the knuckles, as though they were slammed in a door a couple dozen times over. A half-dozen tortured hands at a time, I wander the museum staring just above the knees, watching fingers flit from place to place, unshattered or unbroken or squared or narrow ...

—Talia Gordon, artblog (2021)

Chaim Soutine consistently distorted his subjects, dramatically twisting, bending, and disfiguring their form. He did so to flowers and landscapes, but this inclination is most discernible when applied to his human figures. Gaunt eyes, enlarged appendages, swollen joints, and contorted torsos characterize his subjects. Soutine’s so-called “flesh paintings” employ unusual color choices and thick, gestural paint application. Woman in Blue’s face, for instance, is modeled in intermingling shades of blue, green, violet, and mustardy yellows. Attenuated hands display bulbous knuckles, elongated digits, and talon-like fingernails. Slashing brushstrokes of luminous blue construct her form. These harsh, active strokes have led critics to understand Soutine’s work as a precursor to later abstract expressionists, namely the Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning.

Born in a small town in the Russian Empire, Soutine was the tenth of eleven children in a family of menders. A series of patronages brought the young artist to Paris in 1913, where he fell in with a circle of painters enrolled at the Ecolé des Beaux-Arts, including Amedeo Modigliani. Under threat of German invasion, however, Soutine temporarily relocated to the small town of Céret in the French Pyrenees. He produced Woman in Blue during the particular angst of the interwar period.

The identity of Soutine’s sitters is rarely known, but we can assume they posed for free; Soutine was poverty-stricken throughout his life. Occasionally referred to as a “servant painter,” his portraiture included wait staff, a pastry cook, a hotel page, maids, and sometimes people he encountered on the street. He notably never painted family, love interests, or anyone with whom he had demonstrably sentimental attachment. In spite of the sitters’ anonymity, many of his portraits, including Woman in Blue, have a searing psychological intensity. Wretched caricatures of sorts, these exaggerated portraits simultaneously confer pathos and absurdity; they are as melancholy as they are excessive. The personality and idiosyncratic presence of the sitter is sensitively and abstractly captured within a pictorial moment. There is no attempt at satire or personal grievance from Soutine, rather a peculiar mingling of the real and unreal, antipathy and empathy.

reflections…

Soutine’s artistic practice, bodily afflictions, and world-historical events were intimately connected. When he returned to Paris in 1921, Soutine began to paint slaughtered animals. Hanging the carcasses in his studio, he continually doused them in fresh blood to maintain their vibrancy. Soutine often fasted before painting; he thought his hunger would sharpen his work, though sometimes, he simply could not afford food. With Paris under German occupation, Soutine’s anxiety and stomach troubles worsened. He died following a failed surgery for perforated ulcers. Writing in Art in America in 1984, critic Gary Indiana elaborates on Soutine’s human and animalian portraiture:

“In his portraits, Soutine breaks different taboos. Nearly all his subjects are captured in antisocial, nonportraitlike attitudes. Some look as though the painter had rudely yanked them from a private meditation; some are asleep; others are just plain sullen or downright goofy—defying the intrusion of the artist or mocking his seriousness. Many appear to have relinquished consciousness altogether, and in their handling these pictures bring Francis Bacon’s work strongly to mind. Most of Soutine’s portrait subjects, however, struggle with a fathomless personal sorrow. They wear masks of skepticism and petulance, but this is makeup dusted over intense discomfort. Even the dead animal and vegetable presences in Soutine’s still lifes look distressed, flustered at being painted, anxious to get on with their private decomposition.”

We might think of Soutine and the inexplicable suffering of his subjects as visceral embodiments of socioeconomic ailments and the trauma of the interwar moment more generally. In manifesting suffering as pathology—bulbous joints, slaughtered geese, a flayed ox or rabbit—Soutine lays bare the otherwise intangible, collective unease of traumatic global events through “the body in pain,” as termed by Elaine Scarry.

Soutine’s oeuvre takes on newfound resonance amid the COVID-19 pandemic as many of us have doubtlessly felt a similar ennui or angst. Often, this feeling manifests in physical or psychiatric forms: anxious stomachs, skin irritation from N95 masks, sleepless nights, loneliness or depression. Rates of domestic abuse have increased significantly during this time. Seventy-five percent of health care workers under the age of thirty reported some level of mental health distress; fifty-five percent reported burnout. As ubiquitous as suffering is in this moment, these pathologies remain largely veiled in our visual lexicon. Conversely, Soutine does not shy away from the painful and the grotesque, instead bringing those feelings and experiences to the foreground. He forces us to acknowledge an unpleasant reality unfolding within ourselves, to intentionally sit with ‘personal sorrow’ and develop a tolerance for confronting it.

In what ways have we witnessed transformation, both inwardly and outwardly, during this pandemic? How can we grow to accept these changes, not as an aberration, but as a part of the process of healing from immense trauma and hardship? How do the arts give representation to the pain and pathology of the COVID-19 pandemic?

sources

Evans ML, Lindauer M, Farrell ME. A Pandemic within a Pandemic - Intimate Partner Violence during Covid-19. N Engl J Med. 2020;383(24):2302-2304. doi:10.1056/NEJMp2024046.

Gordon, Talia. “Chaim Soutine and I Have Never Broken a Bone,” ArtBlog, December 12, 2018, https://www.theartblog.org/2020/01/chaim-soutine-and-i-have-never-broken-a-bone-2018-grand-prize-winning-essay-in-the-new-art-writers-contest/.

“Soutine / de Kooning Conversations in Paint,” Barnes Foundation, 2021, https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/exhibition/soutine-de-kooning.

Indiana, Gary. “The Master in Spite of Himself,” Art in America, April 1, 1984, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/archives-master-spite-63509/.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Schjeldahl, Peter. “The Vulnerable Ferocity of Chaim Soutine,” The New Yorker, May 8, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-vulnerable-ferocity-of-chaim-soutine.

Clement, Scott, Pascual, Cece, Ulmanu, Monica. “Stress on the Front Lines of Covid-19,” The Washington Post, April 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/04/06/stress-front-lines-health-care-workers-share-hardest-parts-working-during-pandemic/.