Description:
It's tempting to put artists in their places, linking them to an era, a style, or a movement, but there are always a few, like Chaim Soutine, who don't quite fit. "Soutine's paintings are so different," writes Kenneth E. Silver, "that the first effect is likely to be utter bewilderment." Soutine was born in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania in 1893 and died in 1943, in wartime France, where he was forced to hide in the countryside to elude Nazi occupiers. He has been called a postimpressionist, in keeping with his time, but his torturous, richly colored paintings--the studies of dead animals fresh from the butcher shop may be his best-known images--relate more closely to expressionism, or de Kooning's wild women. This fascinating volume, published to accompany an exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum, includes 10 essays on Soutine's life and work. It is filled with black-and-white snapshots of the handsome artist and his many friends, including the painter Amedeo Modigliani and the American writer Henry Miller, that transport the reader to "that visual France words can but feebly trace"--the magical interlude between the two world wars. There are only 32 color plates of Soutine's paintings, but the photographs, reminiscences, letters to and from the artist, and critical perspectives make for a richly satisfying book. --Peggy Moorman
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