Early 20th Century Expressionist and Parisian Bohemian
Chaïm Soutine 1893-1943 by Daniel Rohlfing

Chaïm Soutine? But back in February of 2002, I had never heard of him. ... But there I was in Paris standing in front of Soutine's Les Maisons. It was jarring and I was captivated. At the time, I took note of his name and wanted to see and know more. These dancing houses in Les Maisons had impact. Their movement was fanciful, wildly colorful and expressive. I found Soutine to be boldly unapologetic with every stroke.

Chaïm Soutine left his native Belarus and found a home in the Montparnasse section of Paris. He lived in a building with other young poor artists, many of whom were Jewish and had left their native countries. In Paris, they found acceptance, something they would never find back home. Soutine's friends included Amedeo Modigliani from Italy and Marc Chagall of Russia.

Both Modigliani and Chagall are much better known today than Soutine. Before seeing paintings by Modigliani and Chagall, I knew about them, but Soutine, I didn't know a thing. It's an unfair quirk of the art world that Soutine remained relatively unknown while his contemporaries' fame grew. But fame has never been commensurate with talent. A major part of the explanation why Soutine remained less known has to do with his early death at the age of 50 during the Nazi occupation of France in 1943.

Overall, the experience of living and working with other Jewish immigrant artists gave Soutine a lifeline, a community, a place to practice and grow in his art. Amadeo Modigliani became Soutine's best friend. He even painted two rather flattering portraits of Soutine. Modigliani, while drinking, once described himself by expressing, "Everything dances around me as in a landscape by Soutine."

Soutine was an expressive and passionate soul, and was not the best of neighbors. There's the story of Soutine's admiration for his artistic hero, Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt painted a still life, Slaughtered Ox. Soutine visited this painting in the Musée du Louvre often and studied it. In 1912, in hopes of creating an homage to Rembrandt's masterpiece, Soutine went to the Vaugirard slaughterhouses located near his atelier and purchased a steer's carcass to put up in his studio. His goal was to paint a series of still lifes patterned after Rembrandt's The Slaughtered Ox.

The flies and the stench from the rotting meat drove his neighbors to summon the police. When the police entered Soutine's atelier, Soutine lectured them on the relative importance of art over hygiene. It is said Marc Chagall saw blood from the carcass leak out onto the corridor outside Soutine's room and rushed out screaming, "Someone's killed Soutine!"

Soutine's landscapes, portraits and still lifes are asymmetrical and are meant to show more than a visual depiction of his subject. His buildings and his subjects' faces are contortions of reality with wild colors, all adding up to make his subjects memorable from the inside out. Whether a landscape, portrait or still life, he manages to reveal the subject's deeper inner truth. His paintings demand notice. They grab the viewer's attention, are deeply probing, throbbing, and reveal the subject's inner secrets.

In the family tree of Art History, Soutine's Expressionism proved to be a bridge to Abstract Expressionism. His work was influential for a number of modern artists who followed in his wake, among them Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jackson Pollock, Jack Tworkov and Willem de Kooning. Tworkov said, "Soutine's completely impulsive use of pigment as a material, generally thick, slow-flowing and viscous, with a sensual attitude toward it, as if it were the primordial material, with deep and vibratory color." De Kooning said of Soutine's painting, they "had a glow that came from within."

The building where Soutine, Modigliani and Chagall lived was called "La Ruche" (The Beehive). The building was designed by Gustave Eiffel for a wine rotunda during the Great Exposition of 1900. After the Exposition, the building was purchased, dismantled, and reassembled by sculptor Alfred Bocher as an artist's cooperative in Montparnasse, a building of ateliers open to all who applied. In short order, it became home to an array of drunks, misfits and drifters. Among its more famous residents were Modigliani, Chagall, and Diego Rivera.

Chaïm Soutine was born in January in 1893, the tenth of eleven children. His Jewish family lived in  the shtetel of Smilavičy, Belarus, near the city of Minsk. He studied art in Minsk and later in Vilnius, Lithuania. At age 20, he emigrated to Paris in 1913. He would remain a poor struggling artist for ten years before getting his big break.

In 1922, American art collector Albert Barnes came to Paris to buy paintings. For a decade prior, Barnes was a major client of Parisian artists. He once delegated his high school friend, Ashcan School painter William Glackens, to Paris, giving him $20,000 and an order to acquire the best paintings by the best artists he could find. In 1922, Barnes traveled to Paris himself. He was impressed by one painting by Chaïm Soutine, Les Maisons, and insisted on seeing more paintings by the artist. After meeting Soutine and seeing more of his work, Barnes bought 54 of his paintings. Barnes' large purchase established Soutine as a major up and coming Parisian artist. His reputation and fame grew and demand for his paintings rose dramatically along with their prices.

Another patron of Soutine's work was Madeleine Castaing, a renowned French antiques dealer and interior designer. In her younger days, Madeleine did some acting in silent films, earning a nickname as "the French Mary Pickford." After marrying Marcellin Castaing, an art critic and wealthy heir from Toulouse, Madeleine Castaing became an influential interior decorator. Today she is remembered as the grande dame of decoration.

From 1930 to 1935, Madeleine Castaing and her husband welcomed Soutine as a summer guest at their summer mansion in Lèves, near Chartres about 90 kilometers southwest of Paris. Other guests included André Derain, Jean Cocteau, the composer Erik Satie, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.

The couple was generous to Soutine, giving him the entire upper floor of their home so he could work uninterrupted. The gesture paid off as the Castaings ended up owning over 40 of Soutine's paintings enabling the artist to hold his first solo exhibition in Chicago in 1935.

Although the last years of the 1930's were a time of world-wide economic depression, these were good times for Soutine. He had finally been recognized as a great artist. He participated in the exhibition The Origins and Development of International Independent Art in Paris at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume.

But in 1940, the good times came to a terrifiing halt. The German Army marched into Paris. Soutine's long-time lover and nurse-maid Gerda, a Jewish-German woman who fled to Paris in 1935, was removed by the Nazis to a camp for German nationals. This left Soutine distraught. He next became involved with Marie-Berthe Aurenche (previously Max Ernst's former wife) who remained Soutine's mistress until his death.

Like so many others, Soutine was officially labled as a Jew and was forced to flee Paris, trying to stay a step ahead of the Gestapo. He stayed in safe houses, first in Paris and then outside the city to the west in the Loire valley, frequently moving from place to place with forged papers. The quality of his diet was poor and his stress level was high. Being on the run and trying to stay out of sight aggravated Soutine's chronic ulcers. In time, he needed medical help. It was determined he needed to return to Paris for surgery, but the journey was long and arduous. Traveling over 24 hours with many detours he made it to the surgeon. Immediately, the operation took place, but he did not survive. He died soon after on August 9, 1943 at the age of 50. He was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Although Soutine did not die in a German prison camp, he was most certainly a victim of the Holocaust. Holocaust victims not only include those killed at the hands of the Nazis, but those who died while trying to steer clear of them. For Soutine, the fear, the fleeing, the hiding and running all took its accumulating toll. In the whirlwind of the Nazi horror, Soutine's story was lost among the millions of other worthy stories.

As for Soutine and his art, I would suggest they were extinguished by the trauma of the war. Amid all that horror and death, his story, like the stories of millions of others, was buried in the rubble.

Today, Chaïm Soutine is enjoying new fame. His work is seen as transitional, a bridge between Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. He has found a new audience in the 21st century. His paintings are in a wide range of museums, but the largest collections are in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. If you've not heard of him, take note.

Joshua Meador is not known for making etchings or prints. Apart from his legendary work as Disney Studio's Director of Animation Effects, the vast majority of his fine art work are impressionist palette knife oil landscapes and seascapes of California.

So, when this small etching became available for our gallery, we took notice and did a little research.

Josh began working at Disney Studios in 1937. Three years later, according to the 1940 census, he was 29 years old and rented a house on Spazier Avenue in Glendale, California with his wife Elizabeth (Libby), his infant son Philip and his mother-in-law, Emma F. Oston. The census said Joshua Meador's 1940 income was $5,000 + per year.

We date this etching as being c1935, although it may well have been done a few years earlier. As a student, at the Art Institute of Chicago, he would have had access to etching tools and press. We guess this piece was part of an assigned project.

On the back of this etching is written an address, 198 E. Chestnut in Glendale. We speculate that this would have been Joshua Meador's original Glendale address when he and Libby moved to Hollywood from Chicago in 1937. By 1940, the Meadors would have moved to the Spazier Ave. residence, possibly for more room to accomodate Libby's mother.

If you wish to consider purchasing this etching or would like to view it in person, please contact us. We'd love to hear from you. It is a lovely little treasure and we hope to find a great home for this little guy.

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art

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