Chaim Soutine, great artist but disturbed?

Portrait of a Young Woman, 1915WikiPastry Cook of Cagnes, 1922 The GuardianGrotesque self portrait, c1923Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.Thank you to George Prochnik for this review. From 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in present-day Belarus, to Paris, 20 year old artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a huge impasto, churning with deep, febrile colours. Where Rembrandt’s hanging carcass is mottled with pale tones once the blood has drained away, Soutine’s reds appear to be fermenting. It’s not a picture of mortality! Interpreters of Rembrandt’s ox often place it in a memento mori, but Soutine’s picture convulses with what is happening right now.Soutine insisted that he could only depict a subject if he had it in front of him, and various accounts of how he managed this with a huge quarter-side of beef came down to us. In her passionate biography, Celeste Marcus shares…