Chaïm Soutine

Painted in 1927.

Considered the Modernist Master of Flesh, Chaïm Soutine painted an extraordinary sequence of canvases focusing on the newly slaughtered carcasses of livestock—the vermilion-colored flesh and golden suet flayed open for the artist’s penetrating inspection. Le Petit quartier de mouton is among Soutine's most powerfully visceral examples from this body of work, with vigorous streaks and swirls of viscous, jewel-like pigment used to render the hemorrhaging slab of hanging meat. In the present work, Soutine has stripped away any narrative or allegorical setting, laying bare the naked fact of the animal and its death. “There is no room for anything but the carcass,” David Sylvester described of the series. “The carcass is the setting.” [1] Cropped at the top and bottom by the edge of the canvas, the immortalized carrion pushes into the viewer’s space with a visceral immediacy, asserting its sheer physical presence. Most arresting is Soutine’s handling of the paint—viscous, heavily loaded strokes, utterly unrestrained—which seems to possess the same fatty carnality as the butchered animal itself. The decaying flesh of Le Petit quartier de mouton retains a strong sense of mass and plasticity, as Soutine’s thick, sensuous brushwork evokes the physical, observed reality of striated muscle, curving ribs, and glistening deposits of suet.

Soutine’s depictions of raw meat, dead fish and birds recall a long tradition of still-life painting in Western art. Born desperately poor in a Lithuanian shtetl, an environment both devoid of and hostile towards visual culture, Soutine avidly devoured the art of the Old Masters at the Louvre upon his arrival in Paris in 1913. He studied Rembrandt’s great Le Boeuf écorché (1655) at length, admiring its tactile, encrusted surface. “From nothing, a cultural desert, he finds himself in the Louvre, facing the skill and taste and sumptuousness of centuries,” Andrew Forge described. “It is a measure of his stamina and the force of his need for self-definition that he was able to absorb and use so much.” [2]

Painted with the same intense, expressive brushstrokes as his portraits and landscapes, Soutine’s depictions of animal flesh reflect the artist’s fascination with unorthodox subject matter, as well as his extraordinary ability to turn these brutal images into iconic paintings brimming with energy. The imagery of butchered meat particularly preoccupied Soutine in the 1920s. He would hang the carcass on the wall of his studio, watching it decompose and occasionally adding blood in order to freshen its color.

Monroe Wheeler described the circumstances in which Soutine created this series of paintings, as well as their reception among contemporaries: "In the late twenties one scarcely heard mention of Soutine without some scandalized discourse about the gruesome circumstances of their production. When he lived in La Ruche, he had made friends with slaughter-house employees, and practiced painting pieces of meat which he got from them. [...] In 1925, when he had a studio large enough in the Rue du Mont St. Gothard, he procured the entire carcass of a steer, and it was this undertaking which grew legendary. [...] According to the legend, when the glorious colors of the flesh were hidden from the enthralled gaze of the painter by an accumulation of flies, he paid a wretched little model to sit beside it and fan them away. [...] Other dwellers in the Rue du Mont St. Gothard complained of the odor of the rotting flesh, and when the police arrived Soutine harangued them on how much more important art was than sanitation or olfactory agreeableness." [3]

Throughout his childhood and first decade in Paris, gnawing hunger had been a relentless and inexorable part of Soutine’s daily existence. By the time that he was able to afford nourishing food, his years of deprivation had left him with stomach ulcers, ultimately fatal, that relegated him to a meager diet of bread, milk, and soup. Soutine’s images of animal flesh become, in this light, the unbridled exorcisms of his insatiable hunger and desire; the sharp, crystalline pigments render the butchered beast unexpectedly and beguilingly beautiful.

The freshly butchered meat, most intrinsically, represents a source of nourishment, a fact that would have particularly resonated with Soutine as a member of the Orthodox Jewish community. The association between food and death represents the very foundation of Judaism’s kosher edicts, which stipulate that the animal must be killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as possible, then immediately rinsed and drained of all blood. Soutine’s entire process—inspecting the decomposing carcass for days, lingering over the details, pouring fresh blood over the meat to preserve the vivid color—is in direct opposition to these sacred laws. The power of Soutine’s art rests in no small part upon his need to see the forbidden thing, to paint it and possess it.

Soutine’s intensely sensual yet gruesome subject matter resonated powerfully in the post-war era. “Soutine was not just my hero,” declared Baselitz, who hitchhiked to Amsterdam in 1959 to view Le Bœuf (circa 1925) at the Stedelijk Museum, “but in our rotten post-war period, his images were also a quite perfect replica of a skewed world—our world… There was more of the existential and the broken, as well as the cynical and the hideous, in his images.” [4] Yet, no artist carried forward Soutine’s legacy with more searing intensity than Francis Bacon, for whom the animal carcass, with its mangled flesh, served as a powerful emblem of the frailty and brutality of the human condition. Bacon took David Sylvester to admire Soutine’s work at the Redfern Gallery in 1953, just a year before he painted his own Figure with Meat, in which two suspended sides of beef provide a raw and disturbing visual analogue for the seated pope’s epic scream.

In Le Petit quartier de mouton, the paradoxical combinations of empathy and brutality, appetite and hunger, reason and magic teeter in an unstable reality. An exorcism of his own hunger and desire, Soutine devours the carcass with his eyes, rather than his mouth, creating a sensual feast for both himself and the viewer.

Le petit quartier de
mouton boasts a distinguished provenance, having been
acquired directly from Soutine by the French perfumery owner and collector
Jacques Guérin. The child of businesswoman and socialite Jeanne Louise Guérin
and industrialist Israel Gaston Monteux, Guérin became a successful
entrepreneur and avid collector like his parents. Deeply involved in the
Parisian intellectual scene, he amassed a significant collection of books and
manuscripts which included some of Marcel Proust’s original papers. Additionally,
he was well-connected to a number of important artists, including Édouard
Vuillard, Pablo Picasso and Soutine—with whom he maintained an especially close
relationship. His long-time friendship with Soutine and sustained passion for
his works were undoubtedly shaped by his upbringing in his mother’s apartment,
where Guérin remembered Soutine’s canvases adorning the walls. Le petit quartier de mouton was
inherited directly from Guérin by the present owner, creating a remarkable
unbroken line of ownership.

[1] D. Sylvester, Chaim Soutine, London, 1963, p. 13
[2] A. Forge, Soutine, London, 1965, p. 11
[3] M. Wheeler, Soutine, New York, 1950, p. 68
[4] G. Baselitz quoted in Soutine and Modern Art, New York, 2006, n.p.