Two of the Moderns
Chagall.
Text by Jacques Lassaigne. Ten color plates including cover.
Skira: Masterpieces of French Painting. $3.50.
Soutine.
Text by Raymond Cogniat. Ten color plates including cover.
Skira: Masterpieces of French Painting. $3.50.
The reputations of Matisse, Picasso, and the other contemporary masters rest ultimately on a comparatively small number of masterpieces sorted out from a much greater number of unsuccessful or trivial works. Titian, Velasquez, and Rubens, too, produced many unsuccessful pictures, but these ordinarily led toward their successful ones; the curious, the problematical thing about the great moderns is that their bad pictures, once the artist has reached maturity, usually lead away from their good pictures. Why this should be so, I do not know, but it contributes to the impression of an anarchy of tendencies and directions made by modern art as a whole—an impression that is fundamentally false because in its best products modern art does go pretty much in the same direction.
The late Chaim Soutine offers an exception and a paradox in that his good and bad pictures lead towards each other and require each other without this making his work any the less problematical. A further paradox is offered in that the capacity of Soutine’s painting to involve, intrigue, and affect other artists is out of all proportion to its degree of realization. His ratio of hits to masses is low, and even when he did hit a picture off, more often than not it teeters on the edge of a miss. It is this very teetering, however, that makes Soutine’s painting so interesting to fellow artists—because it tells so vividly of the self-torture of modern painting, its inherent difficulties and frustrations, but also of the possibilities of triumph just within its reach.
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Chagall got what he wanted in painting far more often than Soutine did. If the latter is the type of the tormented, dissatisfied artist, Chagall seems by contrast the type of the serene one. But this serenity is still more apparent than real, for Chagall has his doubts in plenty, only does not work them out so conspicuously in his art. He did his best oils between 1910 and 1920, and these are enough to install him in the history of art as a painter of at least the second rank. Since then his work has been softened and sweetened by the practice of that cuisine of viscous oil which seems to incorporate for him the essence of French tradition—a tradition he adores as only one originally an outsider could. However, in a few recent “pictures” (shown in New York this past winter) that were done on flat square tiles mortared together to form a support like a canvas, with the pigment fired in and the surface either glazed or unglazed, his color has recovered some of the raw immediacy that was one of the notable strengths of his early work. If his tile paintings continue to maintain this level, we shall have to assign him a larger place in the pantheon of modern art.
In any case, as an etcher and lithographer, as distinct from painter, Chagall belongs altogether in the first rank, unrivaled except by Picasso in this century; and his book illustrations, together with that master’s, make a last glorious burst in what seems to be an expiring art. His blacks, whites, and grays are here the subtler and profounder expression of a gift for color that too often contents itself in oil with tried and true effects obtained from standard recipes.
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But I find Soutine not only more interesting than Chagall, for all his deficiency in achievement, but more sympathetic. Far away from him is that cloying, folkish cuteness which the latter cultivates in his role of lovable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk. Soutine had no truck with such self-indulgent exhibitionism. He was, if I may put it that way, too Jewish— or at least too much a Litvak to put his East European Jewishness on show as something exotic and picturesque. Yet, if such a thing as Jewishness can be made palpable in art, I find more of it in Soutine’s than in Chagall’s. Soutine is more naive and direct and absorbed, less self-conscious and more involved with his feelings than with the effect in view. He looked away from himself, and the trees, fields, flowers, animals, houses, and people he painted from are not a set of iconographic themes on which to ring variations, as his subjects are for Chagall, but so much existence to be grasped through paint.
Coming to Paris from a shtetl in that same Lithuanian White Russia which Chagall came from, Soutine got his first good look at the museum art of the West in the Louvre when he was already past adolescence. He never got over it. Chagall was affected in the same way by the Louvre, but he remained less hypnotized; he deliberately went to school with Cubism and Matisse, whereas Soutine, for all he absorbed from modernism, never really gave it his assent. Aspiring above all to the depth, volume, and illustrative power that Rembrandt and Courbet got by shading, he was yet unwilling to sacrifice the expressive force of pure color as he had seen it in Van Gogh; nor could he put out of his mind the way Cézanne built a picture by massing planes of prismatic tone. But these divergent methods and aims could be reconciled only if one or the other of them were drastically subordinated. Soutine’s stubborn, arrogant refusal to cede an inch anywhere is as much responsible for the frenzied, turbulent look of his pictures as the high pitch of feeling at which they were painted.
This effort to do the impossible, the absoluteness of it, and the terms of it, are what fascinate so many painters today. This, aside from his extraordinary capacity for color, pure and impure. And at the moment regard for his painting grows among non painters too. But it should be mentioned that a lot of collectors buy him, and have bought him, mainly because he was a Jew and they themselves are Jewish (the nationalism that many Jews express in collecting art, all the more ardent for being unconscious—most of them would shrink from anything positive in the way of that kind of nationalism—is a curious feature of the modern art scene). This does not, however, take anything away from Soutine; he will remain, I believe, one of the very most important of the artists of our century, however incomplete.
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The Soutine portfolio at hand, with an introduction and very brief notes on the individual pictures—both full of turgid commonplaces—contains ten color plates of good quality made from fairly representative originals. The only fault I have to find with their choice is that nothing is included from the last years of the artist’s life, when he won through to a kind of calm that made possible a firmer control and unity of means, the result of which was some complete masterpieces. Also, some of the plates seem to have been trimmed a little, to judge from the way the end of Soutine’s signature is cut off—but then that may have been his own doing. (Incidentally, for the facts about Soutine’s life and death the reader should consult Alfred Werner’s article in COMMENTARY for May 1948.)
The selection of the pictures reproduced in the Chagall portfolio makes more or less the same assessment of his career as I do (which is pretty standard): seven date from between 1910 and 1913. The three others, from the 1940’s, are particularly well chosen, being among the few superior works Chagall turned out in that decade. And the introduction offers at least some facts about his life, while the notes on the pictures are more honest and perceptive than those in the Soutine portfolio—which may not be saying much.
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