Chaïm Soutine moved paint with such unbridled energy that the art critic John Russell called his canvases “a world in convulsion.” The seeming abandon with which he used his loaded brush will be plain to see in a long-overdue retrospective exhibition, “Chaïm Soutine. Against the Current,” opening today at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Düsseldorf. The show then moves to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark, and later to the Kunstmuseum Bern, in Switzerland.
Soutine’s independence in both life and art, his battle to paint in his own way, was evident early on. He was born in 1893 in a Lithuanian shtetl, one of 11 children; his father mended clothing. As a boy, Soutine was beaten savagely by the son of a rabbi whom he had asked to pose for a portrait, a violation of the Orthodox Jewish prohibition against graven images. He fled to Minsk to study art, went on to an art academy in Vilnius that accepted Jews, and at 20 headed to Paris, broke and speaking only Yiddish, to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. His struggles with harsh experience are alive in his provocative paintings, as is his fine technique.
