WILLIAM DAVIE

As painting arguably reached its evolutionary peaks across the middle third of the twentieth century, Chaïm Soutine, active during the twenties and thirties, was canonized as the patron saint of gestural figuration for his preternatural ability to, as sculptor Jacques Lipchitz noted, “translate life into paint, paint into life. He was one of the rare examples in our day of a painter who could make his pigments breathe light.”

The reach of Soutine’s influence has often extended to anyone working in a remotely similar vein. With this in mind, the mission of Soutine and British Painting—to chart the intergenerational impact Soutine has had on British painting—is a herculean task. One tempered by the commercial nature of Piano Nobile, a small, ambitious London gallery, specialising in modern British art, but one that is ultimately elevated by the fascinating and unexpected encounters it presents.

Anchoring the exhibition are three works by Soutine. Les Platanes à Céret (ca. 1920) is a stupendous, violently undulating landscape, that of the three, best showcases his talents. Portrait du Peintre Ramey (1915–16) presents an angular portrait of painter Henry Ramey seen in profile, that is slightly anaemic colour-wise, while Jeune Homme Obliquement Étendu (ca. 1921–22) offers a resplendent and enigmatic portrait of a recumbent male, diagonal across the composition. In concert are paintings and works on paper by well-known British artists: Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff. Alongside these are less-known artists, ranging from the historical—David Bomberg, Jack Butler Yeats, and Christopher Wood—to postwar artists R. B. Kitaj, Peter Coker, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, in the midst of mid-career institutional recognition.

The success of an exhibition like this lies in how rewarding the juxtapositions are. Two recent, critically acclaimed institutional exhibitions, Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2021), and 2023’s Soutine | Kossoff at Hastings Contemporary, demonstrated that there is a richness and a forgiveness in being able to delve into these artists’ respective practices to bring out and strengthen these connections. But to replicate their achievements through a group exhibition with only one work per artist, as is largely the case here, is incredibly difficult. 

A case in point is Yiadom-Boakye’s Rose Nether Poetry (2012). Even at its weakest, the vitality of Soutine’s touch makes visible the subject’s innate internal poetry. In conjunction with this, Soutine’s vast colour palette, made up of subtle inflections that may only appear once in a given painting, awards his works a fantastical technicolour luminosity and idiosyncratic emotive depth. In comparison—and particularly to Les Platanes à Céret (ca. 1920) where these two aspects are so viscerally experienced—Rose Nether Poetry (2012) feels distinctly flat and constrained; on reflection, this applies as well to the works on view by Butler Yeats, Wood, Kitaj, and Coker. While these paintings are expressive in nature, and on one occasion offer an acknowledged homage to Soutine, each artist’s application of paint and colour is fundamentally different to Soutine’s.

In stark relief, however, are the successes, which far outweigh this point. The heady effect Les Platanes à Céret (ca. 1920) has on our ability to see anew Freud’s quickly executed and otherwise placid watercolour study, Annie Reading (1961), is spellbinding. Through visual association, Soutine’s wild distortion of perspective, which awards the landscape a palpable psychological tension, allows Freud’s marbling of wet-on-wet watercolour, that maps the contours of her rolling flesh as she sits nude in a fetal position, to come alive. This is encouraged by his choice of colour, rusted red with cold blue accents, and a diluted black that draws our gaze to the curve of one buttock. The tenderness of the interaction suddenly feels primed by a hint of a nascent yet benign erotic charge.

Kossoff’s King’s Cross, Summer (1998) exemplifies why Soutine | Kossoff was so well received. Auerbach’s Sketch for Reclining Figure in the Studio (1966), which is visually similar, illustrates that both artists possess Soutine’s ability to make their “pigments breathe light” while intuitively developing their own ideas towards abstraction. But of even greater pleasure, like the Freud relationship, is how Soutine’s frenetic brushwork and perspective distortion in Les Platanes à Céret (ca. 1920) amplifies the poetic potential of Auerbach’s small, lightly paint-spattered drawing Mornington Crescent (1969) by association. Here, the intense back and forth of Auerbach’s pencil and bowing perspective, used to describe the view of Mornington Crescent with a sense of possessed urgency, takes on a new lease of life. It suddenly appears ferocious, even anthropomorphic, like the opening jaws of a wild beast about to engulf us. 

Foundational to Auerbach’s and Kossoff’s artistic DNA was David Bomberg’s iconoclastic teaching at Borough Polytechnic. He encouraged his students to eschew academic conventions and reach for the “spirit in the mass” to convey something’s essence rather than its image; a charge that just as easily encapsulates Soutine’s artistic impulses. This leads us to the exhibition’s most enthralling juxtaposition: Bomberg’s cacophonous Bomb Store (1942). 

It is a work that is every bit as sophisticated and muscular as Les Platanes à Céret (ca. 1920). In it, Bomberg acutely captures, through an evocative impression that dances along the precipice of abstraction, the potent atmosphere of danger that stifles the dark, claustrophobic bomb store. Our mind’s eye hungrily feeds off Bomberg’s every strike, smear, and sweep, enhanced by his dexterous use of colour as an emotive tool. Against the murky browns that dominate the composition, streaks of creamy yellow on the left and a constellation of gold dots on the right viscerally signal what could be fatal flashes of light, echoing Soutine’s broad use of colour in Jeune Homme Obliquement Étendu (ca. 1921–22) which readily suggests the man’s characteristics beyond the visual. At the same time, as also seen abundantly in the three paintings by Soutine, these painted passages, rooted in figuration but free to be of themselves, are exquisite to observe unfurling across the compositions. Through this juxtaposition, a compelling argument is put forth for the need of an in-depth, tête-à-tête investigation into their thrilling kinship.

First published by The Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2025/07/artseen/chaim-soutine-soutine-and-british-painting/