Soutine with Dog

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about how Soutine’s use of Christian imagery mixed with his life experiences, artistic influences and his own Jewish culture in his paintins, particularly his carcass paintings such as Flayed Rabbit from 1924. In Part 2, I uncovered beliefs and superstitions specific to the area where Soutine was raised, and how I believe they influenced his work, particularly the idea of the Angel Dumah and his fascination with death. Part 3 goes deeper into these ideas and how one painting in particular encapsulates them.

This all seems to be best expressed in the painting Dog with Forks, date unknown. Because of its subject matter, it seems appropriate to place it right around the early to mid 1920s.  Sadly, the work is missing and can only be seen in black and white photos.

All the elements seen in other carcass paintings are present in this work, an animal lying on its back, limbs splayed, torso cut wide open with forks on either side.  But this is no rabbit or fowl, this is nothing that one would come across in a Parisian market and take home to make soup.

Dead Fowl, 1924

In a photograph dated 1927 Soutine poses with his acquaintance Paulette Jourdain and the dog belonging to his maid and cook.  According to the Soutine scholar Maurice Tuchman, Soutine loved the dog and took it on long walks, thus overcoming his irrational fear of dogs.  This fear was not unusual for a Jew from the shtetl where the evil eye was used on them for protection.  In the photo, the dog stands on its hind legs and its front paws are held by Soutine and friend, so that its belly is entirely exposed.  It is the same shape and size as the dog in the painting.

The dates of the painting and the photograph may be unreliable but if one is to believe that Soutine never worked from memory, if one is to accept willingly that Soutine kept a rotting side of beef in his studio, occasionally pouring blood on it to keep it looking fresh, then what are we to make of this situation?

Is Mr. Tuchman correct in his belief that Soutine overcame his fear of dogs in the most normal way possible, by befriending it?  Or must we think the worst?  That Soutine did to this dog as he did with all the animals and all his demons?  It is difficult to suspend disbelief on this issue but even more difficult to comprehend the alternative.  Yet, must our artists be so safe?

It is interesting to me that while black and white images of this work can be found in older texts on Soutine, it is missing from Tuchman’s and Esti Dunow’s Catalogue Raisonné.

Nefesh…The Hebrew word nefesh is similar to Dumah in that it is a concept with several meanings, some mystical and some more grounded in the physical plane of existence.  One of the Biblical meanings of nefesh is one that works best to describe the carcass paintings of Chaim Soutine.  It means a living human, its breath and blood; more specifically, the breath of life given to humans by God that creates a living being or nefesh hayyah.  Nefesh sustains life and when it is taken away, then bodily life has ended.  As described in the Bible, death is the “going out” of the nefesh, or God’s taking away of life/nefesh.  The Rabbinic (and Greek) meaning is that nefesh is the soul.

Assuming that there is such a thing as a soul, when does the soul leave the body?  In Judaism, there are many ideas about this, and just as the belief that a God gives and takes away our breath, our very life, to believe in a soul that leaves the body implies belief in a greater power that has control over this process.

Soutine, so concerned with death and ritual, may have used the process of creating his carcass paintings to gain a better understanding of what nefesh is; he may have even wanted to control the process as if he was a god.  The more intense works of the 1920s depict creatures that are not quite dead yet.  Despite the flayed skin and the open gut, their mouths are open as if crying out and there is something about them that continues to live as if their nefesh makes them writhe on their backs and brings one to question, “what is death, exactly?”

If it is not exactly a boy in a shtetl wrapped in white sheets, alive and carried through the streets to the graveyard, if it is not exactly being beaten so severely for painting the portrait of a rabbi that one comes near death before escaping to Vilnius and art school, then is this truly death?  Can death be this controlled and carefully arranged?  How far could Soutine push the boundaries before returning to life?

There is an ebb and flow to Soutine’s series of carcass paintings.  One can see he is pushing this boundary between life and death.  He is testing nefesh.  As noted, the early works which began in the mid-teens have a calmer air about them.  Then they become increasingly graphic with works like Flayed Rabbit and Dog with Forks before returning again to more subdued works interspersed with his paintings of sides of beef.  After a break from these works in 1927, Soutine painted two still lifes of fish in 1933.

The Fish, 1933

Christian imagery, Jewish metaphysics and his personal mythology all reside within the carcass still-lifes.  Soutine stripped away any pretense of traditional artistic beauty as seen in the paintings he studied in the Louvre and created visceral works that revealed pure moments of brutal honesty that stand in direct opposition to the Renaissance beauties posing as martyrs who barely express emotion as they are being tortured.

Soutine pushed himself to the darker realms of the mind with these paintings and they continue to push the viewer to do the same; he desired an intimate understanding of the moment of “going out.”

detail of wallpaper panel, 8 x 3 feet

I collaborated with my friends Jonathan Nodrick and Anita Modha of ROLLOUT Custom Wallpaper in Vancouver on a project that’s currently on view in Toronto. The exhibition, entitled Radiant Dark 2010, is on view January 21-24, and runs concurrently with the Toronto International Design Festival.

The theme for this year’s exhibition is Assets & Values. Our entry, entitled “Oh, That Explains Everything”, consists of 3 digitally printed wallpaper panels, each 8′ high x 3′ wide, that emulate chalkboard diagrams. The drawings, charts and formulas explain everything you would ever want to know about the economy.

Here are the 3 panels…

Oh That Explains Everything, panel 1 of 3

Oh That Explains Everything, panel 2 of 3

Oh That Explains Everything, panel 3 of 3

Also, as a follow-up to a recent post, I tried to “NEWS” -ify the four cardinal letters, but the effect was problematic. So I followed the original plan with this result. The object is made of expanded pvc, glued together and painted.

I have no idea what to call this object. Any ideas?

Oxygen, 48" x 60", 2010, acrylic & ink on wood panel

Hi everyone. Happy New Year! Sorry I’ve been out of touch. Working working working…

Here’s a painting I just finished. Also, I’ve started a fan page on Facebook for David Palmer Studio. If you’re on FB, stop by for a visit!

Reading ‘Bright Earth’ inspired me to devote the winter holidays to learning more about pigments. At first, I reread the description of the various artist’s oil on the dickblick.com.

Currently, I am mostly relying on The Color of Art: Pigments, a website that provides comprehensive pigment information on chemical composition, color description and long term effects of light, opacity, lightfastness, oil absorption and toxicity.

This research led me to eliminate some of my most cherished oil paints that are reputed to be of low toxicity: PV23-dioxane violet because of its imperfect lightfastness and PR209-quinacrinidone red because its pinkish red hue can shifts towards bluish.

The upshot is that I will, exercising caution, resort to the more toxic pigments, PV16-Manganese violet or PV14-cobalt violet and PR108 cadmium red.

A new beginning, mixing new colors.

Have you ever drastically revised your palette?

19th century shtetl

In the book, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, Yekhezkel Kotik shares his memories of living in a shtetl not far from Soutine’s home of Smilovitchi in what is now Lithuania and what was once the part of Tsarist Russia that held on desperately to the edge of its borders with dirty fingernails. Of the superstitious beliefs of the townspeople, and there were many, there is this one in regard to death,

And when the body is lowered into the grave, the Angel Dumah appears beside him and asks, “What’s your name?”

To his misfortune, the unlucky deceased has forgotten his name. The Angel Dumah rips open his belly, plucks out his guts, and flings them into his face. He then turns the corpse over, strikes it with a white-hot iron rod, subjects it to excruciating torture, and finally tears the body to pieces, and so on. Everyone believed those things as though they were irrefutable facts.

As a child, Soutine was obsessed with the rituals of death, going so far as to participate with other children in the shtetl in mock funerals and burial rituals. If this particular superstition was known to Soutine, and it seems likely that it did, one can only imagine what a gruesome story such as this would do to a sensitive child who wrapped himself in white sheets and pretended to be dead on a regular basis.

Flayed Rabbit, 1924, Barnes Collection

Although Soutine was from an Orthodox Jewish family, he lived in a part of the world deeply influenced by the teachings of Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism and a Kabbalist whose mystical Judaic teachings stressed the primary idea that God is in everything. And while this has only been speculation by Soutine scholars, one should add to these above mentioned superstitions and teachings whatever psychic weight Soutine carried with him for breaking Judaic law by becoming an artist, something taboo to the Jewish religion at that time. Additionally, putting all speculation aside, there was the very real abuse and neglect Soutine suffered as a child as well as the rejection by his family and his community over his desire to create art.

The Angel Dumah, also called the Angel of Silence, is not an unfamiliar concept in Judaism and has more than one meaning dependent on which school of Judaism it pertains to. For instance, Dumah is the name for a city in Judah and is mentioned in The Septuagint and in Rabbinical Literature; Dumah is the name for the angel who is in charge of souls in the nether world, the one who takes the wicked souls and casts them down into the depths of Hades. But every evening, Dumah leads the souls out of their torment and into Hazarmaveth, (the Courtyard of Death and also a geographic location mentioned in the Old Testament) where they eat and drink in absolute silence.

It is also written in Rabbinical Literature that the soul cannot leave the body entirely until it cries out in confusion from its decaying body and Dumah takes it immediately to Hazarmaveth. So there seems to be a mutual working relationship of give and take between the soul and the Angel Dumah and is inherent in all of Judaism which relies on a give and take between a person and God, whether it is intellectual or mystical or in Soutine’s case, artistic.

Soutine the adult who rarely spoke of the harsh conditions of his childhood, who because of his early years of poverty and lifelong stomach ulcers viewed food as a luxury and never ate anything beyond basics like potatoes and milk, re-enacted both his childhood death rituals and food rituals in these carcass paintings, exorcising whatever fears and fascinations he held towards his religion, culture and memories. Jews were forbidden to be artists because to be an artist is to create and only God can create. Also, according to dietary laws, an animal was to be killed quickly and as painlessly as possible, with the blood carefully drained from the body. It is not to be gutted and posed nor is it to hang in a studio with regular drenchings of fresh blood, as Soutine famously did when he created his Side of Beef painting, based on the work of Rembrandt. Yet Soutine immersed himself in the act of painting, of creation, with an abandon that can be likened to religious zeal.

Side of Beef, 1925

Soutine

It contains the elements of a compass including a round face. The letters designating the cardinal directions, however, are congregated in a pattern that is more self-referential than indicative of a greater orientation. The needle sits idly by, with no particular functional opportunities, or sense of direction.

No longer much of a compass, the collection of shapes seems to call for a reorganization of content and meaning.  Where things are put can be an open issue. Everything, for example, could be pushed to one side, which would create it’s own associations. The cardinal points could be rearranged around the circle in some kind of a riff on the traditional design. But such a move feels trivial.  The present arrangement comes across as somewhat social in spirit with the letters trying out a Robert Indiana look while the needle contemplates its northness or has turned away in disapproval.  But is such a reassignment legit?  What are the contexts that  would allow one to humanize a compass? Maybe a compass can be seen as purely passive and entirely dependent upon a strict ordering of components, while humans exercise a degree of free will as exemplified by the funk.

I could go on, but a reasonable question might be: what would you do with this, aside from putting it in the closet?