George Prochnik at Literary Review:
The artist Chaim Soutine was obsessed with Rembrandt’s painting of a flayed and headless ox. After managing at the age of twenty, in 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in present-day Belarus, to Paris, Soutine made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s, he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a voluminous impasto, churning with deep, febrile colours. Where Rembrandt’s hanging carcass is mottled with pale tones indicating where the blood has drained away, Soutine’s reds, oranges and roses appear to be fermenting. It’s less a picture of mortality than of some process in medias res. Interpreters of Rembrandt’s ox often place it in the tradition of memento mori, but Soutine’s picture convulses with what is happening right now.
Soutine insisted that he could only depict a subject if he had it in front of him, and various accounts of how he managed this with a huge quarter-side of beef have come down to us. In her impassioned and informative biography, Celeste Marcus shares the most lurid. After hauling the carcass from the slaughterhouse to his studio under cover of darkness, Soutine set to work painting it, but after a few days it began to go green and give off a terrible stench.
more here.
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