Memories of Starobielsk by Jozef Czapski

Author:Jozef Czapski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

DERVISH

On Chaïm Soutine

Paris. The Occupation. Eighty-three Jewish painters are deported to camps by the Germans and murdered. Soutine goes into hiding in the nearby countryside. For several years he has had an intestinal ulcer. Cancer? A sudden deterioration. Rushed to the Junot clinic in Montmartre, operated on too late, he dies on August 9, 1943, exactly sixteen years ago. He is forty-nine. “Give me a shave, I don’t want to enter the other world with a shaggy beard,” he is said to have yelled before he died.

Soutine’s first big exhibition in France (119 canvases from America, France, Switzerland, England) was undertaken by the Galerie Charpentier, not by an official institution, not one of the museums, which—apart from the Petit Palais and the museum in Grenoble—do not own a single painting of his.

In one of the glass cases at the exhibition a few pages are laid out—his letters: J’ai décidé de rentrer à Chartres, je suis trop triste. . . . Je décidais de ne pas aller à l’invitation de la femme écrivain, elle est trop embêtante.1 A very slanting hand, uncertain, and those strings of letters of uneven size, always sloping downward. Why do I have the impression from merely looking at these letters (I am not a graphologist) that it is the handwriting of a flayed man?

This exhibition was a revelation to me. I write that word with full consciousness of its weight. Soutine’s canvases have fascinated me for thirty years: his meats, the Boeuf écorché, the choirboys, the red groom at Chez Maxime. I discovered Goya after Soutine and perhaps thanks to Soutine. But today for the first time, looking at Soutine’s paintings, I had the impression that a good dozen painters of the first order, his contemporaries and mine, have now disappeared or rather receded to a level of lesser importance: Picasso, the royal tiger of our artistic circus; Braque, a precious poet, a connoisseur of form and color; even the art of the great Rouault, perhaps closest to Soutine, doesn’t always have the same quality of color. In comparison with those of Soutine, some of Rouault’s canvases seem impoverished, less anchored in a vision, more detached; they sometimes seem made with a cookie cutter.

We look at Soutine’s paintings cowedly, so exposed is he here: the hunger, the mud, the Jewish lice and fleas of Smilavichy, from where he had to flee, beaten by the sons of the rabbi because he had made a portrait of their father—a crime: “Thou shalt make unto thee no graven image . . .”—Soutine’s studios in Paris, dirty, with dark, putrefying, foul-smelling pieces of meat, which he sprinkles with blood to “revive” them—portraits of people as if on a rack, children with innocent eyes, eviscerated geese, turkeys, ducks hung from hooks—“I saw a butcher cut the throat of a goose and bloody it . . . I wanted to cry out, but the butcher’s gleeful look forced the cry back into my throat.” Soutine felt his throat—“I feel that cry here

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