By Agata Ida Kozuchowska

Musée de l’Orangerie’s temporary exhibition, entitled “Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning - Painting Embodied” places the violated body at the center of the contemporary discussion surrounding the masters of 20th century art. This side-by-side comparison show is a result of the museums and galleries’ growing desire to look back at the stylistic and theoretical links between the modern and the post-modern. The focus on the “painting embodied” or peinture incarnée attempts to reconcile the angst with the act of painting and what the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones calls “the meaty essence of humanity”. More than just a comparison show, it is a challenging journey through representation.

Here, the works of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), a Russian painter associated with the School of Paris, present a rather gruesome vision of the Parisian bohème. His gestural approach produces tactile effects due to the layering of thick impasto. His portraits explore the psychological depth without losing touch from the suffering flesh. This existentialist exploration of the material and the visceral echoes 20 years later within the works of the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904- 1997), especially in his famous series of “Women”.

The exhibition traces “the impact of Soutine’s painting on the pictorial vision of the great American painter” through their mutual focus on the body. Major themes include “tension between figures and shapelessness, fleshiness in painting, and the “gestural” painting style of both artists”.

Soutine and de Kooning’s bodies of work lend themselves to comparison: the twisted and anguished faces, tormented physiques and tremulous landscapes of Soutine seem to engage in a visual dialogue with de Kooning’s dissected women emerging from nervous canvases of uncomfortably lurid hues. The exhibition’s atmosphere is anxious and dense as our eye travels from one suffocating composition to another. There is an overarching sense of awe, contemplation and unease as the museumgoers wander slowly in self-imposed silence, under the watchful eyes the haunting portraits.

Both artists deal with the issue of representation, one of the biggest pictorial problems of the 20th century. While his fellow Abstract Expressionists rebelled against the body in favor of non-figurative abstraction around 1950, de Kooning stated: “It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today (…) But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it”.

Face to face with all those anguished figures one can’t help but shiver. There is no escape from the twisted limbs and half-smiles of Soutine’s bellboys or de Kooning’s grotesquely dissected, haunting Marylin Monroe, whose body is aggressively deconstructed to the point of deformity. This portrayal defies our expectations and goes against the American icon’s often idealized image. It is simultaneously important because it gives a specific name to his otherwise unidentified women. De Kooning’s sharp and aggressive lines are juxtaposed with Soutine’s dynamic swirls. In both men’s oeuvre, flesh and paint are synonymous, while dissection refers to the body as well as to the soul.

And after a while it seems obvious. The notion of the body functions at multiple levels here: the body represented, the body of the artist and the body of the viewer. The fleshiness is inescapable, it grounds man in the material world, it is the base of our existence. Soutine and de Kooning’s carnality reminds us that no/body is holy and no matter how hard we try, we will never be able to look away.

Bibliography

Dumas, Richard, and Juan Manuel Castro. “Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning, Painting Embodied - 2021-09-15 | Musée de l’Orangerie.” Accessed January 27, 2022. https://www.musee- orangerie.fr/en/exhibitions/chaim-soutine-willem-de-kooning-painting-embodied-196050.

Jones, Jonathan. “The Meaty Essence of Humanity – Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys Review.” The Guardian, October 17, 2017, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/17/chaim-soutine-portraits-courtauld- gallery-review-butcher-boy.

Kooning, Willem de. Marilyn Monroe, 1954. 1954. Oil on canvas. https://www.willem-de- kooning.org/marilyn-monroe.jsp.