The Impact of Chaim Soutine - De Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon

In 1913, the Lithuanian-born artist Chaim Soutine, barely twenty years old at the time, went to Paris to study the pictures in the city´s museums and galleries and to become a painter himself. After early, compelling portraits and unusual landscapes, Soutine began to create still lifes featuring dead pheasants, turkeys and rabbits or sides of beef in the middle of the twenties, all of them famous for their expressive brushwork. This book, expertly assembled by the two editors of the Chaim Soutine catalogue raisonné, not only presents and comments on a number of his key works - particularly from the decade after 1918 - which reveal his powerful influence and the momentous originality of his work. It also traces Soutine's considerable influence onto works of leading modern artists, for Chaim Soutine is regarded as a "painter of painters", as the book divulges in numerous tell-tale examples: Willem de Kooning, for instance, called Soutine his "favourite painter" and Jackson Pollock claims being greatly indebted to him, as in his late work Scent from 1955. Likewise, the authors outline distinct connections to many of Jean Dubuffet's and Francis Bacon's works with respect to technique, perception and motifs. The artist: Chaim Soutine (Smilovitchi (near Minsk) 1893 -1943 Paris). From 1910 -1913 studies at the art academy in Vilnius. Move to Paris. From 1919, Soutine paints in Céret. Hides from the Nazis after 1940; dies in 1943 under tragic circumstances from inner bleeding caused by an untreated ulcer. Exhibition Schedule: Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne 2.11.2001- 15.12.2001