ART CHRONICLE
( HAIM SOUTINE
Soutine was until recently on the periphery of our attention
here in America-not so much disregarded as overlooked. We had got
used to thinking of Miro as the only significant new painter to issue
directly from the School of Paris after 1918. When Soutine chanced
to come into focus he was viewed with respect, only we
did
not see
enough of him. Lately we began to suspect, when we thought of it,
that he might be the greatest of the Expressionists since Van Gogh; but
we had not seen the right things yet. Two or three pictures and certain
parts of other pictures aroused expectations-landscapes and still lifes
for the most part, not the more widely known figure pieces. Since I had
not been to Merion, outside Philadelphia, to see the hundred or so paint–
ings of his, done mostly before 1923, that are in the Barnes Foundation,
the current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of seventy-five
oils representing all periods of his career gave me my first real oppor–
tunity to verify those expectations. They were disappointed.
Made manifest are capacities for a great art that went largely
unrealized. Soutine aimed for a maximum of expressive intensity and
he asked, perhaps, too much of painting. Certainly he paid too little heed
to its inescapable requirement of a minimum of decorative organization,
without which even easel-pictures must fail of unity. Rembrandt himself
-Soutine's model--could not afford to dispense with that minimum,
and when he did, even he suffered for it (though I prefer, in most cases,
to attribute whatever he seems to lose to darkening by time rather than
to his hand and eye). Having less than Rembrandt in the way of craft
and culture with which to redeem its absence, Sou tine had all the more
reason to take pains with the decorative. That he did not do so until near
the end of his life, that he showed a sovereign unconcern with it until
then, constitutes the source of my disappointment. And I cannot make
responsible for it a bias on my part against all anti-decorative, non–
Mediterranean conceptions of pictorial art; what Soutine wanted of
painting seems to belong too much to the province of poetry or music,
and beyond any "art of space."
The altogether extraordinary force of Soutine's touch, as discerned
