86
PAR TISAN REVIEW
came less furious and the objects it described more clearly placed in a
more outspokenly traditional illusion. It is a gain in my opinion. Soutine
had gone more than halfway in the direction of tradition before--in the
famous (and bigger than usual for him) "Carcass of Beef' of 1925,
which has a complete and unusual unity but suffers, I feel, from an
overripe translucency of surface, due to glazing, that makes it a bit too
picturesque. (ChagalI too has a weakness for the picturesque, but ex–
ploited it better at the same time that he suffered more from it as a
factor of superficiality.) Now Soutine raises the compromise with tradi–
tion to a higher level. The subject may be addressed more convention–
ally, its poetry made more obvious and impersonal, but the method of
the form becomes subtler, more controlled, more refined, and in ex–
change for the impact of the distortions we receive the more valuable
unity of the whole picture. I thought the finest picture at the Museum
of Modern Art the "House at Oiseme" of 1934, which, however con–
ventional and indebted to Courbet in its approach to the subject, comes
off as a triumph of closely modulated and powerfully felt paint. T he
color is narrower in range than before but precisely for that reason of
a more clarified force; tones are no longer clotted together at too widely
separated points of the value register. The "Plucked Goose" of 1933 is
another unified work that might seem conventional at first but which
actually possesses great originality of touch and color: it is a picture
best seen from close up. Like the "House at Oiseme," it is painted,
curiously enough, on a wood panel. Among other pictures at the Museum
of Modern Art that I would single out as complete works of art, in con–
trast to statements of sheer feeling, are the very rich red "Seated Choir
Boy" (1930-and also done on wood), the "Boy in Blue" (1929), sev–
eral of the smaller and later portraits such as the "Concierge" (1935),
and "Woman in Profile" (1937), as well as the following landscapes:
"Alley of Trees" (1936), "Windy Day, Auxerre" (1939), "Landscape
with Reclining Figure" (1942). There is another landscape, "Retum
from School after the Storm" (1942), that shows two little girls, indicated
as tiny blobs in the first two of the three landscapes just mentioned,
hurrying toward the foreground along a path through open fields. I find
this picture exceedingly moving, especially in the figure of the little girl
on the right, without liking it altogether as art. The contradiction con–
tains
in nuce
the problem raised by most of Soutine's work.
Mr. Wheeler, in his valuable catalogue, writes that Soutine's grow–
ing mastery of his craft in the thirties was accompanied by gradual
boredom and fatigue; that the most powerful factor in his art having
been "his ghastly anxiety lest the power and skill of his brush fail
to
