London 2018 Chaim Soutine

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I’m back in London for two weeks of theater and museums! I enjoy trying to set down my reactions to what I see and in order that my thoughts don’t disappear into the digital void of my laptop I will post to this blog when I find the time.



Let’s start with Chaïm Soutine (which is where I started yesterday six hours after my arrival at Heathrow). I’ve apparently seen his work (Gordon tells me I have) but he hasn’t stuck in my head before. That’s all changed after seeing the small but spectacular show of his portraits of hotel staff at the Courtauld Gallery.



The cumulative effect of these 21 portraits of bellboys, pastry cooks, and chambermaids is far greater than the sum of its parts. What makes this so?



Perhaps it’s the way the show makes clear that these portraits belong in a long tradition of noble portraits. Historically, uniforms suggested the rank and authority of kings and nobles. Here they mark position and rank of a sort, and Soutine lavishes the same attention on the uniforms that the old masters did, but he also shows how these uniforms constrain his subjects, placing them into a particular niche in the growing global economy of the early 20^th century. There’s irony here, of course, and also pathos in seeing the range of responses—pride, insecurity, eagerness to please, exhaustion—that these people show in the service economy of 100 years ago.



It’s not entirely clear to me if these tortured portraits portray genuine individuals or are reflections of Soutine’s own imagination. The features are irregular and the eyes rarely match one another. The backgrounds are most often indistinct dark masses, and at times these backgrounds actually seem to invade the borders of the individual himself.



But I think it’s the color that gives the show its special power: his intense reds and blues take my breath away, and his whites! His pastry chefs wear white aprons that, like the whites of Sargent’s society ladies, reflect the colors around them, but also reveal the stains from the day-to-day work of their lives. Any single one of these paintings is intensely colored. To go from midnight blue to deep red and back again as I pass through the exhibit leaves my senses quivering with the excitement of experiencing color as never before in my life.



Most of his subjects are men. The few women are less vivid, less engaged with the viewer. (His men tend to confront us, particularly one valet who appears in four iterations, each one more fed up than the last.)



One of these women, however, touched me deeply. It’s a full-length portrait of a chambermaid. Now the very fact of choosing a full-length portrait would suggest her importance but Soutine radically undercuts that impression by boxing her into a disturbingly narrow frame that forces us to imagine her constrained life.



I was reminded, oddly, of the monumentally disturbing Holbein portrait of the dead Christ. It’s powerful because of its uncompromising presentation of Christ as a dead man, but also because of its long, narrow frame that confines him to the tomb. (I nearly jumped out of my skin the first time I came across the painting in Basel.) To compare a minor painter and subject with a much greater one, this chambermaid seemed to me the vertical, living equivalent of that horizontal, dead Christ. And all the more pathetic for its accurate description of a human life.

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Comments

[Michelle Liechti]

wow Lisa!
I am finally reading your blog. Your eloquent writing quiets the little creatures inside me. Thanks. Most enjoyable.