 My name is Michael Williamson and I'm part of our team at the Barnes Foundation and today I'm doing a presentation on the Chaim Soutine. Chaim Soutine was born in a shtetl, which is really a rural ghetto, in the Lithuanian part of Russia in 1893. He was a tenth of eleven children and a family of menders, a caste below tailors. His village, Smilnovich, now in Belarus, was small and poor. Soutine was an outlier all of his life. He was consumed by painting even as a child, and this appalled his father and brothers who beat him for his secular heresy of making graven images. In 1909, his mother was able to gather together a small sum of money so that he could attend art school first in Minsk and later in Vilnius. And you can see on the map on the right, from about the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, there's kind of this white area and it was called the Pale of Settlement and it was a prescribed place for Jews to live at limited employment and starting in a latter half of the 19th century pogroms or these kind of violence against the Jews living that area was pretty rampant. At the age of 20, supported by a patron, he was able to make his way to Paris, the center of the art world at the time. He found a studio and a place to live in Montparnasse and met fellow Jewish immigrants, the Italian, Medio Modigliani, the Russian, Mark Chagall, the Bulgarian, Jews, Jules Paskin, and the Lithuanian, Jacques Lipschitz, and the Polish, Moise Kisle. Initially, Soutine attended the Eichel de Beaux-Arts in Paris, however, he found independent learning, scouring the galleries of the Louvre, much more focused education. And one of the critics from the Los Angeles Times writes, if artistic success depended on appearance, manners, hygiene, geniality, training, and outside support, he certainly would have been voted least likely to succeed. He struck his cupboards as a shtetl bumpkin, so poor that he always seemed disheveled and unwashed, so obsessed by his painting that he would slash or burn his canvases if they failed to fill his hopes. Soutine spent much of his time at the Louvre looking at Rembrandt's Carcass of Beef, created in 1663, and shardans the Ray, 1725 to 26. During the First World War, Soutine moved to Ceret, a small town near the Spanish border, very focused primarily on landscape painting. In 1922, Albert Barnes visited Soutine's dealer in Paris, Leopold Zaburowski, and purchased fifty-four paintings from the show, and by 1936 would purchase five more. The magazine Montparnasse proclaimed, Hello boys, cheer up. Mr. Barnes is within our walls. This was an extraordinary event for Soutine. This had many positive repercussions. He made an immediate leap out of poverty. He cleaned himself up, bought new clothes, and traveled to the south of France for an extended period, and at age twenty-nine, he became an instant art star. Over time, his work found its way into the collections of American art, patrons, and museums. Albert Barnes, quote, the main reason I bought so many paintings, he later said, was that they were a surprise, if not a shock, and I wanted to find out how he got that way. Besides, I felt that he was making creative use of certain traits of the work of Bosch, Tintoretto, Van Gogh, Domier, and Cezanne, and was getting new effects with color. So here we are with our flayed rabbit, which is in room five on the north wall. This rabbit is eviscerated on what appears to be a cutting board. It rests on white butcher paper. Compositionally, it combines a bird's eye view with a frontal view and the high horizon completely out of the frame. The rectangular cutting board is skewed slightly to the left. The board is bounded on the top, left, and right sides by a sanguine oxgall colored background. The board has a range of salmon-colored Mars and Venetian red coloring. The white butcher paper has inflections of red, tan, Naples yellow, and cool gray. For Soutine, white is not white but made of a range of subtle coloring. For this, I'd call him a colorist akin to the sensibilities of Renoir, Van Gogh, and Cezanne, though clearly charting his own idiosyncratic territory. The rabbit haunches apart, tufts of fur still on the feet, the chest cavity, and skinned head blood red with brilliant vermilion. Linear traces of white define the chest cavity wall. The thick impasto paint is smeared, scumbled, slathered. Some areas are built up using thin glazing. Soutine used brushes, paint knives, rags, and likely his bare hands to move paint on the canvas. Apparently, Soutine didn't begin to think a painting was inching towards completion unless every area of the canvas was layered with paint. He often scoured second-hand shops for used canvases. Is this totally out of frugality or a manifestation of an affinity for previous underpainting? I'm reminded of the Italian word pentamento, a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas. I'm also reminded of Lillian Hellman's introduction to a series of stories that she called pentamento, and I love her description of it, just so visually rich. Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens, it is possible in some pictures to see the original lines. A tree will show through a woman's dress. A child makes way for a dog. A large boat is no longer on an open sea. This is called pentamento because the painter repented, changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say the old conception, replaced by later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. There was some tension among the French artists that Barnes made significant purchase of. Soutine, Moldoleani, Pasquine, Kiesling, and Lipschitz. They were all foreign-born Jews, invited to show their work at the independent salon representing French modernism. To squelch nascent French anti-Semitism and nativism, the critic Roger Allard proposed calling the group School of Paris a name that grew in popularity over the years. When Barnes mounted his show of modern art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1923, ahead of the opening of the Foundation Gallery in 1925, Edith Powell of the Philadelphia Public Ledger described Soutine's paintings as portraits of the dregs of humanity and images of a diseased and degenerate world. The sting of public vilification wounded Barnes. When a boxer is wounded, he fights back even harder. When Albert Barnes grew up in the poorest sections of Philadelphia, it was really tough for him. Barnes's father was a butcher, but lost his right arm in the Civil War. Barnes knew meat, and he knew gnawing poverty. Soutine's flayed rabbit must have felt oddly familiar. Barnes coming of age in industrial Philadelphia, which is often called the workshop of the world, made him keenly attuned to race and class, the overflowing waves of the European immigrant population, including the first wave of the great migration of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. All were seeking jobs and a better life. Barnes was a self-made businessman who made his millions in pharmaceuticals before the age of 40. He had an uncanny, unwavering affinity for art and artist. He too was an outsider. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes' takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. 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