The Impact of Chaim Soutine
De Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon
CologneNov 2 - Dec 15, 2001
The importance of Chaim Soutine's Céret landscapes for postwar American abstraction is a familiar modernist trope. But to demonstrate it in an exhibition that juxtaposes Soutine's work with that of Pollock and de Kooning is another proposition, and to chart Soutine's influence on postwar European figuration is a different story entirely. In trying to follow both paths in a single show last Fall, "The Impact of Chaim Soutine," at Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne, the American organizers, Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, took the high road, as it were, focusing only on documented influences and major figures. Their other, unstated purpose seems to have been to present a number of relatively unknown Soutine paintings that were not included in their 1993 catalogue raisonné of the artist's work. By sticking to the big guns--Soutine himself as well as Pollock, de Kooning, Bacon and Dubuffet--the Cologne show argues for a newly rigorous reading of Soutine as a deity of spontaneous painting. (Brooks Adams in "Art in America," April 2002)
