Author(s): Simonetta Fraquelli (Editor); Claire Bernardi (Editor)

Art

"I've always been crazy about Soutine--all of his paintings," said Willem de Kooning in 1977, speaking about Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Of all the abstract expressionists, de Kooning was the only one who continued to praise Soutine throughout his career and to credit him with an influence on his work. But how much was de Kooning's approach impacted by Soutine?

Soutine de Kooning dramatically juxtaposes the two artists and shows Soutine's decisive influence on the development of de Kooning's art. De Kooning first discovered Soutine's work before World War II in the galleries of New York. The expressive force of Soutine's painting, coupled with his image as an "accursed" artist struggling with the vicissitudes and excesses of bohemian life in Paris during the interwar years, exerted a powerful influence on a new generation of postwar painters in the United States. It was during these years that de Kooning matured his own personal form of expressionism, which, with its visceral brushstrokes and heavy impasto, lies somewhere between figuration and abstraction. And a significant turning point in de Kooning's work, evident in his celebrated Women paintings of the early 1950s, coincides with his in-depth study of Soutine at retrospectives at New York's Museum of Modern Art and his visit to the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. This lavishly illustrated book traces the development of that influence, paying particular attention to the posthumous retrospective of Soutine's work that was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.