![]() When asked what would happen if the curator had directly paired Soutine’s baffled-faced, 2ft-tall valet with the 5ft, near-faceless portrait of Seedo, Seated Woman (1957), Russell replies: the works “would fight with each other”. ![]() Seedo, in works such as Head of Seedo (1964). Faceless portrait Canvas acrylic paintingeasy tutorial for beginners no skills needed dkscreativity. Kossoff produced many depictions of the writer N.M. And Russell regards the figure’s near-abstract hands as approaching Kossoff’s own near-break with figuration. In Le valet de chambre (around 1927), Soutine uses “drips and splashes of colour,” Russell says, to lend texture to the servant’s very distinctive velvety sleeves. This inherent artificiality is most apparent in their portraits. Rather, he argues, each wanted to let their paint colours themselves seem to be a source of light. But unlike the Dutch master, “both were uninterested in recording light”, Russell says. And they both famously shared a love of Rembrandt, with each making paintings inspired by his work. There is a sense of near-formal continuity between the two artists, suggests Russell, who points out that Kossoff owned the Soutine catalogue raisonné. Kossoff-like his friend and fellow Soutine acolyte, Auerbach-viewed the ruins and construction sites of post-war London as a kind of dynamic visual wonderland, and that painting, showing a bombed area nominally coming back to life, imbues its array of steel girders with a Soutine-like spontaneity.īoth famously shared a love of Rembrandt, making paintings inspired by his work The show, which rigorously separates the two artists in otherwise flowing galleries, implicitly compares the Céret works with Kossoff’s post-war cityscapes, such as the expressive, yellow-brown blur of City Building Site (1961). Featuring around 20 paintings by each artist, the exhibition will include key works from Soutine’s Céret years, such as Les platanes à Céret (around 1920)-a “vibrant, fleshy, anarchic” painting, says the curator James Russell, which seems to have been created “without plan or pattern”. Soutine had an artistic breakthrough just after the First World War, when he created dozens of landscapes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a town called Céret. ![]() In Soutine | Kossoff, Hastings Contemporary assembles Soutine landscapes and portraits along with similar works by leading School of London painter Leon Kossoff (1926-2019).Ĭhaim Soutine's Les Platanes a Ceret (around 1920) C ollection Diethard Leopold. Its members, from Francis Bacon to Frank Auerbach, found inspiration in Soutine’s impasto beef carcasses and feverish landscapes. But he had an immediate afterlife in the 1950s, when he became a presiding influence for that other loose, decades-long, vaguely cosmopolitan movement, the School of London. Rising from near destitution to art stardom, Soutine-an Expressionist in all but name, and a product, like Marc Chagall, of Tsarist-era Jewish life-died from the effects of a bleeding ulcer, aged 50, during the Nazi occupation of France. Less of a formal movement than an informal time span, it was marked by cosmopolitanism, with Modernist-minded artists from around the world flocking to the French capital, in the first half of the 20th century, to innovate, hang around, work in obscurity, and wait for genius to emerge and fame to pounce. I want to seek more possibilities in painting and color, more possibilities in myself.The Belarus-born, France-based painter Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) is precisely the kind of figure we now associate with the School of Paris. I’m often asking myself, is my imagination unlimited? This question is the basis of all my art. I don’t want to limit my own work to someone else’s standards. While the human figure is there, the painter’s soul is missing. “Looking back at my past pieces, I always think they feel too much like portraits. He moved toward his current approach because he wanted his work to be unconstrained and offer more space for creative freedom. He does this to avoid any link to the outside world, and to make the painting solely a tool for recording his mood.Īmong his early works are some portraits with distinguishable faces. Occasionally, he paints with a specific subject in mind, but even then he’ll often still title the work as Someone or Untitled. Who they are is unimportant, because they exist solely in Yim’s mind. In his Portraits series, some of the subjects are based on real people while others are completely conjured up from the depths of his imagination. ![]()
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