Pablo Picasso was among the few who stood beside Chaim Soutine’s grave as his corpse was lowered into it. It was Aug. 11, 1943, and Paris was under Nazi occupation. Mr. Soutine — the artist, the genius, the Jew — had died in his hospital bed with his belly cut open after being smuggled into the city in a black-and-white-flagged ambulance to avoid Nazi detection.
Mr. Soutine’s lover had insisted that he procure the best medical treatment available in France, despite the fact that they had been hiding together in the forests and farmland outside Paris so that he would not be rounded up and sent to an extermination camp. The hearse’s journey from farmland to hospital cost him precious hours. By the time the doctor performed the surgery, it was already too late.
At birth and death, the world assigned Mr. Soutine a status: He was born as a Jew — in a shtetl outside Minsk in what is now Belarus in 1893 — and he died as a Jew. In the 50-year interim he lived only as an artist.
Like many other Ashkenazi Jews, Mr. Soutine left Eastern Europe just after a spate of pogroms that rattled the Russian Empire in the 1910s. After studying painting in Minsk and Vilnius in present-day Lithuania, he joined the school of Jewish painters rankling the French art establishment in Montparnasse. His destitution was well known even in that impoverished milieu, but in the early 1920s an American art dealer bought 52 of his paintings, catapulting him from obscurity into the annals of art history.
In the society of Jewish painters in Paris that he joined in 1913, Mr. Soutine was widely esteemed. He was monomaniacal: utterly, obsessively committed to his craft. “Soutine had no biography outside his art; one might even say that his art was a substitute for a biography,” one art critic wrote. On his deathbed, Amedeo Modigliani whispered to a dealer he and Mr. Soutine had worked with, “I leave you a genius. I leave you Chaim Soutine.”
Perhaps Mr. Soutine would have been surprised to hear that Picasso helped bury him (the two men shared friends but were not friends with each other), but I like to imagine I give his bones a greater shock when I say Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, over his grave every time I visit its corner in Montparnasse Cemetery. Of the traditions he was bequeathed — the Jewish faith, Russian Jewish cultural heritage, the culture refugee communities cultivate in a cosmopolitan center — the only one he seized with both hands was the tradition of great artists in whose company he condignly placed himself. What does identity matter when one has been blessed with genius?
The story of his life can be told as a war between the force of his will and the force of history. History won when it reduced him to another victim of Hitler’s reign. Mr. Soutine’s story is universal and eternal.
Every generation births its own monsters with the same appetite to pulp a people’s will and to wring the artists from their art. Like Mr. Soutine, today’s refugees are members of a community of artists, broadly construed, who transcend circumstance, who seek out and seize and build their own identities in addition to the ones into which they were born.
“Every time I remember a book from my destroyed bookshelves, I weep,” the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha recently wrote on social media. “It is more than paper.” In Gaza, his brother rooted through the rubble to salvage the books that hadn’t been destroyed. Art galleries throughout Europe have opened their doors to Ukrainian artists who are among the three million people displaced since the full-scale Russian invasion began two years ago. To live as an artist in exile is among the most glorious triumphs of human will: a spiritual victory.
The majesty of Mr. Soutine’s work is the primary subject of “Chaim Soutine: Against the Current,” currently at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen. It is the first major retrospective of the artist in over a decade anywhere in the world. The exhibit offers an overwhelming wealth of genius, the sum of five decades’ work. My favorites of his landscapes are the ones he did in hiding at the end of his life. The wind whips the trees in exhilarating blues and greens; he was home, which is to say he was himself, with a brush in his hand.
Mr. Soutine could not paint on command. He could only obey an inner necessity. To commence a work, he needed to feel possessed, overcome by the beauty of a subject and the bizarre compulsion to communicate that beauty in paint. He waited for these seizures of intelligent energy to grip him as a prophet awaits divine whispers. It is glorious to be a vessel for truth beyond ordinary comprehension. And if the compulsion — what he called “the miracle” — did not come, he would brood, growing increasingly anxious that the thunderbolt would never strike again.
His paintings look like the work of a man in the throes of something more than human. Élie Faure, the greatest art critic of the 1920s and 30s (with whom Mr. Soutine shared a brief and almost romantically intense friendship), said that Mr. Soutine was the most spiritual painter alive because he was the most carnal. For the “Boeuf Écorché” series that he painted in the 1920s, Mr. Soutine bought a full beef carcass from an abattoir near the artist colony where he once lived.
Mr. Soutine, entranced by Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox,” wanted the color and complexity of the open body with its glimmering alizarin fibers and luscious tissues. When the meat began to decay and lose its flush, he bought buckets of blood and doused the beast to restore the precious red. Legend has it that his downstairs neighbors saw the sticky liquid leaking through the floorboards and began screaming, convinced someone had killed Mr. Soutine above their heads.
When neighbors forced open the door, they found him painting wildly, wholly immersed in his work. There was no distance between himself and his art. Art was his country. Art was his heart and mind.
“Culture,” said the Syrian artist Bashar, who fled Aleppo in 2015, “has no country, no language.” Bashar, Mosab Abu Toha and Chaim Soutine remind us that it is a blessing to be touched with the madness that compels us to create. Such people live in history but are not of it. They are more than pawns in the politics of their time: They are artists.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
