oday being the last day of National Vegetarian Week, this week’s choice of picture is Chaim Soutine’s spectacular portrait of a very large chunk of raw meat: Carcass of Beef, painted in Paris in 1925. The artist was in his early thirties when he chose to tackle this bloody theme, one well suited to the raw expressionism of his style and the morbidity of his temperament. Soutine’s depictions of animal carcasses offended many people when they were first shown. Rene Huyghe, chief curator of the Louvre, accused the artist of attempting to “weaken the great tradition of French painting” (an eccentric criticism given that Soutine was a Lithuanian Jew, not a native Frenchman) and branded him “the vampire, the painter tipsy with blood.”
Photographic realism was never one of Soutine’s ambitions. He wanted to convey his sense of nature’s deeper rhythms, its tactile as well as its visual properties, together with his own emotional responses to those things, rather than simply painting what the world looked like. But it was always important to him to work from the thing itself, as his contemporary Monroe Wheeler noted in explaining the genesis of the so-called “side of beef” paintings:
“In 1925, when he had a studio large enough in the Rue du Mont St Gothard, he procured the entire carcass of a steer... He did at least four similar canvases, as well as sketches … and meantime the steer decomposed. According to the legend, when the glorious colours of the flesh were hidden from the enthralled gaze of the painter by an accumulation of flies, he paid a wretched little model to sit beside it and fan them away. He got from the butcher a pail of blood, so that when a portion of the beef dried out, he could freshen its colour. Other dwellers in the Rue Mont St Gothard complained of the odour of the rotting flesh, and when the police arrived Soutine harangued them on how much more important art was than sanitation or olfactory agreeableness.”
The inspiration for Carcass of Beef was Rembrandt’s painting of a slaughtered ox in the Louvre. But whereas Rembrandt provides a setting for the grisly spectacle – an interior, with a girl peeking round the door – Soutine presents it in brutal close-up. The flayed and disembodied creature was, in his eyes, symbolic of the violence of existence itself in a twentieth-century metropolis. “In the body of a woman Courbet was able to express the atmosphere of Paris,” he remarked; “I want to show Paris in the body of an ox.”
He was born in Smilovitchi, a Lithuanian village in the so-called “Pale of Settlement”, a vast rural ghetto running along Russia’s western boundary from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In the shtetl – the small East European Jewish community, extremely orthodox in outlook – painting itself was regarded with extreme suspicion. Soutine was the tenth son of an impoverished garment mender, who wanted the boy to follow in his own trade, and whose views on art seem to have been more or less synonymous with those of the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” By the artist’s own account he was brought up to regard painting as a transgressive, forbidden activity. He remembered stealing from the household money to buy pencils and being locked in the cellar for two days as punishment; and being beaten severely when he offered to paint the local rabbi’s portrait.
In his teens, Soutine scraped together enough money for a mediocre art training in the town of Vilna before finally leaving Lithuania for France. His early years in Paris were marked by extreme poverty. He lived for several years in a rabbit-warren of artists’ dwellings and studios known as “La Ruche” (the beehive), in the Vaugirard district. Food was so scarce that Soutine was reduced to begging employees of the nearby slaughterhouse for scraps of spare meat. Later, the same source furnished his ox carcass. By the mid-1920s, his pictures were selling for considerable amounts of money and poverty was behind him. But the Carcass of Beef – an open wound of a picture, if ever there was one – shows that he still felt scarred by his experiences. The flayed, suspended creature appears still to be struggling, even after death. The painter seems to probe its insides, not merely delineate them, feeling the flesh with his brush as he paints it: tracking the drips of blood, fingering the pathetic concavity of the animal’s eviscerated ribcage.
It is often a mistake to talk about art in terms of race or nation, but Soutine’s Jewish origins – and his keenness to escape them – also seem of significance here. The close relationship between food and death lies at the foundation of Judaism’s kosher laws. In the shtetl where Soutine was brought up, animals could only be killed by the ritual slaughterer, the shokhet, using a perfectly smooth blade. Then they were to be rinsed and drained of all blood. Soutine’s ragged and bloodily dripping Carcass of Beef is about as far from a kosher piece of meat as it is possible to get. The artist seems to draw a parallel between the animal carcass, a stretched piece of flesh, and the stretched skin of his own canvas. I wonder if there is a kind of defiance behind that equivalence – Soutine revelling in the fact that his art, like his subject matter, was a violation of the Jewish laws and values that had dominated his unhappy youth. The paradox is that the Carcass of Beef still feels, to me, like an image with spiritual purpose. With its glowing colours and tragic subject it might almost be a scene of martyrdom, in stained glass. Meditating on the closeness between death and life, Soutine created an image of how much life persists in death. It is a religious painting, of a kind, but painted by a man who had long left his old religion behind.