Friday Night…oops Saturday Morning Gallery Chat, Bodies Painted As Meat

“A Pale Green Mermaid Blog”

 

Good Morning, today let’s take a look at an artist’s interpretation of the human form.  The painter that comes to mind who saw the body as a semi-menacing commodity is Chaim Soutine.

Chaim Soutine is often categorized in the tail end of Impressionism but  he was an Expressionistic painter as well.  Born in Russia he worked in a meat packing plant and used decaying carcasses as an inspiration for his painting.

Look at the paintings below, how do you think his interest in animal carcasses effected his depiction of the human form ?

	Chaim Soutine, Carcass of 164 x 240 – 12k –	Chaim Soutine. 624 x 516 – 44k
*Chaïm Soutine, Self portrait 461 x 920 – 55k –

 from Google Images

His paintings are fleshy and sometimes bloody but there is always a sweetness in the subjects expression. 

Check out his work at www.artcyclopedia.com  search for Soutine.

 

See, even meat carcasses can inspire art!  Have a fun day!

 

Note:

Soutine once horrified his neighbours by keeping an animal carcass in his studio so that he could paint it (Carcass of Beef). The stench drove them to send for the police, whom Soutine promptly lectured on the relative importance of art over hygiene.  (now I call that spunk!)

Soutine painted 10 works in this series, which have since became his most iconic. His carcass paintings were inspired by Rembrandt’s still life of the same subject, which he discovered while studying the Old Masters in the Louvre. In February 2006, the oil painting of this series ‘Le Boeuf Ecorche’ (1924) sold for a record £7.8 million ($13.8 million) to an anonymous buyer at a Christies auction held in London – after it was estimated to fetch £4.8 million.

Soutine produced the majority of his works from 1920 to 1929. He seldom showed his works, but he did take part in the important exhibition The Origins and Development of International Independent Art held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1937 in Paris, where he was at last hailed as a great painter. Soon thereafter France was invaded by German troops. As a Jew, Soutine had to escape from the French capital and hide in order to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. He moved from one place to another and was sometimes forced to seek shelter in forests, sleeping outdoors. Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly, he left a safe hiding place for Paris in order to undergo emergency surgery, which failed to save his life. On August 9, 1943, Chaim Soutine died of a perforated ulcer. Soutine was interred in Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

 FROM WIKIPEDIA