In Boeuf écorché (Carcass of Beef, 1925), an ox hangs by the ankles in a blue studio, its blood a deep red stain. Chaïm Soutine painted several carcasses, and this one is an Expressionist answer to Rembrandt’s own Boeuf écorché of 1655, now in the Louvre.

The French term for still life, nature morte, literally means “dead nature” — which is the whole collection in a phrase. The PDR’s selection of roughly two dozen Soutine still lifes makes the case that his bridge between the Masters and the Moderns was deliberate, not instinctive.

The mechanics of the studio practice are worth the price of admission on their own:

  • Soutine rented a studio at 8 Rue Saint Gothard in the 14th Arrondissement and travelled eight kilometres north to the La Villette slaughterhouses to pick carcasses — chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and the spectacular ox, which he hung from the ceiling.
  • His model Paulette Jourdain recalled that he spent hours at the market choosing the right carcasses, and that she was sent out to buy him more blood, which he splashed over the bodies to revivify their tones.
  • The health department eventually showed up. Jourdain pleaded with the inspectors, who relented on one condition: the meat had to be regularly injected with ammonia.

What kept the paintings from being mere gore was erudition. Soutine haunted the Louvre, referenced Chardin, Corot and Delacroix, and after learning French read Balzac, Baudelaire and Montaigne alongside the Russian novels of his youth. Chiara Palermo’s reading, quoted in the collection, is that he “reenacted” his heroes rather than copying them — painting from life, submitting himself not just to the memory of the greats but to their own experience of blood, guts and decay.

The biography behind that is displacement plus sudden money. Born in 1893 in Smilavichy, a village near Minsk in the Russian Empire, to a poor family; left at seventeen for art school in Vilnius; reached Paris three years later and moved into La Ruche, the Montparnasse hostel built for the city’s penniless painters, where rent was cheap or non-existent. There he fell in with Modigliani, who painted him. After Modigliani’s death in 1920 he began leaving Paris for longer stretches, until 1923, when the American pharmaceutical magnate Albert C. Barnes bought sixty paintings for 37,600 francs — a pittance from Barnes’ side, and fame and freedom from Soutine’s. The Barnes Collection in Philadelphia still holds twenty-two of his works.

The collection’s sharpest passage is about how the myth flattened the man. Waldemar George, his first monographer, described the work as looking “like a hemorrhage,” and biographers “would exult in the degree of his abasement, perhaps thrilled to cast the young Jewish artist as a refugee in need of French money and French class.” When Soutine told George his work represented “the implementation of a conception of art,” George laughed it off. Even the grave — in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, marked with a cross chosen by his last companion, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, former wife of Max Ernst — became someone else’s interpretation of him. He died in 1943, in hiding from the Nazis.

The painters who get read as pure feeling usually turn out to have been running a rigorous programme. Soutine’s still lifes are where that programme collides with the messiness of life and death, which is a more interesting story than the one about the wild émigré genius.