Soutin Kossoff art exhibition

Painters Chaïm Soutine and Leon Kossoff are often curated in conversations exploring artist relationships, but separately. Kossoff’s partnerings have been more contemporary, and predictable – at the Barbican’s bomb-fest, his friend and fellow North Londoner Frank Auerbach - whilst Soutine is linked with those influenced by his works, like the abstract artist Willem de Kooning. In future, perhaps he’ll be displayed alongside the figurative practice of Jenny Saville.

Hastings Contemporary suggests a long acknowledged, but little explored, artistic connection between both artists. They never met - though Kossoff knew of Soutine’s Céret paintings – and came from very different backgrounds. Soutine left Belarus for Lithuania, then France, before World War I; Kossoff was a lifelong Londoner, canonised as an artist of the aftermath of World War II. Both would come to be respected as modern and contemporary masters in their respective cities and schools, of Paris and London. 

Soutine is already well-represented in America, a product of his patronage by the collector Albert C. Barnes. He’s lesser known, however, in the UK - perhaps this pairing is inspired to raise his profile, and widen access to his works. (The Courtauld Institute of Art has already sampled celebrity endorsements.) Whatever art types might say – and it’s an easier sell than Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian now showing show at Tate Modern – it works, if the words of the visitors in the gallery are anything to go by.

‍Soutine | Kossoff focuses on landscapes and portraits, two areas of shared interest, and like Tate, Hastings Contemporary too separates the artists by room. More interesting are the works which challenge this binary. Soutine respects his surrounds, depicting individual characters in the natural environment; his ‘L’Arbre de Vence’ (1929) has much in common in Mondrian’s ‘The Red Tree’ (1908), another artist deeply influenced by Vincent van Gogh. Only his earliest works, the clearest imitations, warp and writhe with a similar life to the modern Dutch Master; more generally, Soutine’s paint falls flatter.

Both artists revered tradition – Old Masters like Rembrandt van Rijn, Gustave Courbet, plus Paul Cézanne – above their contemporaries. (A moment where it was particularly passé to speak of others, Soutine was more ardent in his opposition, vehemently denying his taste for van Gogh, and savaging the ‘swindle’ Pablo Picasso.) 

Such acknowledgements are the rare instances when curator James Russell strays from his subjects’ primacy. He too is wholly present in the video, and the captions, which detail this history, with gestures and turns of phrase as expressive as the art on display. Rather than pretend they laid the foundations of modern art, he focuses on how they worked with those of the past, taking conventions to more abstract – and ‘explosive’ - conclusions. 

Save for sites of both demolition and construction, and the striking presence of blue – an unexpected parallel with Soutine – there are no surprises in the selection of Kossoffs. Hastings’ Miniature Railway provides the unexpected backing track to the child-like origins of the artist’s practice. Kossoff came to paint trains after seeing his grandson’s excitement at this ‘everyday wonder’, a banality witnessed by many but ‘rarely recorded by artists’ - in the 20^th century, perhaps.

Certainly, Kossoff’s Kilburn and Willesden landscapes could also be read as portraits of his personal relationships. As Kossoff leans more into abstraction – his first painting of his father is almost illegible – his portraits also become self-portraits of himself as a bold artist. Beyond ‘brave experiments’, they’re also compromises between figuration and abstraction, a necessary reaction to the wider artistic abandonment of portrait painting.

Hidden figures feature in their landscapes and portraits, in more ways than one. Soutine never kept records of his models, nor depicted working people at work. Their resulting portraits are ambiguous; ironic, or respectful, of his sitters’ dignity and unspoken service. (Fred Sirieix, the French maître d’hotel of First Dates, charitably punts for the latter.)

Hastings only hints at their agency. We see pastry chefs painted like ‘macho Renaissance princes’ (One, offered payment in cash or a Soutine painting for sitting, opted for the former, thinking little of the artist’s work). The curation quietly addresses the absence of women as influences – whilst omnipresent as subjects – by pointing out the ‘intelligent, life-worn faces’ of the youngest sitters, or crediting his Jewish contemporaries, like N.M. Seedo. 

Kossoff carves out faces with care, whilst Soutine near-caricatures his sitters. ‘A connoisseur of ears,’ Russell calls him, for his fascination with details, and exaggerated features. Women get drooping, weeping eyes, their faces are either elongated or squashed. ‘Le Roquin’ (1917) has fingers long from waiting, humorously proposed by the artist.

Still, Soutine’s ‘empathetic expressionism’ is better kept to the hands of his Neue Sachlichkeit contemporaries and successors. No doubt, Kossoff tends more towards German Expressionism than Soutine in his practice here too. With a few bold brush strokes, he cuts a tender depiction of his wife, Rosalind, his soft emotions in contrast with the stark red, yellow and black. 

Soutine | Kossoff keeps both artists’ backstories to a minimum, encouraging more creative than personal connections. It skips over their wartime migrations, and shared Jewishness, perhaps out of respect, for Soutine’s failed efforts to escape it in Paris. But avoiding the obvious prevents the exhibition from ever fully addressing the violence in Soutine’s practice. 

Soutine used painting to work through childhood traumas, dead animals to depict the everyday violence faced by humans across interwar Europe, well before the Holocaust. His neighbours often called the police, or pushed him to practise in the stables, sickened by the stench of fresh blood, flesh, and rotting carcasses which seeped from his studio. Art historian Esti Dunow highlights too how he ‘hunted down’ and destroyed the works he didn’t like. 

For curators like Stephen Brown, it is this grotesque reality that marks him out from his contemporaries, and even makes him ‘edgy’. It’s also the easy option to get true-crime-sensitised (and seeking) customers into the museum space. 

If violence and Jewishness were so intimately entwined to Soutine, so too must we resist separating the art from the artist. His paintings are ‘acts of aggression’, reflections and products of his temperament, both subject and perpetuator of physical violence. But in Hastings, he’s censured, and thus deprived his full complexity. We only read that he might have become a boxer, were his career as an artist not such a success. 

We can both address the social context - and show Soutine’s superlatives - without perpetuating exploitation. By honing in on his practice in this most experimental period: his bold colours and experiments in vertical forms; the ugliness of his updated vanitas; and his moving still lifes, which are both landscapes painted by Soutine and portraits. In death and meat, he keeps a contradictory empathy with his subjects - and pays homage to the horrors of Goya and his beloved Masters.

Soutine | Kossoff stays apolitical in comparison to previous exhibitions. Its curators are keen to emphasise its family-friendly nature; it is no coincidence the director’s favourite is a Cézanne-like scene of Willesden Swimming Pool, one of many works here supported by Tate. The perfect accompaniment to a day at the beach, and a lively alternative to the serenity of Yun Hyong-keun downstairs.

It’s designed to ‘fly the flag’ for the museum, to serve the local community and region, and be the ‘most important show beyond London this year’. (At the same time, it relies on a set of North London galleries who make the art, if not the economics of, such an exhibition work.) Again, it’s obvious, and like the captions, there’s no need to justify works or connections which speak so loudly for themselves.

We leave with the same love for Kossoff, and thoughtful about Soutine too. The UK could see a solo portraits show, or perhaps another pairing with a contemporary, continental European artist, like his friend Amedeo Modigliani, or Oskar Kokoschka, who crosses over in patronage, travels, and a late life tendency towards conservativism. There’s scope – and soon, after Soutine | Kossoff, there’ll be appetite too.  

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‍Soutine | Kossoff is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 24 September 2023.

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