BERN.- Between 16 August and 1 December 2024 the Kunstmuseum Bern is devoting the major retrospective Chaïm Soutine: Against the Current to the painter Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943). His expressive and vividly coloured paintings address the existential dimension of life and are at the same time a pure artistic experiments. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen in Düsseldorf and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

Chaïm Soutine is one of the great painters of classical modernism. His works show swaying landscapes, slaughtered animals and people from the lower strata of society; his models were pages, chambermaids, cooks and altar- boys. The vividly coloured paintings address the existential, vulnerable dimension of life and bear impressive witness to a precarious existence on the margins of society.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern comprises some 60 works from all periods of the artist’s career, including six works from the Kunstmuseum’s own collection (all from the legacy of Georges F. Keller), as well as international loans from institutions such as the Musée d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It shows works from the genres characteristic of Soutine – portraits, landscapes and still lifes – and focuses on the first decades of his career.

Declarations of love to life

Soutine’s paintings are impetuous explosions of colour, and at the same time demonstrate dramatic vulnerability. They are declarations of love to life and to the people at the lowest level of society – an experience that Soutine shared through his own biography. His empathetic and raw portraits of simple people, his energetic, colourful landscapes and the mysterious still lifes of slaughtered animals reflect a whole era and a generation marked by war, social abuse and the remorseless conflict of religious and political views of the world.

Against the current

Chaïm Soutine grew up in a Jewish Orthodox family in a small town near Minsk in present-day Belarus. In 1913, at the age of 20, he travelled to Paris, which was to become his second home. Even so, he remained an outsider throughout his life, with a poor command of the language at first, and an ignorance of socially acceptable manners. The experience of flight and migration that profoundly shaped Soutine’s life is apparent in his works. His few close friends included the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.

While many of his contemporaries engaged with abstraction, Soutine’s painting was figurative, extremely vivid and expressive. His works are marked by a powerful, restless line that gives his paintings an incomparable expressive force.

The ‘artist’s artist’

The exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bern has the aura of a journey of discovery: even though Soutine is treated as one of the most important modern artists, and represented in many major museum collections, his work is less well known than for instance that of his friend and colleague Amedeo Modigliani or that of Marc Chagall. His influence on painting after 1945 can be seen among the representatives of Abstract Expressionism, the CoBrA group of artists and the School of London, which chose Soutine as an inspiring model. Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and above all Francis Bacon are his best-known admirers. But also contemporary artists like Dana Schutz, Leidy Churchman, Amy Sillman, Emma Talbot, Thomas Hirschhorn, Chantal Joffe and Imran Qureshi name Soutine as a key figure in their artistic biographies. In a film produced specially for the exhibition these seven artists provide an insight into their fascination with Soutine. In 2020–21 Soutine assumed contemporary symbolic status in the democratic protests in Belarus, which were later crushed by repression.