Chaim Soutine ~ The Little Pastry Chef and other Pastry Chefs

Chaim Soutine painted a number of other pastry chefs in addition to The Little Pastry Chef at the Portland Art Museum. The one shown on the left from the Kunstmuseum Basel is a small almost square portrait (26 x 20 in). The chef seems to be both collapsing and distorted at the same time much like the chef above. He does seem much younger than the one in Portland and the painting's title ranges from The Pastry Chef to Baker Boy. Soutine painted it in 1919. The one shown below carries the same title as The Little Pastry Chef here in Portland and was painted in 1922, a year later.

Later in 1927, Soutine evidently painted yet another pastry chef and its title is remarkably The Pastry Chef. Like the other chefs, this one's right shoulder is tilted slightly up. Unlike the other chef paintings, there's a lack of red here. The one from Portland punches red with the use of red in the background. Each of the other two chefs are holding something red. By 1927, red seems to have dropped from Soutine's palette as a front running color. This definitely seems to be calmest of the compositions, the one with the least churning abstraction and build up of color.

The Pageboy

Soutine's Pageboy is from 1925, perhaps more poular than the Pastry Chef it is one of the portraits Soutine did of uniformed workers from grooms to bellhops. He was the 10th of 11 children born in modern day Belarus. Between world wars Soutine painted in Paris. He's been called the precursor to De Kooning and Pollack and took his inspiration from Rembrandt and Chardin.
Three years before he painted the Pageboy and one year after he painted the Little Pastry Chef Soutine got his big break when Philideplphia art educator Albert Barnes bought 52 of his paintings in 1922. Right after this major celebration of his work in the art world, Soutine tried to burn and destroy his past work and find a new style. What are the major differences between the Pageboy and the Pastry Chef?
Hollow eyes, I would rather hang out with the Pastry Chef.

Chaim Soutine ~ The Little Pastry Chef

This week's image here at Fifty Two Pieces is Chaim Soutine's The Little Pastry Chef. Painted in 1921, it shows a pastry chef with a wry look standing very near a chair. Some say he would have preferred sitting there while Soutine painted him. That could explain the expression on his face or perhaps it showed the other question -- why would you possibility want to paint me? At the Portland Art Museum, this painting is straight ahead of you as you come up the stairs to enter the Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. The flaming red will warm you on a chilly day. As you get nearer you see that the red is made up of a myriad of colors, the same ones in that white jacket and hat the pastry chef is wearing. More about Soutine and The Little Pastry Chef later this week.

If you haven't seen this Soutine painting in person you should plan a trip to the Portland Art Museum. At about twenty feet from the top of the stairs, you'll be in the center of six major pieces of modern art.

On the left –– Gauguin's Garden View, Rouen
At a slight diagonal on the left –– Monet's Waterliles
Straight ahead –– The Little Pastry Chef
On the right –– Cezanne's Paris: Quai de Bercy - La Halle aux Vin
At a diagonal on the right -- Brancusi's Muse
Just past the Muse –– Picasso's Head of Woman

And around the corner from the Gauguin you'll find Van Gogh's Ox Cart.

Van Gogh and David Hockney

Some people might think that Van Gogh and David Hockney would be an unlikely duo. Others think that art makes strange bedfellows. In any case, I was doing some online reading this morning after waking up early, 3 am to be precise. A quick google search found a rather in-depth article on Van Gogh's letters. They've already all been translated so what is new. Well the new appears to be a complete translation as opposed to the one previously authorized by Van Gogh's family. Vincent it would seem had a few racy moments. Some letters were withheld and others translated with fewer phrases from the vernacular. The project has taken three men many years to complete. It is being published in six volumes that will weigh in fairly close to Mike Tyson's fighting weight. Here is one tidbit from Waldemar Januszczak's article...

I did, though, enjoy an exchange between Vincent and the painter Emile Bernard, preserved now in one of the reworked letters from Arles.

“Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on?” thunders Vincent. “Degas lives like a little lawyer, and he doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and f***ed them a lot he would become hopeless at painting… Rubens, ah, there you have it, he was a handsome man and a good f***er, Courbet too; their health allowed them to drink, eat, f***.” Vincent himself believed that refraining from sex was good for his art. It made his paintings “spunkier”.

The article by Januszczak is quite a fascinating read. Included with it is the usual listing of optional reads including one on David Hockney. The art work shown above is not Van Gogh's but Hockney's. It's used as the promo to a very funny interview with him while he has been most recently in England. Hockney, in addition to everything else he has tried, has chosen to start doing art on his iPhone. He's not the first but is perhaps the most famous artist to have made images with the Apple creation. The article is not only interesting but will make you laugh. Hockney is a very funny man. Thinking about this passage from the interview, I do wonder if Van Gogh would be using an iPhone. I'm thinking he would.

There are several drawings of Hockney’s brother, Paul, and his sister, Margaret; and in each picture the subjects seem mesmerised by a small gadget in their hands, which turns out to be an iPhone — Hockney’s latest enthusiasm: “Yes, my brother and sister sat there for three or four hours, totally engrossed.” Hockney is thrilled that he has finally persuaded Celia Birtwell to buy one so that he can send her pictures: “I draw flowers on them and send them out every morning to a group of people.”

He demonstrates, tracing his finger over the tiny screen with such absorption that I worry he will stop talking altogether. “Who would have thought the telephone would bring back drawing?” he exclaims with glee.

“It’s such a great little device, it has every Shakespeare play in it and the Oxford English dictionary. In your pocket! But it’s also amusing, look at this.” He blows into it and his new toy becomes a harmonica.

Van Gogh ~ Appropriations by Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Colescott

At least two of the artists we have featured here in Fifty Two Pieces have painted appropriations of Van Gogh's work. Roy Lichtenstein from Week 37 made this print of Bedroom at Arles with Drawing on the verso in 1992. Evidently, Vogue Hommes, Paris, published a special hand signed catalogue, portfolio in a limited edition of 50. The illustration on the reverse (shown here on the left) was made when Roy Lichtenstein spilled coffee on the print during the signing. In addition to this print, Lichtenstein also painted an oil of Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles. It is shown below on the left as well as Van Gogh's original version of his Bedroom at Arles.












Robert Colescott from Week 20 was another artist famous for his appropriations of work by fellow artists. His versions became riffs and parodies. One of his most famous was of Van Gogh's Potato Eaters. Both images are shown below and it's fairly clear which artist was responsible for which painting.

Brothers

I found this poem by Keats. It reminded me of Vincent and Theo.

To My Brother George

Many the wonders I this day have seen:
The sun, when first he kist away the tears
That fill'd the eyes of morn;-the laurell'd peers
Who from the feathery gold of evening lean;-
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears-
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been.
E'en now, dear George, while this for you I write,
Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
And she her half-discover'd revels keeping.
But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?

In 1889 Van Gogh painted The Bedroom, he said he enormously enjoyed doing this "interior of nothing at all." It has been suggested that he was trying to express his desire for simplicity and familial security. He said "The broad lines of the furniture must again express inviolable rest." Yet, the perspective suggests that the security, the hope for rest, is in a room of anxiety, where one is waiting and confined. The bird's eye view of empty chairs and Van Gogh's own self portrait on the wall suggest how lonely it must have been. The hundreds of pages to Theo are agonizing and brilliant. It is for the Van Gogh brothers as Keats wrote:
But what, without the thought of thee, would be the wonders of the sky and sea?

Van Gogh ~ The Ox Cart, Fog

Position yourself in the gallery at the Portland Art Museum near Van Gogh's The Ox Cart and you'll usually hear someone comment on what a gray morning it seems to be. The grayness stands out now as it did for Van Gogh in 1884. He had moved to Neunens to live with his parents after a failed attempt at being a minister. He wrote to his brother Theo in Paris of his life in this northern part of The Netherlands.

Out of doors everything is mournful. In fact the fields consist entirely of patches of black earth and snow; on some days one seems to see nothing but fog and mud; in the evening the red sun, in the morning crows.

There are a number of works of poetry about fog but this one by Giovanni Pascoli seems to capture the grayness of Van Gogh's Neunens.

In the Fog

I stared into the valley: it was gone—
wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained,
gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one.

And here and there I noticed, when I strained,
the alien clamoring of small, wild voices:
birds that had lost their way in that vain land.

And high above, the skeletons of beeches,
as if suspended, and the reveries
of ruins and of the hermit’s hidden reaches.

And a dog yelped and yelped, as if in fear,
I knew not where nor why. Perhaps he heard
strange footsteps, neither far away nor near—

echoing footsteps, neither slow nor quick,
alternating, eternal. Down I stared,
but I saw nothing, no one, looking back.

The reveries of ruins asked: “Will no
one come?” The skeletons of trees inquired:
“And who are you, forever on the go?”

I may have seen a shadow then, an errant
shadow, bearing a bundle on its head.
I saw—and no more saw, in the same instant.

All I could hear were the uneasy screeches
of the lost birds, the yelping of the stray,
and, on that sea that lacked both waves and beaches,

the footsteps, neither near nor far away.

--Giovanni Pascoli