Found in Translation: Chaim Soutine and English Art

The article is the first to consider the impact of the early work of Chaim Soutine, produced in the South of France around 1920, on a circle of painters working in Britain some 30 years later, notably Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, as well as on the writer David Sylvester who promoted both their work and the key French artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Soutine who seemed to epitomise the new ‘existentialist’ climate. After the war Soutine became a cult figure in London, as he did in contemporary Paris and New York. He embodied the idea of the ‘tragic’ artist in his still-life imagery of flayed animals, his uncompromising, heavily-laden paint surfaces, and in his identity as a Jew who had died in 1943, an indirect victim of the Nazi occupation of France. I try to identify which works in particular were known to the English artists, themselves all Jewish except for Bacon, and to describe the very different ways in which they reacted to Soutine's art and adapted its lessons to their own artistic purposes.