The artist Chaim Soutine was obsessed with Rembrandt’s painting of a flayed and headless ox. After managing at the age of twenty, in 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in present-day Belarus, to Paris, Soutine made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s, he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a voluminous impasto, churning with deep, febrile colours. Where Rembrandt’s hanging carcass is mottled with pale tones indicating where the blood has drained away, Soutine’s reds, oranges and roses appear to be fermenting. It’s less a picture of mortality than of some process in medias res. Interpreters of Rembrandt’s ox often place it in the tradition of memento mori, but Soutine’s picture convulses with what is happening right now. 

Soutine insisted that he could only depict a subject if he had it in front of him, and various accounts of how he managed this with a huge quarter-side of beef have come down to us. In her impassioned and informative biography, Celeste Marcus shares the most lurid. After hauling the carcass from the slaughterhouse to his studio under cover of darkness, Soutine set to work painting it, but after a few days it began to go green and give off a terrible stench. He returned to the abattoir, this time to get a bucket of blood so that he could keep the colours vibrant. But the blood dripped through the floorboards into the apartment below. The street was aghast. ‘Murderer! Someone slit Soutine’s throat!’ the neighbours cried. They ‘rushed to the “victim’s” house and found him wading in a pool of blood frantically painting an enormous canvas’. 

The official sanitation squad paid him a visit with the aim of shutting down the project, but Soutine’s assistant prevailed on them to let him finish the work, whereupon they relented and showed him how to inject the meat with ammonia to preserve it. Since Soutine was also busy painting dead ducks, turkeys and chickens, he became adept with the needle. The smaller bodies still gave off a stink that made him a troublesome neighbour, but something about Soutine’s devotion to his work seemed to keep complaints to a minimum. When he finished a work, he tossed the remains of the fowl out in the rubbish. Dogs sniffed the carrion, gorged on it – and died. 

A lot of death went into the making of Soutine’s art. Yet it is Marcus’s argument that everything Soutine does on the canvas should be understood as part of the artist’s pursuit of life. His canvases bear witness to his ‘epic struggle for self-mastery, for the discipline and skill to communicate satisfactorily the energy of life itself’. The irony goes unparsed that, at crucial junctures in his career, he is chasing life by way of the slaughterhouse. Not to mention the fact that many of his landscapes appear deliquescent, while the figures and faces of his human subjects ripple with contortions. He shows us scene after scene in which our axiomatic perspectives on life and painting seem to have become unstuck – tilting, inverting or turning his subject matter inside out. In an important 1963 essay on Soutine, the critic David Sylvester noted the painter’s debt to Cézanne. Sylvester describes how Soutine’s endeavour recalls Cézanne’s determination ‘to take hold of volume in its full tactile reality and beat it, as it were, into the picture-plane’. Both artists aspired not to represent but to re-create – which meant capturing the swing between broad, organic continuity and individual ephemerality. ‘Nature is always the same, but nothing about her that we see endures,’ Cézanne said.

Marcus recognises the pitfalls of writing a biography about an artist who made so few personal statements, and for an understanding of whose formative experiences we are forced to rely on sketchy anecdotes supplied by those who knew the painter – or who knew someone else who claimed to have heard the stories first-hand. She makes good use of this material, however, especially in her account of how Soutine left behind his constricted youth in an orthodox eastern European Jewish village for bohemian Paris. Here he lived a destitute, industrious, essentially monastic life for many years, despite soon earning the esteem of his peers in Montparnasse, among them Modigliani. Then, around 1922, the collector Albert Barnes encountered Soutine’s work, seized on the artist as a star-in-waiting and bought more than fifty paintings in one go, liberating Soutine from the struggle for survival, until the rise of fascism stripped his life of all security once more. Soutine spent his last years moving from flat to flat, trying to keep out of sight. He worked relentlessly, but the world around him hollowed out. His health deteriorated. Medical care for the stomach problems that probably began with youthful malnutrition became more challenging under the new political realities, leaving him weaker and more vulnerable until, in 1943, he died of a perforated ulcer. 

Marcus fills out this chronicle with mini-biographies of some of Soutine’s intimates, including Gerda Michaelis, the German-Jewish refugee who in 1937 became Soutine’s partner and one serious love affair. Conceptually, however, the author strives to honour the position once articulated by Hilton Kramer, that the painter ‘had no biography outside his art; one might even say that his art was a substitute for a biography’. She scoffs at those who insist he left no traces: ‘he is there, right before our eyes. The man was his art, and his paintings bellow from the walls on which they hang.’ This is a legitimate position to take, but there is of course no verbal master key to those utterances. It is somewhat surprising, then, to confront the confidence with which Marcus pronounces on what this bellowing is and isn’t communicating. ‘The Cossacks and then the Nazis stalked him to an early death, but they had no authority inside his head, and there is no evidence of them in his work … what he noticed and studied was energy: not anxiety, not alienation, not abjection, not intensity of feeling.’ How does she know? 

Marcus wants, in part, to rescue Soutine from the critics who ascribe all of the emotional content of his work to traumatic Jewish experience. To counter this view of his painting, she takes a formalist approach, which makes Soutine’s evolution an almost exclusively interior, technical development. Marcus has enlightening things to say about the increasing strength of Soutine’s style, some of them informed by her own practice as a painter. Yet it’s unclear what is gained by trying to draw so strict a line between the historical and the personal. World horrors have a way of penetrating even the most focused creative consciousness. Nor did Soutine try to keep his head in the sand. Marcus notes that by the summer of 1938, as evidence for Hitler’s designs on Europe mounted, ‘Soutine seemed to hasten to the newspaper each morning a little faster than the day before.’ 

It’s not only Cossacks and Nazis who get pushed outside the frame of the canvases. The firewall Marcus puts up between Soutine’s subjection to history and his creative genius leads her to minimise the ways in which his first twenty years might have shaped his sensibility. There is conflicting evidence about how miserable Soutine was in the shtetl. He seems to have found the countryside beautiful and the markets lively, but he suffered poverty and physical abuse. Some versions of his story indicate that he was beaten by his brothers – perhaps for making art – and received at least one significant beating from others for painting an old man in the community, although accounts differ about whether a violation of Jewish law was the issue. Once he departed from the Pale of Settlement there is no outward indication that Soutine ever looked back. But this does not rule out the possibility that the experience continued to gnaw at him. 

Given the bias against visual culture within Orthodox Judaism, it is perfectly plausible to view his art as a reaction against it. According to the curator Maurice Tuchman, when congregants in the synagogue were told to lower their eyes, the young Soutine raised his head and looked around. Many of his paintings do seem to demand that we look when others turn away – and not just look, but stare hard. A few years after Soutine painted the ox, Georges Bataille wrote two entries for a dictionary section of the avant-garde journal Documents (1929–30), one on the slaughterhouse and one on the museum, exploring how repulsion induced by the former was meant to be compensated for and purged by attendance at the latter. ‘The crowd floods into [the Louvre] every Sunday like blood, and leaves again purified and fresh,’ Bataille wrote. Soutine planted the abattoir inside the exhibition hall. 

The Dadaist writer Emil Szittya said that Soutine once told him of seeing the village butcher slit the throat of a bird. He had wanted to cry out, but the butcher’s own expression of joy stopped the sound in his throat. ‘This cry, I always feel it there,’ Soutine continued. ‘When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded.’ Francis Bacon, who acknowledged the fertile shock produced by his encounter with Soutine’s work, and whose homage to Rembrandt’s ox seems more indebted to Soutine than to the Old Master, made the screaming mouth a leitmotif, even in the absence of a visual cue. Conversely, we can think of Soutine’s work as the expression of what happens when the scream is choked, not by horror at the killing itself, but by the sight of rapturous bloodlust. 

Whatever Soutine is trying to work through in his canvases seems all-encompassing – cosmic. The small children rushing and sprawling on lonely roads beneath vast, unsettled skies in a series of late paintings from 1939 feel exposed to the whole universe. Marcus quotes John Ashbery, who found Soutine’s MOMA show in 1950 a ‘heady revelation’ that increased his sense of possibility as a writer: ‘the fact that the sky could come crashing joyously into the grass, that trees could dance upside down and houses roll over like cats … was something I hadn’t realised before, and I began pushing my own poems around and standing words on end.’ It’s a giddy, topsy-turvy scene – but there is danger pulsing beneath that fallen sky. The writer Maurice Sachs, who met Soutine a couple of times in the early 1930s, said that he painted ‘in a state of lyrical panic’. He slashed his canvases and destroyed them when he felt they did not succeed. Surely he was addressing a dilemma with historical and political dimensions – what Freud described as the perpetual agon between humanity’s life and death drives. Freud saw the future of civilisation as dependent on the life urge prevailing, but already by 1930 the prospects of that outcome were dwindling. In 1943, the year of Chaim Soutine’s death, Thanatos reigned supreme.