Soutine / De Kooning

Paint Made Flesh 

with Anne Catherine Abecassis

This highly original exhibition brings together the works of Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), the School of Paris painter of Russian origin (now Belarus) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), the famous American Abstract Expressionist of Dutch origin.  

Soutine’s work was introduced to the US though the collection of Albert Barnes who fell in love with his work when he first discovered it in Paris in the early 1920s. The expressive power of Soutine’s painting, his pronounced impasto and wild distortions were admired anew as gestural abstract art took off in America in the 1940s.  

The exhibition confronts some of Soutine’s finest work to De Kooning’s celebrated early “Woman” series and purer abstract work of the 1950s and 1960s. The rich colors and sensuous surfaces of both artists’ work create an effect of beauty that in the end overwhelms the underlying violence of the distorted figures and Soutine’s dramatic landscapes.