Review by New York Times Review
TODAY, WHEN THE art world can seem like a subdivision of the investment banking business, it is easy to romanticize Paris in the early 1900s. When you think of the beginnings of modern art, you think back to a golden age of creativity, a time when every waking moment, it seemed, was devoted to painting and poetry and the carnal pleasures of the bohemian life. On the other hand, do we really believe that the artists of Montmartre had more ideas than artists today, or that they lived more freely and had better sex? Two new books, by coincidence, offer group portraits of the Paris art scene in its heyday and give us a chance to reconsider its claim on our affections. Sue Roe's "In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris 1900-1910" is the more upbeat and anecdotal of the two. It spans only 10 years in the life of Montmartre, that fabled hill on the Right Bank that has graced countless postcards. In the early 20th century, Montmartre still had the air of a rustic village, and painters set up their easels outdoors, along the sloping cobblestone roads. Even the cabarets blended into the landscape. The Moulin de la Galette, an old windmill refashioned into a dance hall, was near the top of the hillside. The Moulin Rouge, constructed as a faux windmill near the base of the hill, conjures up images of Toulouse-Lautrec's cancan dancers, their black-stockinged legs kicked high. Roe is the author of a previous group biography, "The Private Lives of the Impressionists." She opens her new book with a glimpse of Picasso making his way up the hillside, a 19-year-old newcomer from Spain. Matisse, who was older and more conservative - 30 at the time - was living on the edge of Montmartre with his wife and young daughter. It was a singularly productive time. In the next decade, Matisse would invent Fauvism; Picasso and Braque would pioneer Cubism; and they all claimed triumphantly they were seeing the world as it really is - i.e., an arrangement of abstract pictorial form. The story of Picasso & Company by now is widely familiar, and Roe's book follows well-worn paths. She condenses the research of biographers and art historians into a tale that reads smoothly but feels generic and devoid of insight into either the art of the period or the personalities of its creators. The book is probably best read sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Montmartre, on a day when you are in the mood to absorb information about the artists and poets who once walked the cobblestones. I FAR PREFERRED Stanley Meisler's "Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse," which picks up where Roe's book leaves off. In 1912, irritated by an influx of tourists who were crowding the cafes and poking around in his neighborhood, Picasso moved out of his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir and across the Seine to Montparnasse, on the Left Bank. Other artists arrived in short order. Among them was Chaim Soutine, a Russian Jewish exile who became the leading Expressionist painter of his era. Meisler, a former Paris correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, happens to be a distant relation-by-marriage of Soutine. His book offers a fresh and moving account of the origins of modern art by shifting the perspective from Picasso and his merry band to a group of exiles who conversed in Yiddish and were centered at La Ruche, a ramshackle "beehive" of studios in Montparnasse. In other words, the book focuses on the significant number of Jewish painters in the School of Paris, a subject seldom mentioned in art history. Scholars of the period tend to act as if the only religion that matters is the religion of modern art. Some of the Jewish artists in Soutine's circle were more cosmopolitan than others. Soutine was especially close to Modigliani, or Modi, who came from a once-affluent Italian family and supposedly painted his elegantly elongated, swan-necked portraits in a single sitting. Jules Pascin was a Bulgarian Jew whose name was an anagram of his family's original name, Pincas. Sonia Delaunay, who carried the spare forms and radiant geometry of abstract painting into textile design, was born Sarah Stern in Ukraine. Who was Chaim Soutine? He left behind almost no letters or photographs. His life story is riddled with gaps. Born in a shtetl near the town of Minsk, the son of a tailor, Soutine arrived in Paris in 1913, a reticent, socially awkward man of 20 with olive skin and black hair. He spoke no French. We tend to think he was jumpy, probably because his art looks jumpy. He titled one of his self-portraits "Grotesque." His years were marked by predictable poverty and obscurity, until the fairy-tale moment when the American collector Albert Barnes arrived in Paris on a shopping spree. It was 1922 - Americans were going abroad by the boatful. Dr. Barnes was so moved by Soutine's paintings that he sailed back to Philadelphia with 52 (!) of them, which may be the largest single haul of work by a major artist in modern history. Soutine, who woke up to success overnight, had no interest in pushing his art into the realm of Cubist fragmentation. He was more interested in reaching back to the Expressionist tradition as exemplified by van Gogh, not that Soutine openly gave him credit. "Van Gogh is an old maid knitting," he was quoted as saying, as if mocking the Dutchman's propensity for laying down brush strokes one by one, like so many careful stitches. Soutine's work, by contrast, looks more like the aftermath of a mudslide. Whether he was painting an animal carcass, a portrait or a landscape in the village of Céret, Soutine favored harsh red-and-black contrasts and a vertiginous world in which outlines appear to be melting. Much later, Willem de Kooning called him his favorite painter, and said, "Soutine distorted the pictures but not the people." Soutine, of course, was a member of the School of Paris, which today serves as an all-purpose moniker for most every kind of painting and sculpture produced in Paris before World War II. But it originally meant something else. As Meisler relates, the term "School of Paris" was coined or at least popularized in 1925, by the critic André Warnod, to refer admiringly to Soutine and other Jewish artists in exile. Warnod believed the presence of the exiles represented a boon for France and should be a source of national pride. But that view was not a popular one. Even in the supposedly carefree '20s, various prominent French critics railed against Jewish artists from Eastern Europe and denigrated them as cultural contaminants. The critic Louis Vauxcelles earned lasting fame by coining the terms "Fauvism" and "Cubism," albeit as insults. One reads with disbelief about his vulgar invective against immigrant artists. He referred to them as "Slavs disguised as representatives of French art" and claimed they were unwashed. What was needed, he wrote, was "a simple matter of hygiene, of sanitation, aimed at achieving the proper behavior in Paris." Although Meisler's book is not as rigorous as it might have been - there are no footnotes, only more generalized endnotes - it offers a revelatory account of the fate that befell Soutine and his friends during World War II. After the Germans occupied Paris and the flags of the Third Reich flew over the boulevards, Russian émigrés who loved Paris deeply and tenderly suddenly realized they had no home. A handful of artists were able to sail to America. Chagall arrived in New York in 1941, as did the Cubist sculptors Jacques Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkine. Soutine, however, was less fortunate. He made repeated attempts to obtain a visa from the American Embassy but was so disorganized he couldn't produce the necessary paperwork. His requests were declined. So he stayed on in Paris during the German occupation, keeping his apartment on the Villa Seurat but sleeping elsewhere to elude the French police and the nightmare of deportation. He moved between hotel rooms and the homes of friends, hunted and heartbroken and enduring a host of indignities. His German lover was classified as an enemy alien and banished to a detention camp. He suffered from painful ulcers and, unable to consume most solid food, subsisted at times largely on milk. In August 1943, in need of an emergency stomach operation, he undertook an arduous trip from the Loire Valley to a private clinic in Paris. He died a day after the surgery. He was 50 years old. He was buried in the cemetery at Montparnasse, and his Jewish artist-friends were too afraid of being arrested to attend his funeral. This is all extremely sad, providing an abrupt finale to the period of dazzling accomplishment that gave rise to modern art. In the end, maybe too much has been said about the cafes and dance halls, about Picasso and his love affairs and his wardrobe of blue-and-white-striped sailor shirts. Meisler's book reminds us that the French art scene was shadowed by xenophobia and cowardice even when it was in full bloom in the '20s and '30s. He wants us to see Paris as less fluffy and convivial than other writers have suggested, and he succeeds in darkening our view of the City of Light. His book also implicitly advocates for new scholarship on Soutine, who remains a fairly unassimilated figure and has yet to be the subject of a full-on biography in English. DEBORAH SOLOMON is the art critic of WNYC radio. A revised and updated edition of her book "Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell" will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 28, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Stanley Meisler's Shocking Paris is chilling. A family connection by marriage to the dark, enigmatic artist Chaim Soutine propels Meisler's meticulous examination of the painter's scantily documented life. A poor shtetl boy, Soutine was able to attend art school only because his parents received compensation after he was badly beaten for making a sketch of the rabbi . Shy and art-obsessed, Soutine arrived in Paris in 1913 as part of a wave of Russian Jewish artists fleeing persecution and seeking artistic freedom. As he developed his sculptural approach to paint and created his highly charged portraits and unnerving still lives of decaying sides of beef, Soutine found his opposite in savvy Chagall and a savior in Modigliani. Meisler brings a fresh perspective to this ardent trio's struggles and triumphs while charting the rising anger among the French against the brilliant immigrant artists gathered in Montparnasse, fury that found a ready channel once the Nazis invaded.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
The School of Paris was a group of Jewish immigrant artists who lived in the city in the early 20th century. Critics gave them this collective name to distinguish them from French artists. They included Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jules Pascin. Former LA Times foreign correspondent Meisler (United Nations) offers an intimate account of their lives, from their experiences in their native countries (many were from Russia) to their days in Paris. The author describes in detail their personalities, childhood upbringing, relationships with other artists, and encounters with anti-Semitism. He provides context to world events during the time period, including the Great Depression and World War I. Despite speaking little to no French, these artists managed to make a name for themselves through their creations. VERDICT A fascinating read for anyone interested in art history or art, from the lay reader to undergraduates to art historians.-Tina Chan, SUNY Oswego (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The story of immigrant artists who were celebrated as the School of Paris.Histories of bohemian Paris usually feature Matisse, Picasso and their circle. Former Los Angeles Times diplomatic correspondent Meisler (When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years, 2011, etc.) takes a fresh view by highlighting three artistic iconoclasts who happened to be Jewish immigrants: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Marc Chagall (1887-1985) and, the author's central focus, Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Critic Andr Warnod publicized them as the School of Paris, talented foreigners who emigrated, he said, with "hardly anything else in their baggage but the will to enrich their art with what they find among us." Meisler found considerable material to document the lives and works of Modigliani and Chagall, but Soutine proved elusive. With no letters, memoirs or personal notes to draw upon, the author still puts together a vivid portrait of a difficult, irascible man, markedly unlike the gregarious Chagall or suave Modigliani. Unattractive and noticeably unkempt, Soutine's emotional temperament emerged in his work: A predominant trait "was the thickness of the paint with its dynamic swirls, bolstering the belief that the artist must have attacked the canvas in some kind of frenzy." When a painting failed to meet his expectations, he violently slashed it. Meisler finds recurring instances of Soutine's "paralytic shyness, his foolish naivet, his volatile anger and his sometimes-cursed relations with those who wanted to embrace him." Among those were a wealthy patron, Madeleine Castaing, whom Meisler interviewed; and Albert Barnes, the eccentric collector who discovered Soutine during an early buying trip. Soutine's works, Barnes exclaimed, "were a surprise, if not a shock.I felt he was making creative use of certain traits of the work of Bosch, Tintoretto, Van Gogh, Daumier and Czanne, and was getting new effects with color." Meisler throws new light on Soutine and, more broadly, on the experiences of aspiring immigrant artists in the city that fostered their dreams. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
