Chaim Soutine / Willem de Kooning: Conversations in Paint

Soutine, Chaim and Willem de Kooning and Simonetta Fraquelli, Claire Bernardi

ISBN 10: 1911300881 / ISBN 13: 9781911300885

Published by The Barnes Foundation and Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021

About this Item

Hardcover without dustjacket as issued, 166 pages; as new condition; clean and crisp; no internal marks. Foreign shipping may be extra.

Seller Inventory # ChSoTh85

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Chaim Soutine / Willem de Kooning: Conversations in Paint
• Publisher: The Barnes Foundation and Paul Holberton Publishing
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1911300881
• ISBN 13: 9781911300885
• Binding: Hardcover
• Seller catalogs:
  • Art Since 1945

About this title

Synopsis

“I’ve always been crazy about Soutine—all of his paintings,” said Willem de Kooning in 1977, speaking about Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine (1893–1943). Of all the abstract expressionists, de Kooning was the only one who continued to praise Soutine throughout his career and to credit him with an influence on his work. But how much was de Kooning’s approach impacted by Soutine? 

Soutine / de Kooning’s dramatic juxtaposition of the two artists reveals Soutine’s decisive influence on the development of de Kooning’s art. The expressive force of Soutine’s painting, coupled with his image as an “accursed” artist struggling with the vicissitudes and excesses of bohemian life in Paris during the interwar years, held a powerful sway over a new generation of postwar painters in the United States—it was during these years that de Kooning matured his own personal form of expressionism. 

This lavishly illustrated book traces the development of Soutine’s influence, paying particular attention to the posthumous retrospective of Soutine’s work that was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.

About the Authors

Simonetta Fraquelli is an independent curator specializing in early twentieth-century art. She worked for more than twenty years at the Royal Academy of Arts in London before becoming a freelance curator in 2006.

Claire Bernardi is curator at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.