Critics and curators are reframing great artists, from Gentileschi to Soutine, to fit with modern ethical narratives. But this ignores the glorious ambivalence of their creations
O
ne rainy afternoon last winter, sitting under a blanket with a cup of tea, I found myself Googling paintings by Chaïm Soutine. It’s a pastime I’ve indulged ever since visiting an exhibition of his portraits of hotel staff on the French Riviera during the 1920s – paintings that combine such a mixture of tenderness and debasement that it’s as if his brush is kissing and beating his subjects at the same time.
I flicked through images of hopelessly innocent cooks and bellboys, with complexions the colour of raw sausage and ears that look as if they have been brutally yanked. And as I did, I came across a review of the very show where I had first encountered Soutine’s works. Ah, I thought, looking forward to luxuriating in literature about his particular genius for kindly sadism.
Yet my plans to float away on Soutine’s twisted dreams came to an abrupt halt. For as I read, I realised that the tangled emotions and gnarly moral complexities that make his paintings so intoxicating had been erased from the picture. In their place was a sanitised vision of an artist with a “profoundly compassionate and humane eye” that “sympathetically drifted to the underclass”, who made paintings that celebrated “the richness of these otherwise forgotten lives”.
