SOUTINE/BACON: the catalogue
Available at Helly Nahmad Gallery
May 2–June 18, 2011
975 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Hours:
Monday to Friday, 10 AM–6 PM; Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
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(212) 879-2075
Helly Nahmad Gallery New York is pleased to announce the release of a fully illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition SOUTINE/BACON, the first comparative exhibition of Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon. The 150 page publication features an introduction and innovative illustrated and annotated chronology by the curators Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, demonstrating the dramatic links between the artists, and an afterword by Martin Hammer, contextualizing Soutine’s reception in post-war London.
Chaim Soutine’s paintings have not only had a crucial impact on the development of modern art in the twentieth century, but also a sustained critical influence on contemporary practice. The artists most often associated and identified with his influence are the post-war Abstract Expressionists in the United States, best exemplified by Willem de Kooning, who referred to Soutine as his “favorite artist.”
Francis Bacon, who went to live in Paris in 1927 as a young man, with a future not yet determined, became aware of Soutine’s already legendary paintings of beef carcasses. The images and the legends about their making resonated with him, as he had always since his boyhood in Ireland been fascinated to the point of obsession with slaughtered beef carcasses in local abattoirs.
The catalogue’s comprehensive timeline and comparative illustrations demonstrate that Soutine’s paintings of carcasses were a trigger for Bacon’s essential vision, possibly even the reason he was to become a painter. He intuited from Soutine’s carcasses the basis for his art and art making. “If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there,” Bacon explained, “it’s not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me.” It is no great leap to believe that Soutine’s were among the works that had a decisive effect on him—that unlocked his valves of sensation.
There are distinct links between the two painters: direct painting and general studio practice, the equation of oil pigment with flesh, and a certain aggressive re-invention of Old Master paintings.
This groundbreaking SOUTINE/BACON exhibition, which opened to the public on May 2, 2011, is the very first to explicitly pair, compare, and historically situate these two magnificent painters. Museums and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern and Bacon Foundation in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the Pearlman Foundation with the Art Museum of Princeton University have generously agreed to lend works.
SOUTINE/BACON is organized by the Helly Nahmad Gallery and curated by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, co-authors of the Chaim Soutine Catalogue Raisonné. The Helly Nahmad Gallery—located in the Carlyle Hotel—and founded in 2000 is internationally prominent with a rich history of museum-quality exhibitions of such Impressionist and twentieth century masters as Monet, Picasso, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Léger, Ernst, and Dubuffet. The SOUTINE/BACON catalogue is available at the Helly Nahmad Gallery.
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