Artistic Emigres

As the
center of artistic interest, Paris attracted many foreign painters in the early
20th century, and within a few years of each other three Jewish
émigrés, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, and Amedeo Modigliani, had
all arrived in the city. Though they became friends and gained inspiration from
the recent innovations in art, they were each highly original artists and their
paintings stand alone, defying categorization and imitation.

The three
painters that we look at here were all born outside France, and they remained
outsiders to the Parisian art scene for more than merely cultural reasons
(Soutine and Chagall were both Russian, and Modigliani was Italian). These
painters shared the isolation of being ``other'', never truly belonging to any
group or adhering to a single manifesto.

Chaim Soutine, a passionate
Expressionist

Chaim
Soutine (1894-1943) came to Paris in 1913. He was the only painter in the city
who was in the least like Georges Rouault, and as a Parisian Expressionist, he
belonged to the ``School of Paris''. Soutine's style of applying thickly
encrusted paint was quite different from Rouault's, but his wild, chaotic
spirit, sorrowful and vehement, is like that of the Frenchman. Just as Rouault,
despite his Fauvist connections, is seen as inherently Expressionist, so
Soutine was a natural, though singular, Expressionist.

Soutine's
religion was the earth. He painted the sacredness of the country with a passion
that makes his art hard to read. Landscape at Ceret (c. 1920-21;
56 x 84 cm (22 x 33 in)) is so dense that it could be abstract, and it does
take enormous liberties with the earthly facets, but when we do ``read'' it,
hill and tree and road take on a new significance for us.

Список литературы

Для подготовки
данной работы были использованы материалы с сайта http://www.ibiblio.org/louvre/paint/