Beef and calf head

Last crawled date: 1 year, 9 months ago

Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943) Chaïm Soutine seems to be fascinated by the motif of the flayed ox which he represents many times in his paintings. A dozen pieces of oxen in particular are spread out over the year 1925. At that time, Soutine occupied a vast studio on rue du Saint-Gothard, not far from Montparnasse, where he had pieces of animal carcasses brought in and painted directly. This attraction to this motif may have come from a traumatic childhood memory. The journalist Emile Szyttia reports Soutine's words: ...once I saw this butcher cut the throat of a goose and bleed it. I wanted to scream, but his joyful look forced the scream down my throat, he adds further When I painted the flayed ox, it was still this scream that I wanted to release. I did not succeed. In this composition, the flayed carcass of an ox occupies most of the composition, while next to it the head of a calf hangs from a butcher's hook. The red and yellow tones, treated in broad strokes to render the bloody flesh, stand out against a plain, dark background. Beyond childhood memories, Soutine's admiration for the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669), whose paintings he had admired in the Louvre, particularly his 1655 Flayed Ox, must also be stressed. chaim soutine paint beef calf head frame rembrandt louvre musee scanned 3d models various