Pirate Day in Hastings and the streets are awash with tricorn hats and cutlasses outside Hastings Contemporary but the real young buccaneers are inside the striking black glazed gallery walls that currently house Soutine – Kossoff, a bold double bill of Belarusian artist Chaim Soutine and Londoner Leon Kossoff, two artists united by eastern European Jewish heritage and a desire to make paint come alive on canvas. It’s a wonder the roof is still on, given the emotional turmoil within the gallery, writes Ed Gray.
Curator James Russell expertly separates the artists’ work room by room, confronting us initially with Soutine’s dramatic early French landscapes. Young Soutine’s art career began on the back of an insult when he was beaten up for daring to ask if he could paint a Rabbi, by the Rabbi’s own son. Compensation for this beating was used to pay for art lessons and he went on to demonstrate great talent at Vilnius drawing school. Relentless inquisitiveness led him to escape the limitations of his impoverished childhood and migrate to Paris, the world capital of modern art. The resulting expressionist spirit that flows through the roots and branches of Soutine’s swirling plane trees helped create a tornado that would whip the abstract expressionists of 1950s America into a frenzy and change the language of Western art in the 20th century forever.
In London, Kossoff was casting a determined gaze at Soutine’s work and recognising much in his own desire to paint. Kossoff was born in the City Road to Jewish immigrant parents Wolf and Rachel who had both fled Ukraine separately aged 15 and 11. Wolf was running a bakery in Shoreditch when Leon was born in 1926. Leon discovered the National Gallery aged 10 and drew constantly, and this is evident. He studied under David Bomberg at Borough Poly, but the artist that most overshadows these two painters is Rembrandt. He is there on the surface, lurking in the quivering sensitive brushwork of Soutine’s portraits of working people; in the depth of light that falls on a nose, brushes an ear or strokes a piece of cloth. Rembrandt’s vision is apparent in the solidity and drama of Kossoff, and both artists reverberate with the psychological impact of looking hard enough at themselves and the world they exist in as they struggle to recreate life in paint.
Kossoff’s large London cityscapes find inspiration in the postwar debris of a city eviscerated by the Luftwaffe, scraping itself back together. As Kossoff scoops and jabs and excavates his canvases before our eyes, he discovers the truth of the city. From Christ Church Spitalfields to Dalston Junction via York Way, he stuffs the city into his sketchbook and scrapes it onto canvas. Children’s Swimming Pool 1971 is a celebration of the triumph of the city, a vision of a racially diverse city, filled with gleeful chattering children revelling in the safety of a newly built modernist vision.
A museum attendant asks our daughter how she is enjoying the exhibition and how much did she think Soutine’s Pastry Chef portrait went for at auction? The pastry chef cooly observes us from the wall, on shift, orders to fill, aching back, sore feet. Two thousand pounds? Try twenty-two million. And there’s the killer punch. All the struggle to go through heaven and hell and find the spirit in the mass, moving reality into paint, the ulcers that killed Soutine at 50 – that’s what you’re paying for, the intangible, invisible, indefinable human struggle in us all.
This is a knockout show. As Soutine himself said ‘I would have stopped it if I had not succeeded. I might have become a boxer’.
Hastings Contemporary, Rook-a-Nore Road, Hastings, TN34 3DW until 24th September.
Admission: £9, children free.
Website: www.hastingscontemporary.org
