Soutine / De Kooning - Conversations in Paint - Beau Livre

"I've always been crazy about Soutine - all of his paintings, " said the Dutch-American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) in 1977. How much de Kooning's approach was due to the influence of Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) is examined in this exhibition catalogue, in which the two artists are dramatically juxtaposed. This book accompanies an exhibition organized by the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, dedicated to the affinities between the work of Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning.
It was Dr Alfred Barnes who had made Soutine's career by buying the bulk of the unknown artist's available work in Paris in 1923. The exhibition and accompanying publication will show how the work of Soutine had a decisive influence on the development of de Kooning's art, especially following Soutine's posthumous retrospective held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1950. The expressive force of Soutine's painting, coupled with his image as an 'accursed' (maudit) artist struggling with the vicissitudes and excesses of bohemian life in Paris during the interwar years, exerted a particular influence on a new generation of postwar painters in the United States.
In 1977 de Kooning emphatically declared : "I think I would choose Soutine [as my favourite artist] ...