Today being the last day of National Vegetarian Week, this week’s choice of picture is Chaim Soutine’s spectacular portrait of a very large chunk of raw meat: Carcass of Beef, painted in Paris in 1925. The artist was in his early thirties when he chose to tackle this bloody theme, one well suited to the raw expressionism of his style and the morbidity of his temperament. Soutine’s depictions of animal carcasses offended many people when they were first shown. Rene Huyghe, chief curator of the Louvre, accused the artist of attempting to “weaken the great tradition of French painting” (an eccentric criticism given that Soutine was a Lithuanian Jew, not a native Frenchman) and branded him “the vampire, the painter tipsy with blood.”
Photographic realism was never one of Soutine’s ambitions. He wanted to convey his sense of nature’s deeper rhythms, its tactile as well as its visual properties, together with his own emotional responses to those things, rather than simply painting what the world looked like. But it was always important to him to work from the thing itself, as his contemporary Monroe Wheeler noted in explaining the genesis of the so-called “side of beef” paintings:
“In 1925, when he had a studio large enough in the Rue du Mont St Gothard, he procured the entire carcass of a steer... He did at least four similar canvases, as well as sketches … and meantime the steer decomposed. According to the legend, when the glorious colours of the flesh were hidden from the enthralled gaze of the painter by an accumulation of flies, he paid a wretched little model to sit beside it and fan them away. He got from the butcher a pail of blood, so that when a portion of the beef dried out, he could freshen...
