soutine photos on Flickr

This portrait of a pastry cook was the decisive moment in Soutine’s career. Paul Guillaume, who was at that time looking for works by Modigliani, discovered Soutine through Michel Georges-Michel, a writer and art critic who had written an article on the painter. Then, in 1923, Paul Guillaume described the painting that he had acquired, in his review Les Arts à Paris, and which appears to be the one in the Barnes Foundation Collection in the United States: “an extraordinary, fascinating, real, and truculent pastry cook, afflicted with an immense and magnificent ear, surprising and just right: a masterpiece. So I bought it. Barnes saw it at my place, and cried "It's a peach!" The spontaneous pleasure he derived from this canvas would immediately change Soutine's fortunes, transforming him overnight into a recognised painter, sought after by patrons, and an artist to be taken seriously - a hero in Montparnasse." Soutine, who often worked in series, produced six versions of this same subject that we know of today. Paul Guillaume bought this painting in the early 1930s in memory of the first Pastry Cook that he had liked so much. This extremely accomplished version in the Musée de l’Orangerie presents a model with an elongated face and fragile neck, wearing his pastry chef hat and jacket. His facial features and limbs are distorted, giving the painting a strong expressive power. The cloth he is holding, expressed in a flat, vivid red, contrasts with the surface of his clothes, rendered in white with touches of grey and green.

MOP043

Greenville County (South Carolina) Museum of Art - April 5, 2018 by JR P

William H. Johnson - 1901 - 1970

Street Scene - Tunisia - 1932

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Exhibition: William H. Johnson: Full Circle

Feb 10, 2018 — Jun 10, 2018

One of the most important African-American artists of his time, William H. Johnson (1901-1970) was born in Florence, South Carolina. As a youngster, Johnson copied comics from the local newspaper. He also worked to help support himself and his family. By the age of seventeen, he had saved enough to go to New York. He moved to Harlem, where he worked as a hotel porter, cook, and stevedore while studying at the National Academy of Design with Impressionist Charles Hawthorne. Hawthorne financed Johnson’s first trip abroad, and, in 1926, Johnson settled in Paris, where he experimented with French Post-Impressionist styles, using bright colors and deliberate brushstrokes. These early European works highlighted his eager assimilation of the styles of such artists as Vincent van Gogh and Chaim Soutine. While working in southern France, Johnson met Holcha Krake, a Danish artist. They married in 1930 and made their home in Kerteminde, Denmark, a fishing village that is the subject of much of Johnson’s work of the period. In 1935 the couple traveled to Norway where they painted, exhibited, and met the modern expressionist master Edvard Munch, whom Johnson greatly admired.

In 1994, Steve Turner, gallerist and art historian, retraced Johnson’s European sojourn in search of the artist’s collectors and paintings. Turner found that the artist enjoyed a highly respected career. He received extensive press coverage during the 1930s and boasted a following of collectors who avidly acquired his work. Turner subsequently mounted an exhibition titled William H. Johnson: Truth Be Told, which traveled to four museums in 1998-1999 and shed new light on Johnson’s life and career.

This installation features twenty-six of the works collected by Turner in Scandinavia and brings the art of William H. Johnson full circle, from his native South Carolina to international centers of modernism—Paris, Oslo, and New York—and back to the state of his birth, where his standing as a significant painter is more fully realized today.

Leon Kossoff ‘Head of Seedo' 1964 by Michael Jones