Rules in art exist to be broken but it takes chutzpah, which could explain why so many rule-breakers in modern figurative art were Jewish. Given that they were breaking the law by making figurative art in the first place, they went for broke.
Where Soutine’s subjects look small and doll-like, Kossoff’s feel monumental regardless of scale
Born a generation apart, Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) and Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) had much in common. Both were brought up in Jewish working-class families with no pictures on the walls: Soutine the son of a Belarusian tailor; Kossoff, of a Ukrainian immigrant baker in London’s East End. Both were rule-breakers – Soutine because he didn’t have the patience for the rules, Kossoff because he had difficulty following them. Both were reserved in person, extravagant in paint.
Ironically, without the Jewish prohibition on figurative art Soutine might not have become an artist at all. The compensation he received after a beating for making a portrait of an old rabbi paid for his enrolment at Vilnius Drawing School in around 1910.
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