Two artists who broke the rules: Soutine | Kossoff, at Hastings Contemporary, reviewed

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. By 1913 he was in Paris, at the École des Beaux Arts, but preferring the Louvre, where he alarmed a guard by falling into a trance before a Rembrandt painting, then prancing about shouting: ‘It’s so beautiful it maddens me!’

Limited to landscapes and portraits, Hastings Contemporary’s joint exhibition omits Soutine’s extraordinary still lifes of bloodied meat inspired by Rembrandt’s ‘Slaughtered Ox’, but there are lashings of blood-red in the waistcoats of his valets de chambre and in his landscapes, some of which evoke the jaws of hell. In 1918, as German long-range artillery reached Paris, he travelled south with his mate Modigliani and spent the next three years moving between Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera and Céret in the French Pyrenees, bashing out landscapes – around 200 – like there was no tomorrow.