Amongst smeared brushstrokes of dark organic hues, the bright body of a fowl emerges in this painting by artist Chaïm Soutine. Dangling from its right ankle, the bird’s body is splayed, each limb being pulled down by its own weight. Thick, overlapping strokes relay the frenzy of the bird’s vigorous movement. While at first glance it seems as if the chicken is struggling against death, Soutine's painting is a celebration of the animal and flesh, a theme that allowed him to explore his obsessions with life and death.
Soutine was highly influenced by the works of the Old Masters and focused his attention on still-lifes, in particular those with carcasses of beef and poultry. Using thick, layered, frantic brushstrokes and a mix of dark and bright colors, Soutine’s depictions of life, death, and decay are brooding and whimsically visceral reflections of life’s struggles and the horrors of war. His application of paint and choice of subject matter bridged the gap between more traditional methods and the developing Abstract Expressionism.
This dead creature, a provider of life, is a bloody lump that is rendered fascinatingly beautiful by Soutine's brutal, swirling, painterly brushstrokes. His ferocious brushstrokes appear as if he is attacking the canvas with his paintbrush. This forceful style of painting heightens the sense of drama and spectacle. His Expressionist style coupled with his palette of seemingly jarring and garish colors was unique in Paris at the time he was working.
Soutine, who was raised in a Jewish household in Lithuania, struggled with poverty and hunger from childhood into early adulthood when he lived quite meagerly as a student in Paris during WWI. Food within Jewish culture plays an important role in both secular and religious rituals. Reflecting this, his paintings become a celebration and exploration of food in a more universal sense. While the chicken struggles against life and death, the artist also explores the chicken as nourishment and a source of food. Soutine places worth on the chicken through his choice to paint the chicken on a large scale. He also emphasizes the chicken through the close cropping of the composition and the hazy, nondescript background. While the abstraction of the chicken’s image prevents a life-like image of the foul, the motion and emotion crafted through color and brushstroke honors the roles of food in society and in Soutine’s own life as both nourishment and a symbol of culture.
Considering his childhood shortage of food, this painting is a celebration of someone finally able to afford luxuries like meat on a regular basis. Despite the abstract nature of this work, the artist was able to afford to purchase meat so that he could paint from real-life. The artist would hang up a piece of meat in his studio and, regardless of the annoyance of his neighbors and its attraction of flies, would leave the meat on the wall as he studied and painted it. His obsessions with life and death allowed him to slowly observe and record the decaying meat while celebrating it through paint.
