Jewish

Sits
Of The

Big Apple

Lincoln Center salutes Israel's 50th.

ALICE BURDICK SCHWEIGER
Special to The Jewish News

I

srael's 50th anniversary will be
celebrated in New York this
summer as part of the Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts
Festival '98. The festival, which runs
July 7-26 and features performers rep-
resenting eight countries in a musical
and theatrical journey through differ-
ent would cultures, this year high-
lights Israel.
"So many organizations through-

out North America are marking the
occasion of Israel's anniversary and we
felt it was important for us to do so as
well," says Janice Price, vice president
of marketing and communications at
Lincoln Center. "This is a very signifi-
cant occasion for Lincoln Center."
Starting off the tribute to Israel
will be two productions from Gesher -
Theatre, one of Tel Aviv's leading the-
ater companies. The company will
present Village (K far in Hebrew), a
play by Joshua Sobol inspired by

LINCOLN CENTER on page 82

New York's Lincoln Center for the Pe orming Arts salutes Israel's 50th anniversary
with a variety of performances.

6/26
1998

80

The paintings of Chaim Soutine
comprise an important exhibit
at the Jewish Museum.

SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to The Jewish News

A

cross rests on the grave of
Jewish artist Chaim
Soutine.
Was it placed there
because the final woman in his life
was Christian or because a Star of
David was to be avoided in 1943
Paris?
Maybe there's another reason
never to be uncovered, hidden as
deeply as the personal reasons for
the lurid subjects found among his
highly expressive, gestural and
thickly painted . canvases.
"We wouldn't be in business as
art historians if we couldn't read in
a little deeply," says Norman
Kleeblatt, one of the curators of
An Expressionist in Paris: The
Paintings of Chaim Soutine, which
is on display through Aug. 16 at
the Jewish Museum in New York.
"Soutine became for some art
critics, at certain moments in
time, the quintessential Jewish
artist who showed Jewish angst to
the world.
"There has been quite a bit of
writing about him relating to the
possible import of his Jewish
background to his work. At the
same time, he never made a paint-
ing of a Jewish subject and rather
painted certain Catholic subjects
in The Communicant and Chartres
Cathedral.
"There was a sense of a tragic
strain in Soutine that was
[thought to be] a foreshadowing
of the Holocaust, but I don't
think he was that premeditated."
Soutine, who was born in
Lithuania in 1893 and moved to
Paris in 1913 to continue his art
studies, created a diverse body of
work until his death from perforat-
ed ulcers in 1943. He was associat-
ed with non-French and mostly
Jewish artists, such as Modigliani,
Chagall and Lipchitz.
Soutine was simultaneously seen
as a link back to the past — to
European shred life and the
Baroque masters — and as a

Parisian precursor of the expressive
abstraction that was taking hold in
New York in the wake of World
War II and the Holocaust.
The Jewish Museum is showing
57 paintings on loan from public
and private collections and divides
them into three sections to give a
sense of the major thrusts of
Soutine's artistic concentration as
primitive, master and prophet.
"The Old Man gives the sense of
the flame-like intensity of the brush
work, the nervous line for which
Soutine became known early on,"
Kleeblatt explains about a painting
from one segment of the exhibition.
"Either the poverty of the subject
matter or the neuroses of the sub-

ject matter is the work of a man
who did not fit into the French tra-
dition but had much energy and
freshness to contribute to the
Parisian art scene."
These early paintings, some
showing people and others depict-
ing animal carcasses, have been
linked to religion. The artist's ren-
dering of a dead fowl is said to
relate to kapporos (the whirling of
the fowl) on erev Yom Kippur. A
hanging side of beef is sometimes