Hot & Heavy

For the past half-century, School-of-Paris art has been an international product. Among those who contributed most to it were six expatriate Jews: Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Ossip Zadkine, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Philadelphia Art Collector Albert C. Barnes once bought 50-odd Soutines at a swoop, called him "a far more important artist than Van Gogh."

Last week Manhattan's modish Museum of Modern Art got around to staging the biggest retrospective show of Soutine's work ever held. At first sight, viewers were apt to be disappointed, for at first his canvases look smeary, stagy, airless and uncomfortably crammed.

Frenzied as it is, his work needs calm scrutiny. At longer look, the heavy brush strokes link in serpentine rhythms, the streaky, hot & cold colors merge into pulsating wholes and his portraits of people and places gain intensity.

Like most European artists, Soutine dreamed of Paris. In 1913, when he was 19, he got there. Modigliani and Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz started the proud, lonely youth on the road to fame. "For those who like painting rich in thick, luminous impasto," Lipchitz wrote, "Soutine is the greatest modern master. You can eat his pictures by the spoonful."

By 35, Soutine had ulcers and a reputation. He refused drinks loftily: "I must not let myself be corrupted." For months, he would not work. Then one day he would start a canvas, beginning with 40 clean brushes and throwing them aside, one by one. If all went well, he would have a new picture to sell by nightfall. If not, he slashed the canvas to pieces.

During World War II his life went to pieces, too. The Nazis overran the French village where he had taken refuge, and Soutine was ordered to paint, from a photograph, a picture of an occupying officer's son. He turned out a painstaking miniature. In 1943 his ulcers killed him.

Light & Cool

For every drink that Chaim Soutine refused, Jules Pascin downed twelve. Ulcers did not bother him, though his overworked liver did. In 1930, when he was 45, it became clear that his liver would soon give out altogether. Pascin slashed his wrists, wrote "Lucy, pardonnez-moi" in blood on the wall, and, for good measure, hanged himself. The girl friend of the message, Lucy Krogh, subsequently opened an art gallery. Last week she staged a retrospective show of Pascin's paintings and drawings.

The pictures were superb, so far as they went. Almost all of them were of Montmartre floozies in various stages of undress. A master draftsman, Pascin employed the sfumato (blurring of lines) dear to Da Vinci. His models were not so much outlined as enmeshed in delicate, shifting parentheses. Being no great shakes as a colorist, he avoided strong hues, tinted his figures with light dabs of pearly paint. No other artist, except Lautrec, ever mixed sweetness and sordidness more successfully. What kept Pascin out of Lautrec's league was that he had no bite; his paintings were pale and flaccid as the man himself.

Pascin (rhymes with askin') was born rich, the son of a Bulgarian grain merchant. He traveled widely, became a U.S. citizen during World War I, but always returned to his Montmartre studio. A heavy-lidded, pasty-faced little man, he was the listless center of thousands of wild parties.

Some time after noon he would rise and begin opening bottles for a new day. By dusk the studio would be crowded, and Pascin would be ready to paint. He worked quickly and easily. As his guests got gayer, his canvas would get greyer, misted over with the tender twilight sadness that characterized his art. At nightfall he would encase his prematurely aged body in a dapper black suit, jam a black bowler hat on his head and announce that he was ready to go out on the town.

His friends considered him "charming --a real gentleman." The more serious-minded ones also thought him "tragic."

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