Chaïm Soutine – View of Cagnes

Chaïm Soutine, View of Cagnes (c.1924), oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

There is a phantasmagorical quality to this landscape that is both kookily enchanting and at the same time unsettling. It shows houses perched on a hillside which writhe away from the viewer as if our perception of their solidity and durability has become unfixed and their physical integrity suddenly called into question. There is an echo in it of the swirling psychic intensity of Munch’s The Scream or Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (although it should be noted that Soutine was rather dismissive of the Dutchman’s art, so this is unlikely to be a conscious hommage) but rather than giving us a turbulent nighttime sky, the artist here has introduced a disconcerting malleability to the ground and the buildings that stand on it. This terra is decidedly un-firma. It depicts a picturesque village that now seems suddenly precarious, its continued existence unsure.

The setting is Cagnes, a village close to Nice where Chaïm Soutine spent time on and off between 1919 and 1924, a place which, along with Céret near the Pyrenees, inspired some of his most intriguing landscapes. While these can sometimes betray a ludic quality and appear at first glance to depict a feeling of benign bewitchment, I think that there is deeper perturbation in them too. In this work, the paint is laid on thickly and the brushstrokes appear vigorous, expressionistic, impassioned. The deformation is softly curvilinear, so not earthquake-like, but even so, that softness is sinister and just as convulsive; it hums with a cognitive or perceptual dissonance. It also makes the viewer feel as if their own grip on reality might be weak, as if all that we think of as solid can easily dissolve before our eyes. The tension in the work stems from the feeling that such dissolution, possibly created or controlled by unknown external or psychological forces, must be resisted.

Soutine’s distortions are reminiscent of El Greco’s - not a new observation and one made by numerous critics ever since the early 1920s. But while the Spanish Renaissance artist used exaggerated forms in his figures to emphasise an otherworldly and spiritual intensity or suffering or angst, the later artist reached for the mishapement device as a way to communicate a kind of surging materiality; Soutine’s scenes are disturbing not because they are metaphysical but because they gesture at ungovernable existential phenomenology. They also remind me of those geodesic illustrations you sometimes see which attempt to explain Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, and the curvature of space-time – pictures which are conceptually baffling but paradigm-shifting at the same time.

The energy implied in the unstable forms in this painting is matched by the fervour and saturation of Soutine’s palette. The brightness of the stuccoed houses and ochre-tinged twin roadways contrast with the darkly threatening verdancy of trees and the foreground spiky and black-edged flora while the terracotta tiled roofs lend their buildings an earthy familiarity and groundedness that resists, if only temporarily, the instability elsewhere. The far mountains, probably the Baous mountains of the Préalpes d’Azur, and the sky above them, are rendered in shades of more ethereal and mysterious blue. The darker sky and mountain shadow to the left is suggestive of approaching night while top right is lighter but still looks as if it belongs to an alien world and not the refulgent Midi. The tension between these colours seems to add to the sense of space compression, to the sense that all matter and form threatens to collapse in on itself, to coalesce into a whirlpool of substance disintegration and pigment homogeneity, the axis of which is this scenic and unassuming hilltop hamlet.

Soutine’s derealization of the landscape articulates an uneasy anchorlessness. There is a vehemence to the mark-making that speaks of the artist’s determination to hold onto the visible substance he captures in paint, substance that might otherwise disappear into a centripetal vortex. And yet while there is a terror in such a nightmarish vision, there also remains in it a residual feeling of affinity and belonging. The Belarusian-born artist made his home in France and while much of his time was spent in Paris, the south exerted a magnetic pull on him (it also repelled him at times it must be said), as on so many other artists of his generation, and perhaps something of this oscillating attraction and estrangement finds its expression here too. The artist’s attention has toggled between darkness and light, between a sense of the grotesque and a sympathetic sensitivity to the fragilely domesticised landscape. Soutine’s work demands our immersion in multiple dualistic domains.

The sinuously asymmetric forms of buildings, mountains and roadways are made with a certain sensuousness too, largely achieved by the way the paint is boldly and purposefully impastoed. The brushstrokes in the viscous paint are left visible – they are not tidied up or refined into a more finished representation but make visible the impression of Soutine’s animated and hasty hand movements, in ways that anticipated the later abstract expressionists. This means that some of the forms are unrecognisable. It is hard to tell exactly what the left-hand lower half of the painting represents, but this hardly matters. What does matter is the feeling of abandon and nervous passion that the draggings and smearings of pigment convey.

At the end of the receding lane that leads upwards in front of the larger building, there lies mystery. Does it peter out at the start of the forest beyond? Does it circle back around the village? Or does it continue onto an unseen and unknown destination? Whichever, the way ahead does not feel secure; it may be hazardous as it approaches the unexplored wilderness borderland and any journey upwards into the remote implies a concomitant possibility of descent, a fall into or from uncharted territory. Even though the hill behind the large house seems to rear up to mirror sympathetically the shape of the pitched roof, its darkness is ominous, and we can’t see or know what lies between house and hill. In the distant land to the right of this house there are a few ochre spots of what might be the lights of another hamlet, and then above them to the right, four spots of white light on the mountainside. But these signs of life are at such a remove that they only serve to underline the isolation of the dwellings that we can see, and their people-less appearance is again ambivalently suggestive of both a ghost town and a possible place of refuge before the onward journey.

This view of Cagnes is highly charged, with its compromised built verticality connoting not just suppressed energy but the sense that, to invoke Yeats’s almost contemporaneous take on modernity, ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. It coneys a feeling of helplessness in the face of chaos and transformation and even though it might look harmlessly arcadian in one viewing, it can seem portentous and baleful in another. Picture-postcard provincial innocence here is transmogrified into contingent and volatile uncertainty. Oil paint, that most pliable of media is here manipulated to suggest the pliancy of what we take for granted in the real world.