Who was Chaim Soutine and why did he paint his raw, distorted, sometimes awful, often powerful paintings?
The multiple answers to these questions are contained in the painter’s first New York retrospective in nearly 50 years, now at The Jewish Museum. Known for his highly expressive canvases, energized by thickly painted gestural brush strokes, Soutine is one of France’s premier 20th century painters. The exhibition concentrates on the period between the arrival of Soutine, a Jewish emigre from Vilna, in Paris in 1913, and his death in 1943. The work…