February 27, 2024
The New York Times
 | By Parker Richards Staff Editor |
Art speaks across borders, and we often look to artists both to explain and to transcend. Even in exile — think of the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, or the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — they can speak for a homeland they have left, or at least render it more clearly to an audience far from what the artists seek to depict.
Chaim Soutine was a refugee artist, a painter of Eastern European Jewish origin who fled the pogroms to Paris in the early 20th century. It’s an experience that isn’t so dissimilar to that of the writer Celeste Marcus’s family, or of my own family: Both of us have ancestors who, like Soutine, fled the czar’s dominions in the face of horrific antisemitism. (Indeed, both of our families dwelt — like Soutine — in and around Minsk, now in Belarus.)
To Marcus, who is writing a biography of Soutine, his exile and the art he produced during that period spoke to a recurring experience of refugee artists. Their art is a thing beyond identity, that speaks in the universal dialects of the creative across cultural boundaries and outside the creators’ original contexts. While many artists — Ukrainians, Palestinians, Armenians and Rohingya among them — have like so many of their neighbors had their lives uprooted in recent months and years, they have still found it in themselves to do the work of art.
When Marcus pitched me this story as a guest essay, I knew it had something that many good essays possess: The ability to make the specific general and the general specific. Soutine’s story had power both because of its own harrowing twists — his passions, his genius, his exile, his death while hiding from the Nazis occupying France — and because the experience of a refugee artist is, terribly, still common.
Soutine, like many artists today, seemed to view himself as an artist first. Certainly, his life in exile and his existence as a Jew marked him. But his art speaks, as Marcus argues passionately, for itself: It is universal, brilliant and beautiful, no matter where a border falls. Soutine and other refugee artists, Marcus writes, “remind us that it is a blessing to be touched with the madness that compels us to create.”
“Such people live in history but are not of it,” she goes on. “They are more than pawns in the politics of their time: They are artists.”