I should confess immediately that I was skeptical when I first heard about “Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint,” at the Barnes Foundation, an exhibition described as “exploring affinities between the work of Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning.”1 It was inevitable, I thought, that the show would follow an entirely one-sided conversation. I was aware that de Kooning had expressed his admiration for Soutine, but Soutine (1893–1943)—who was born in the Minsk region of Russia (now Belarus), came to Paris at twenty, and spent the rest of his short life in France—was surely unaware of the work of de Kooning (1904–97), unaware even of his existence. During Soutine’s lifetime, the Dutch-born painter, who lived and worked in the United States after 1926, was virtually unknown, except to his small circle of New York artist friends. In Soutine’s last years, when de Kooning was very occasionally beginning to exhibit in New York, the Nazi occupation of France had driven the Jewish artist into hiding. Fearing for his life and that of his companion (who had been interned by the Nazis) and horrified by accounts of massacres of Jews in his homeland, Soutine was certainly not paying attention to obscure young painters on the other side of the Atlantic.

I’ll grant that it is obvious that both artists were deeply in love with the lush physicality of oil paint. “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented,” de Kooning is supposed to have said when asked about returning to the figure in his Woman