Walking through the exhibition “An Expressionist in Paris:
The Paintings of Chaim Soutine,” I was put in mind of the
philosopher
Susanne K. Langer and her book Problems of Art, published
in 1957.[1]
In a chapter titled “Expressiveness,” Langer
differentiates between
“the expression of feeling in a work of art” and self-expression.
For Langer, expressiveness is experience given shape and vitality
through the artist’s
realization of form. “What [the artist] expresses,” she writes,
“is … not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about
human feeling.” The
jumble of life, then, is not explicated but made recognizable and
whole. Langer adds that this “knowledge may actually exceed his
entire personal
experience.” In contrast, she brusquely likens self-expression to
a crying baby. Giving precedence to the artist’s psychological
disposition,
self-expression surrenders the artwork’s structural logic. That
such logic reinforces the aesthetic—and, yes,
emotive—
capabilities of a work of art
is lost on those who make self-expression their métier.
Cézanne, for example, may have been a cold fish, but could anyone
dispute the
“expressiveness” of his paintings?

The paintings of Chaim Soutine (1893–
1943) exemplify the
dilemma of self-expression. I don’t mean to imply that his
oeuvre
is equivalent to a child wailing for its mother. Soutine’s work
is, after all, credible and handsome. Yet it is rarely moving—at
least, in a way that
we feel we should be moved by it. Visitors to “An
Expressionist in Paris” will, certainly, exit the show with a
definite