The screaming flesh: Soutine and the expressionism of the slaughterhouses

When The Flayed Ox is exhibited for the first time, critics call it a "pictorial nightmare," a "pathology of art." Yet within these distorted flesh, these bones that seem to scream in pain, lies a truth deeper than mere representation. Soutine does not paint meat—he paints suffering, his own and that of a century about to plunge into horror. And when Francis Bacon, decades later, contemplates these canvases, he will recognize the essence of his own obsession: flesh as a mirror of human anguish.

01The studio that smelled of death

Legend has it that Soutine rented a slaughterhouse in Chartres to paint his carcasses. The reality is more prosaic, but no less striking. In his studio on rue du Saint-Gothard in Montparnasse, he had quarters of meat delivered, which he hung himself from butcher’s hooks. The neighbors, horrified by the stench, regularly called the police. Once, an officer who came to investigate reportedly fainted upon discovering the scene. Soutine, unfazed, handed him a brush and said, "You see, it’s art."

What strikes the viewer in these paintings is their complete refusal to conform to traditional aesthetics. The carcasses are not arranged elegantly on a table, as in Rembrandt or Chardin. They fill the entire space, crushing the spectator beneath their weight. In Carcass of Beef (1925), the meat seems to burst from the frame, as if the canvas itself were too narrow to contain all that suffering. The colors—those blood-reds, bilious yellows, cadaverous greens—are not chosen for harmony, but for their power to provoke physical unease.

Soutine did not work from sketches. He painted directly onto the canvas, often in a single session, as if possessed. The layers of paint are so thick that one could almost feel the texture of the flesh beneath one’s fingers. Sometimes, he mixed sand or sawdust into his pigments to heighten the realism. A persistent rumor even claims he used real blood in some of his paintings. Modern analyses have never confirmed this, but the idea remains fascinating: what if these carcasses literally contained a part of Soutine himself?

02The wandering Jew of painting

To understand these canvases, one must go back to Smilovitchi, the small Belarusian village where Soutine was born in 1893 into a poor Jewish family. His father, a tailor, beat him when he caught him drawing. At seventeen, he fled to Vilnius, then to Paris, where he arrived in 1913 with a few francs in his pocket and a shaky grasp of French. He settled in La Ruche, that strange artists’ colony shaped like a beehive, where Modigliani, Chagall, and Brancusi crossed paths.

It was there that Soutine developed his unique style, somewhere between expressionism and hallucinatory realism. His early portraits—The Little Pastry Chef (1919), The Idiot Village (1920)—already revealed his ability to distort faces to uncover their hidden essence. But it was the carcasses that would make him famous—and cursed. In 1920s Europe, where the memories of the Great War were still fresh and the first signs of fascism were emerging, these paintings resonated like a premonition.

Soutine was obsessed with Rembrandt, particularly the Dutch master’s The Flayed Ox (1655). But where Rembrandt painted an allegory of death, Soutine showed flesh in all its vulnerability. His ox is not a symbol—it is a living being that has been killed, skinned, hung. And in this violence, one glimpses the suffering Soutine himself endured: the pogroms of his childhood, poverty, the rising antisemitism in France and across Europe.

03Painting as exorcism

There is something deeply ritualistic in the way Soutine approached his carcasses. Some art historians see a reference to shechita, the Jewish method of ritual slaughter. Others point out that in Kabbalistic tradition, flesh is both sacred and impure—a paradox that Soutine seemed to explore throughout his life.

His friends recalled that he could spend days in front of a canvas, without eating or sleeping, as if in a trance. Once, he reportedly hurled a painting against a wall, screaming, "It’s not enough!" before taking it up again and reworking it until it seemed "true." This quest for truth, beyond mere representation, may explain why his paintings provoke such a visceral reaction in the viewer.

Look closely at The Flayed Ox (1925). The paint is so thick that the brushstrokes appear like scars. The colors seem to have been applied in a frenzy, almost with rage. And then there are the details that send a chill down the spine: a vein that still seems to pulse, a shred of skin hanging as if in a final breath. Soutine does not paint a corpse—he paints a body that refuses to die.

04The legacy of a cursed painter

When Soutine died in 1943 from a perforated ulcer, he left behind a body of work that would profoundly influence twentieth-century art. Francis Bacon, who owned several of his paintings, said that Soutine was "the painter who best understood flesh." His carcasses haunt Bacon’s Studies for a Portrait, where faces distort like meat under the pressure of an invisible hand.

But Soutine’s influence extends far beyond expressionism. His approach to painting—treating the canvas as living matter, mixing pigments with unconventional materials, working in a creative trance—anticipated the action painting of Pollock and de Kooning. Even contemporary artists who work with organic materials or body performances find in him a precursor.

Yet despite this posthumous recognition, Soutine remains an outlier. Too Jewish for the French, too French for the Russians, too expressionist for the surrealists, too realist for the abstractionists. An uncomfortable position that perhaps reflects the central paradox of his work: how to represent the unrepresentable? How to paint suffering without lapsing into melodrama? How to show flesh without reducing it to a mere object?

05Meat and the sacred

There is an almost religious dimension to Soutine’s carcasses. Not in the Christian sense—though one might see echoes of the Crucifixion—but in the idea that flesh is both sacred and profane, pure and impure. In Judaism, kosher meat is prepared according to precise rituals that sanctify the act of eating. For Soutine, meat becomes the medium for a meditation on life, death, and transcendence.

Some critics have noted that his carcasses resemble landscapes. Look at Carcass of Beef (1925): the folds of skin evoke hills, the veins rivers, the bones rocks. As if Soutine had painted a body, and that body had become the world. A vision at once sublime and terrifying, where the boundary between human and animal, living and dead, dissolves.

This ambiguity lies at the heart of Soutine’s work. His portraits—those distorted faces, those twisted mouths—also seem to strain against their frames, as if painting itself were a prison. And his landscapes, with their trees writhing like suffering bodies, complete this portrait of a world where everything is flesh, everything is pain, everything is beauty.

06The last painting

In August 1943, as Paris lay under German occupation, Soutine, a sick Jew, hid in Champigny-sur-Marne. He knew he did not have much time left. His ulcer had been gnawing at him for years, and the deprivations of war had worsened his condition. On the night of August 8–9, he was rushed to the hospital. He died on the operating table, murmuring, "I regret not having been able to finish my work."

They say that in his studio, an unfinished final canvas was found. No one knows what it depicted. Perhaps a carcass, perhaps a landscape, perhaps a self-portrait. What is certain is that Soutine spent his life painting the invisible: pain, fear, the monstrous beauty of the world. And in his paintings, the flesh continues to scream, long after his death.

Today, when you stand before The Flayed Ox at the Musée de l’Orangerie, you are not merely looking at a still life. You are seeing a man who transformed his suffering into art, who made meat a mirror of the human soul. And if you listen closely, you might hear, beneath the cracked varnish of the paint, the last breath of a century about to plunge into horror.