It has just been announced that the Howard Karshan collection of drawings is going to be donated to the Courtauld Gallery. This is a significant collection including Cezanne, Kandinsky and Klee drawings, but in amongst the well known 'classic' artists I see that the collection also has work by Louis Soutter.
Soutter was put into a home for the elderly at the age of 52, as he had developed osteoarthritis and had become incapable of work. However he continued to draw, but in a much more direct way, as he could no longer hold a pen; so he dipped his fingers directly into ink and made what are wonderfully direct and totally engaging images. These are not naive images, they are too 'knowing' for that; the dark forms work powerfully and directly with the surfaces they are made on, figure and ground relationships handled with extreme confidence. The Courtauld Gallery's news has therefore given me an excuse to put up some of his drawings as a blog post; his images being ones that I have in the past liked to use as loadstones against which I try to measure the effect of my own drawings. It is always salutary to put your own images up against another artist that you admire.
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| Louis Soutter |
There is something elemental about Soutter's work, his figures are always in movement, holding that edge between being ink and being human. His figure's fingers are Soutter's fingers; ink stained scrapings, blots and splodges being records of physical performances as much as drawings. Above all Soutter's images remind us of the possibility of personal triumph over adversity; some of his best and most memorable work coming from a time when in most people's eyes Soutter was incapable of doing meaningful work. These are images that also tell us something about the body's limits, about the onset of osteoarthritis and how this destroys fine motor skills, but these are also images about that dark energy that pours forth out of the unconscious, about life and dancing and being still capable of leaving a mark on the world, even when it would seem that a meaningful life was over.
See also:
Encountering sophisticated and direct art forms
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