Marc Chagall once ran screaming through the corridors of La Ruche, the ramshackle Parisian artist residence. He had spotted fresh, dark blood dripping slowly from beneath the door of his neighbor, Chaim Soutine. Chagall feared a murder had taken place. In a way, his instincts were correct. Inside the cramped, sweltering studio, Soutine was locked in a feverish struggle with death itself, painting a decaying carcass of beef that hung from his ceiling.
Soutine was a Belarusian Jewish emigré who fled the poverty and religious orthodoxy of the Eastern European shtetl for the bohemian streets of Paris. He lived in abject destitution, plagued by severe stomach ulcers that severely limited his diet and left him chronically ill. His physical hunger paled in comparison to his deep psychological need to quiet the ghosts of his youth. For Soutine, the canvas was a battlefield where he confronted the visceral trauma of animal slaughter.
The roots of Soutine’s obsession lay in a horrifying childhood memory. As a young boy in his village, he watched a butcher slice the neck of a goose, letting the blood pool in the dirt. The butcher smiled cheerfully as the life drained from the bird. The contrast between the animal’s agony and the human’s casual indifference struck a raw, lasting nerve in Soutine. He wanted to scream, but the shock constricted his throat, trapping the sound inside. Soutine later remarked that he painted to free himself of that silent cry, though he admitted he never truly succeeded. That trapped scream of the dying goose became the driving force behind his art.
In Paris, this unresolved trauma manifested as a series of raw, unsettling still lifes. Where other artists saw domestic dining scenes, Soutine saw victims. He painted gaping-mouthed fish, skinned hares, and plucked chickens nailed to walls like miniature crucifixions. His brushstrokes were thick, violent, and agonizingly expressive. Avoiding any attempt to make death palatable, he forced the viewer to confront the raw, bleeding reality of what we consume.
This obsession reached a boiling point in the mid-1920s when Soutine began work on his famous masterpieces, the two versions of Carcass of Beef. Inspired by Rembrandt’s seventeenth-century painting of a slaughtered ox, Soutine wanted to capture the sheer immediacy of flesh. He bought a massive side of beef from a Parisian slaughterhouse and rigged it up in his studio. To keep the meat looking fresh and vividly red, he hired an assistant to pour buckets of warm cow’s blood over the rotting carcass while he painted at a manic pace.
Swarms of flies invaded the room. The stench of decomposition grew so overpowering that his neighbors on the Rue du Mont St. Gothard eventually called the health inspectors. Soutine fiercely defended his subject. He only agreed to spray the decaying meat with ammonia to keep the authorities from confiscating his muse. Through the chemical fumes and the buzzing insects, he painted with a desperate intensity, channeling the pain of the animal into every stroke of brilliant red, yellow, and blue.
Soutine did not identify as a political vegetarian activist, and his sparse diet was largely dictated by poverty and his failing stomach. Nevertheless, his art represents a profound ethical awakening. He belonged to a rich, often hidden lineage of Jewish cultural figures who grappled with the morality of meat. From the radical nineteenth-century vegan advocate Lewis Gompertz to the literary masterpieces of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jewish thinkers have long wrestled with the tension between ritual slaughter and compassion for living creatures.
In his famous story about an agonizing ritual slaughterer, Singer wrote of how the bodies of killed animals seemed to argue with the Creator to their last breath. Soutine painted that exact argument. His beef carcasses transcend their role as mere food, standing instead as majestic, tragic portraits of sentient beings stripped of their dignity.
Today, our society hides the dirty business of the meat industry behind the faceless, sterile walls of industrial factory farms. Soutine did the exact opposite. He dragged the slaughterhouse directly into the living space of the salon, refusing to let his audience look away from the blood. The screaming goose of his childhood found its voice in those colossal, agonizing canvases of torn flesh. A century later, as the global conversation around animal welfare and ethical eating continues to grow, Soutine’s masterpieces still echo with that same unanswered cry, demanding that we finally listen.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism
- Subtitle: Studies and New Directions
- Editors: Jacob Ari Labendz and Shmuly Yanklowitz
- Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany
- Publication Year: 2019
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN: 978-1-4384-7361-1 (hardcover), 978-1-4384-7362-8 (e-book)
- Historical Period Covered: Biblical/Talmudic Antiquity, the Medieval Era, Interwar Europe (Poland and Nazi Germany), the late 20th Century (the rise of Jewish punk and environmental organizations), and the early 21st Century (contemporary Jewish farming and vegan advocacy).
- Main Subject Areas: Jewish Ethics, Animal Welfare and Rights, Food Studies, Religious Studies, Yiddish Literature, Art History, Sociology of Religion, Rabbinic Literature, and Ecocriticism.
[Chapter 4, p. 86]
Header image: Plucked Goose, 1933, by Chaim Soutine.