Welcome to the fifth episode of our new podcast season about liberalism and the arts.
Celeste Marcus, executive editor of Liberties and author of the first English-language biography of Chaïm Soutine, joins Henry Oliver to discuss Soutine's life and work. They explore his journey from a small village near Minsk to the center of the Paris art world, his obsession with artistic originality, and the extremes of his work from carcasses to tenderness. Along the way, they discuss Rembrandt, Dostoevsky, the idea of the ‘art monster’, and the relevance of Soutine's success to the promise of liberal society.
New episodes of this podcast season come out every two weeks. You can find the first four episodes here, here, here, and here.
TRANSCRIPT
HENRY OLIVER: Here I am with Celeste Marcus. Celeste is the executive editor of Liberties, and she has written a new biography of Chaïm Soutine, the first English-language biography of Soutine. Celeste, welcome.
CELESTE MARCUS: Henry, thank you so much for having me.
SOUTINE’S UNIQUE PLACE IN THE ART WORLD
OLIVER: What other artists’ does Soutine’s work resemble?
MARCUS: Ah, OK.
OLIVER: You can say “none,” if that’s the real answer.
MARCUS: Resemble?
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: When you say “resemble,” do you mean—
OLIVER: You walk into a gallery of impressionists—
MARCUS: No one.
OLIVER: —you can see that they look the same.
MARCUS: Oh.
OLIVER: When I look at Soutine, I’m like—
MARCUS: Who does he look like?
OLIVER: —“He doesn’t fit anywhere.”
MARCUS: Yes. I think that people often say Kokoschka, which I think is wrong, and whatever. I don’t see that resemblance. People say Munch, which I also don’t see. People also say expressionists, and I don’t see that.
I think that, I can say for me, my experience of looking at a Soutine is probably the primary reason I wrote the book, which is that when I go into a gallery with every other artist, even the artists that I love and who live in my imagination and I reach for them naturally, it takes me a second standing in front of them to feel, to syncopate to their rhythm. And I don’t have that with Soutine at all. It’s immediate. [snaps fingers] It always has been.
OLIVER: When you say “always,” since a child?
MARCUS: Yes. Since the first time I saw him when I was four years old. The biggest collection of Soutines in America, and the second biggest in the world, is at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. I grew up really, really close. It’s a three-minute drive from my house growing up. So, I went all the time, and he was a fixture in my imagination. Certainly, for me, he was the person I experienced standing in front of those canvases before he was anything else.
And that was such a huge fixture of my life and my development. So, I didn’t place him alongside anybody else. And so, it’s difficult for me to think about who he resembles, or who he paints like, even knowing who he would have said he painted like or would have placed himself alongside.
OK, so, that’s my very personal answer. I think in terms of the subject matter, he pulled a lot of subjects from other painters.
MARCUS: That is an obvious example of another painting that he would resemble, are paintings that he drew his compositions from.
OLIVER: But that’s a superficial resemblance, right?
MARCUS: I think that it’s superficial in the sense that they really don’t feel the same and they don’t make you think the same things, and they don’t make you think of each other necessarily. But I think for a painter, those models for how to organize a painting are so important, and a really difficult thing to—it’s one of the hardest parts of painting is thinking about how, literally, you’re going to place the subject on the canvas, and Soutine answered that question for himself often by looking at other examples.
And so, when you see a still life, for example—so, if you’re not a painter, and you’re looking at a still life in, say, the Phillips Collection, you don’t necessarily think about how the painter places the banana and the glass next to each other on the table, why did he place them where he did. If you’re a painter, you are thinking about that. You are thinking about the control that they had over the organization of the subjects and the dynamics involved, how interesting they are, how boring.
And it’s important certainly for a Soutine still life or any other kind of painting. The compositional structure is very important, because the chaos of the paint is so extreme that there has to be a lot undergirding it. There has to be a lot of structure. So, I think for that reason, you might think about—it’s useful to think about the “for examples” that he would have used as scaffolding for himself.
SOUTINE’S AMBITION AND SOCIOPATHY
OLIVER: Yes. Interesting. Now, he was very ambitious, but he didn’t sign his paintings. What’s going on there?
MARCUS: Yes, I think he was very ambitious with himself, and with the community of painters that he was either learning from or competing with. [laughter] Probably, he didn’t know which of those activities was more important for him. I don’t want to say that it didn’t matter to him how famous he was, because I think it did. I think on a certain level, it mattered to him. He had pride, a lot of pride.
And there are very few metrics for considering your own success, especially if your standard for success is historic, and it was for him. He considered himself to be painting in the community of painters like Rembrandt and Chardin, and not painters who were alive, whereas so many of the other painters—[chuckles]
This reminds me of a story that Cézanne was once in the cafe where all of the other artists would all hang out. They were all arguing and saying, “Who’s the best painter? Is this painter the best one, or is that painter the best one?” They were using living examples and dead. Cézanne, who was soft-spoken but kind of a jerk, finally just stood up and just said, slammed his fist on the table and said, “You all know that I am the only painter.” [laughter]
Can you imagine? And I do think that is how Soutine thought of himself.
In terms of what paint was for him, what the objective was what he was trying to achieve, that all happened on the canvas. It all happened on—that was the arena in which all of it was happening. And so, he wasn’t ambitious, in the sense that, I don’t think he ever competed for anything formally, not in competitions that had prizes, which people did at the time, and they still do.
But if he thought that he had painted something that wasn’t magnificent, he was enraged. That was the way—that was how his standards for himself manifested. So, it wasn’t so much about worldly acclaim. The truth, the way that I think about it—and he never articulated this that I know—but the way that I think about it is that he thought that he deserved worldly success. He thought he was—had respect for the people who could recognize his stature. That was something that he thought was his due.
But if you couldn’t do it, and they weren’t collecting him, it didn’t really matter to him. That wasn’t what was forefront for him. And, it’s not like it wouldn’t have mattered at all. It mattered to him which national galleries he was in, and which fancy museums he was in. But there are painters who spend their days making lists of who has bought their paintings, and how many shows they’ve been in, and how many prizes they’ve won, and how many times they’ve been mentioned in The New Yorker in the past two weeks. [laughter] Soutine never lived that way. It wasn’t top of mind for him at all.
OLIVER: He was so detached from other people that he almost seemed sociopathic. Is that how he was able to be so productive?
MARCUS: Look, he was able to be so productive in the way that only he was able to be so productive. All of his attention was squeezed into this one activity and entirely focused on it. Do I think that you have to be cruel and absolutely singular and basically misanthropic in order to be as productive as he was? He had to be. I think that his sociopathy is not always evident in his work. And there are paintings that really seem almost tender—I find tender.
OLIVER: Which paintings?
MARCUS: Actually, the Phillips Collection has two that I’m thinking of. One is—I love that collection. I live where I live, because I can get there within 10 minutes. They have paintings from later in his life. So these are paintings that—the Barnes had nothing like this. The Barnes and the Phillips are actually two excellent complements to each other in terms of Soutine’s personality, because Albert Barnes bought 52 of Soutine’s paintings, and that was in 1923; completely changed Soutine’s life.
But that collection is almost entirely from the earliest period of Soutine’s work, and Soutine hated those paintings. In fact, he spent a lot of his life in established wealth trying to buy them back and destroy them.
OLIVER: Yes, yes.
MARCUS: As he got older, he became more interested in lighter, pastely-er compositions and colors. I don’t think that if you saw those paintings by themselves, you would necessarily be struck by how gentle they are, but certainly in contrast to the earlier works you would.
OLIVER: I think the children in the rain.
MARCUS: Yes. That’s interesting that you feel that way.
OLIVER: I love that painting.
MARCUS: I also love that painting. Lainey and I play this game, we’re like, “Which Soutine would you own?” [laughter] That painting.
OLIVER: I would own the gladioluses.
MARCUS: Oh, my gosh.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Wow. You were the second person in the space of a week to say that to me.
OLIVER: Oh, interesting.
MARCUS: OK. Do you want to hear something crazy?
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Last Saturday, I went to the house of a man who owns maybe the most amazing Soutine I’ve ever seen in person.
OLIVER: Which one?
MARCUS: So, it’s not titled, and it’s not known. The title’s not known because it’s not in any public registry. It’s not even in the catalogue raisonné. In fact, the woman who’s—Esti Dunow, sorry, who’s the person who is the authority on authenticating Soutine’s paintings, she is updating the catalogue raisonné. She went, she visited that painting this past week to see if it would be included, which it definitely will be. It is real.
It’s astonishing. It’s a red portrait of a man’s face. It’s just absolutely amazing, and he owns it. I sat there for two hours crying. Just crying. [laughter] Yes.
OLIVER: So, I want to ask you about red.
MARCUS: OK.
OLIVER: He’s really good with red.
MARCUS: I think so.
OLIVER: Can you explain his use of red to me? Because I think red is what he is best at.
MARCUS: Interesting. Is it—
OLIVER: Sounds like a stupid opinion, but can you make some sense of it?
MARCUS: Well, I don’t think it’s a stupid opinion at all. I definitely feel such love for his red, and that painting is so red. I did feel that way. I did feel so at home with it. It really did feel like visiting him. But the painting that you just mentioned, which is your favorite, not The Gladiolus, I guess, but the girls coming home in the rain.
OLIVER: That’s very non-red.
MARCUS: Not red.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Very not red. It becomes very not red. [chuckles]
OLIVER: Very, but it is.
MARCUS: [self-mocking tone] I, the critic, say, in my estimation, it is extremely not red. Actually, one thing that’s interesting about that painting is that, whereas it’s very not red, there are tiny flickers of red in the girls’ black clothes which I love that. That’s so delicious.
OLIVER: He’s very good at children.
MARCUS: Weird, right?
OLIVER: For a sociopathic, childless loner.
MARCUS: I would have said—not childless. He had a child. [chuckles]
OLIVER: Oh, I’m sorry. That’s true. You don’t think of him as a father.
MARCUS: You don’t. No.
OLIVER: No.
MARCUS: In fact, the story that I thought you were thinking of when you said sociopathic, which I think is correct, is that the mother of his daughter and he does have a daughter. She looks exactly like him. It’s weird.
The mother of his daughter went to him and begged him for money. He burned money in front of her and said, “I would burn it before I would give it to you,” which is terrible, terrible, shockingly cruel thing to do.
OLIVER: Indeed.
MARCUS: You’re like, “Definitely on record, agree with that.” [laughter] “Would not do that.” I think that it’s weird, because, isn’t it such a strange thing to find out that—I’m his biographer. I have no inkling, have never been told anything remotely like that activity. No repeat performances of that level of cruelty in his life. Isn’t it weird that somebody could exhibit that kind of ferocity once? And then I think the rest of it went into the painting.
To be able to treat your own child that way, and also the way that, the version of that story that is in the book, and that I trust, is the one that was recounted by Garde, who was this woman who was completely in love with him and who really didn’t want to believe this of him. I think that’s interesting also. I believe it.
OLIVER: Did he feel love? Did he really love her?
MARCUS: I think he did. You don’t think he did? I gave you all the facts, so that you didn’t have to agree with me.
OLIVER: No, no, no. I like that about the book. I just—one thing I like about the book is that it leaves the mystery of him in place without accepting any of the myths and explanations, right?
MARCUS: Thank you.
OLIVER: But it is a real question to me. He has a big hole where I feel like—
MARCUS: His heart is?
OLIVER: Something like that, yes.
MARCUS: Interesting.
OLIVER: But as you say in the paintings, like the painting of the Mad Woman in the red dress.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: What a beautiful thing to have painted.
MARCUS: Yes, it is so beautiful.
OLIVER: Is it that he’s so sociopathic that he can just see it and replicate it, or is it that he’s so detached from other people, but this gives him a way of seeing them, and a way of feeling them? It’s not a way of being in any kind of relationship with them. Or are you saying, “No, he did love this woman”?
MARCUS: I actually think that he wasn’t that weird. I bet that if you saw him at a party—because we have this, the thing that I’m thinking of is, there’s this five-second clip of him dancing at a nightclub in Paris in the mid-’20s. He looks lovely. He’s just dancing with a group of people he’s dancing with. They’re celebrities in Montparnasse. They’re world-famous in Montparnasse. He does seem like just one of the guys.
I think that it’s easy for us to romanticize his memory. Especially, given what he was capable of creating, it’s hard to imagine that he was normal. But people are weird, and people are capable of comporting themselves differently in different realms of their lives. Whereas I do think that he was enormously selfish, in the sense that what was happening to him was what was happening. That was it. He was consumed by his own preoccupations—
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: —but we know people like that.
SOUTINE, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE ART MONSTER
OLIVER: But the interesting thing to me is that people often talk about the art monster.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: As like, they create themselves. They make themselves into a monster to be a great artist.
MARCUS: Oh, really?
OLIVER: I’ve seen that explained. So, in the new Muriel Spark biography she’s very convincing on the idea that Muriel Spark—
MARCUS: That Muriel did that on purpose.
OLIVER: —was like, “I’m going to become an art monster, because I need to in order to be able to get my work done.”
MARCUS: Wow. Damn.
OLIVER: Obviously, there’s a certain innate quality.
MARCUS: That would make you do that.
OLIVER: That would make you even capable of doing that.
MARCUS: That’s interesting.
OLIVER: Whereas Soutine, it’s like, well, you just have to assume he’s born like this—
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: —or he’s clearly just—he arrives in this. There’s no development of the sociopath.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: It’s just full-on.
MARCUS: That’s so crazy.
OLIVER: Right?
MARCUS: Wait, that would actually be a great essay. It would be the art monster like Raskolnikov, because that’s the whole problem. [chuckles] Raskolnikov, the problem with Raskolnikov is not that he killed the person. It’s that he did it to prove that he was a great person, a great man. Not a great person.
OLIVER: Which is why it’s an evil book.
MARCUS: Right. It is an evil book.
OLIVER: It is.
MARCUS: For sure.
OLIVER: Yes. We need less Dostoevsky in our culture.
MARCUS: No, the other way.
OLIVER: Please stop reading it. Put it down.
MARCUS: What are you talking about? [laughter]
MARCUS: Just because something is evil, doesn’t mean that it should—on the contrary. Dostoevsky’s like that also. Dostoevsky was Soutine’s favorite writer.
OLIVER: Well, I wanted to ask you about that, because I think Dostoevsky is like highbrow Jordan Peterson [Marcus gasps loudly] and really corrupting to the soul.
MARCUS: “Highbrow” is doing a lot of work there.
OLIVER: Yes, it is. [laughter] But why? Why does Soutine—because he loves Dostoevsky, right?
MARCUS: Why is he—what’s the thing? He loved a lot of writers, but he did love Dostoevsky the most. I just think that it’s important to say that he loved poetry also, and he loved Balzac. I just want to say that because people call him boorish and uneducated and unlettered, and that’s not true.
OLIVER: No, no, that’s all rubbish. But there’s something—we’re discussing all these topics like the red and the madness and the sociopathy and the way he treats the woman.
MARCUS: Oh, a pattern emerging.
OLIVER: The Dostoevsky to me is like—
MARCUS: It goes with the red and the woman.
OLIVER: Right? It’s all part of the same. [laughter] Is he reading Dostoevsky in an approving way? Is he identifying?
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: We read Dostoevsky and we’re like, “Oh, my god.” Do you see what I mean? Is it the other way for him?
MARCUS: Oh, I don’t.
OLIVER: No. You feel that?
MARCUS: I read Dostoevsky and I’m—
OLIVER: Should I be a little scared sitting here with you?
MARCUS: Maybe.
OLIVER: [laughs]
MARCUS: You know what’s funny? The first time that I read Dostoevsky was in high school when we read Crime and Punishment and everyone was like, “This man is evil because he killed this person.” I was like, “Well, he’s not evil because he killed the person. [laughter] He’s evil because he killed the person for a totally ridiculous reason.” But it is true. I do think that that’s relevant to this conversation—
OLIVER: No. Sure.
MARCUS: —in the sense that, I don’t think that Soutine was philosophical or analytic in the way that you and I are, for example. I don’t think that he was reading Dostoevsky and analyzing it on a moral basis at all. I think that he would have thought, like with art, that that was the wrong thing to do with it. Right? I think that he would think that that is a category error. That’s not the thing that art functions to do or elicit in the reader or the viewer.
I think that for his relationship with Dostoevsky, the beauty of it, the velocity of it is very similar to Soutine’s painting. Being able to be swept up in artistry and style much more than the content, the philosophical content, or the moral quality of the work. I don’t know that he would have been interested in it. Perhaps, that’s an answer to your question, is he a sociopath? Because I do think that not being interested in it is, at least it is consonant with the qualities in him that make us ask whether or not he was unhinged in this way.
I found it calming to discover this interest in Dostoevsky, because it added a dimension to him, not because of the Dostoevsky at all, but just—it fleshed him out to be able to have a fuller image of him as a man, not just as a painter. I think that that’s important because it is incomplete. If you are focusing on only his paintings, it’s disfiguring also of the paintings.
If you can’t think about—that doesn’t mean that every person who goes to the gallery has to know everything about him. But if you’re going to try and think of who Soutine was, and also who people are, I think that this also functions on that level. That’s one of the reasons why the biography genre is so interesting.
We have entire relationships with this one part of a person, the part that they can leave behind. We don’t want to know about the rest of them, partly because they’re unlike us. The fact that they can be all these other things, like 10 toes, eat breakfast, drink coffee, and also create these things, that feels very unfair and freakish. [laughter] To just condense them into the part of them that is the creator feels safe. I don’t find it safe. I find it extremely unnerving when I couldn’t—I felt so desperate to discover the rest of him.
To be able to have a relationship with the full person, which is strange to say about Soutine, because what everybody says about him is that he was just a painter. He wasn’t any of the other things. But he was a guy. He was a guy who was bad to women and his daughter, and didn’t have a good relationship with his parents, and had lifelong friends, and friends he was a jerk to, and tastes and proclivities and annoyances and illness. You know?
OLIVER: Yes, yes. He also threw blood over rotting carcasses so that he could keep painting them. He was an extreme person.
MARCUS: Totally.
OLIVER: Right?
MARCUS: But unlike Muriel Spark, or I don’t know, I really have to read this biography. I didn’t mean—
OLIVER: It’s a very interesting book.
MARCUS: Yes, I bet. That’s cool. That’s exciting to know about.
OLIVER: I think you’d like that book.
MARCUS: I bet. But I think that you were right to say whatever monster he was, it emerged fully formed. It was not an imitation.
SOUTINE’S WORK AFTER 1930
OLIVER: Does he get much less productive after about 1930, or am I—
MARCUS: No, that’s right.
OLIVER: Yes. What happens?
MARCUS: I think there are lots of theories about what happens. First of all, the most productive years of his life were the first important period. He did paint before that. But the first important period, the one that Barnes bought, all of his paintings come from that period. He painted absolutely—
OLIVER: Like a crazy person.
MARCUS: Like a crazy person.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: And it’s still the period that we have the most paintings from, even though those are the paintings that he hunted down and burned and shredded. It’s just crazy.
OLIVER: But not an unusual story for an artist to hate their best work.
MARCUS: Their earliest work. I don’t think it is his best work, although people do, but I don’t. People do.
OLIVER: What do you think is the best work? All of it?
MARCUS: No, because he definitely is uneven, and some of them are not good. Actually, I learn a lot from the works that are not good which is interesting. That was interesting. I used to get really defensive about the works that were not good, because I didn’t want them to not be good, but they are a window into the ways in which he is a genius. Sometimes that is—it’s like seeing a great man naked. It’s like, “Oh, there’s this whole other part of you.”
OLIVER: Sure. [laughter]
MARCUS: Sorry.
OLIVER: No, sure.
MARCUS: That’s how I felt about him. I was like, “You don’t want me to see this, but I want to see it. I want to see all the muscles and how they work.”
OLIVER: After 1930, is he still producing some of his best work?
MARCUS: I think so. I think that the best—my favorite art is the 1939, is the painting that—
OLIVER: The children.
MARCUS: Your favorite. In 1937 is the portrait—
OLIVER: But I’m a sentimentalist so that painting might appeal to me—
MARCUS: Are you? Not really.
OLIVER: Maybe about children. Yes.
MARCUS: Interesting. Wow. I would really not have guessed that.
OLIVER: No. Probably, I’m much less sentimental than actually sentimental people, [laughter] but the dimension along which I’m more—
MARCUS: Do you think that’s what you love about that painting is the gentleness?
OLIVER: I think he has a real genius for depicting the life of a small child. There’s another one. It’s two children lolling on each other.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: Very few painters have really ever captured that.
MARCUS: Isn’t that crazy?
OLIVER: Yes, it is. The longer I’ve been a parent, the more I’ve just found it completely bizarre. There’s an exhibition at the National Gallery at the moment. Is it Mary Cassatt?
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: She’s wonderful at mothers and children.
MARCUS: I think so, too.
OLIVER: Oh, it’s incredible to see actually, even though she’s not one of the great painters.
MARCUS: I really like Mary Cassatt.
OLIVER: But it’s wonderful work.
MARCUS: Yes, it is really wonderful. And the tenderness is a real—that’s real.
OLIVER: I was very surprised to find that in Soutine.
MARCUS: Yes, it is surprising.
OLIVER: You read this book and you’re like, “OK.”
MARCUS: Right. But then, it is really there. Also—
OLIVER: Is he getting more sentimental after 1930? He’s got money so he can relax, take his time? What’s the—
MARCUS: I think that’s part of it. He can relax. I think he doesn’t need to be. He can. I don’t know that he was capable of, or inclined to, make prudent life choices. I wondered if he had not had any money, and we didn’t know anything about him, because he never became famous, but he still kept painting, would he have stopped? Would he have continued painting at such a high volume anyway? I think probably not.
OLIVER: Even with the hunger?
MARCUS: Even with the hunger, because I don’t think that—first of all, it wasn’t because—it wasn’t like he was selling a lot while he was painting that much.
It’s true that he could get a lot of money for fewer canvases, but I don’t think that was why he wasn’t creating as many. I think it was actually that he had tried really early to express something essential.
Think about it. If you’re seized by a certain way of viewing the world, and you don’t yet know if you’re capable of expressing that vision, capable of giving some kind of visual articulation to it, and you’re frenzied about that, about the possibility that you’ll fail, that you actually can’t do it, because that is a real possibility.
Think of the absolutely tragic condition that many, many people must live with, and have lived with throughout history, of having a vision they can’t rise to. That’s one of the most terrifying sentences for an artist and for a person.
OLIVER: That’s why they all drink, isn’t it?
MARCUS: Yes, that’s why I drink. [laughter]
Every writer has a tormented relationship with writing. I think that that’s a lot of it. I do think that that’s a lot of what—painters feel that way. I think he felt that way. I think the reason that he painted—this is my theory. I don’t know. It’s not based on anything that he said, but I have spent a lot of time with him.
What I think is that, he was frenzied to discover whether or not he could be himself. There is this—for him, the name “Soutine” meant something. It meant this vision, this conception of reality. What you can do with that calling whether you can actually give expression to it, that’s such a weight. It’s like a yoke. He discovered in the Ceret period that he could. That was what that frenzy was. That was what painting with such intensity for such a prolonged period, I do think that that’s what that was.
Then, when he realized that he was able to do that, to paint in this way which is so specific to him, and so unlike anyone else. It really is—think about it like a person who’s singing for the first time. Their voice—every singing voice sounds differently, because every human voice sounds different. They realize that they do sound the way they wanted to sound. That realization is one thing. Then, you get to do other things with the voice. You can do things other than just sheer power. But he needed to know that he could sound like him.
I think that over time, he became less exacting and more playful with his capacity. Painting could do something other than just prove to him that he was who he was. It was a way of having genuine interplay with the things around him. And he could be curious about the things around him. A lot of the older paintings are of scenes that he came across, not scenes that he set up. The children coming home from school, that’s something that he saw. Very different, very different from—
OLIVER: The fowl and the rabbits and all that stuff.
MARCUS: And the ox and the beef carcass, or even of the portraits, or of the woman in the stream, which he had to set her up there.
OLIVER: Yes. And then, scream at her not to move when it rained.
MARCUS: Yes, exactly. [chuckles]
OLIVER: That’s one of the things that I remember from this book.
MARCUS: Of course. Who could forget?
OLIVER: Horrific moment. Yes.
MARCUS: Isn’t that crazy? [laughs] It’s a great story.
OLIVER: It is.
MARCUS: It’s a great story. I think that that is a lot of what is happening there. You see that. It’s just getting older, and not in a way that’s becoming sadder, or weaker, or languid. I think it’s becoming more secure.
THE EVOLUTION OF SOUTINE
OLIVER: Which period sells for more money today, the early work or the late work?
MARCUS: I think it actually is not—
OLIVER: It’s not like that?
MARCUS: It’s not like that. I’m always surprised by what gets what price. I think sometimes it’s more about, if it’s in France, it’ll probably sell for—I’m making this up, but I think that this is roughly right. If it’s in France, it’ll get more than it would get in America. If it was in a really fancy collection, then it’s being deaccessioned, or if it was owned by somebody really famous that kind of thing.
OLIVER: Because one theory of late blooming is that there are two sorts of artists. An economist came up with this. I’ve shamefully forgotten his name, but his book is very compelling. There’s a Picasso model where you arrive knowing what you do and the first decade you do it and then you’re done. It’s still the case that Picassos, I think, in the 1920s, that stuff sells for the big money, and the later work does not.
MARCUS: Interesting. OK.
OLIVER: Right? And then, there’s the Cézanne model, and he describes it where every painting is an experiment, and you learn a little thing. And you’re just constantly adjusting. So, Cézanne hasn’t even started by the time Picasso’s finished, in a way—
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: —because he’s discover—as you say, learning how to be himself, and then all that stuff sells. Is Soutine maybe more of a Cézanne—
MARCUS: So, I—
OLIVER: —if you don’t like the early work as much?
MARCUS: It’s not that I don’t like it as much. It’s that everybody does think it’s the best, and I’m not as comfortable saying that. I think that he is learning something new every time. And, I think, sort of like Picasso, he is—I’d never thought about it this way, but I think that this is right. He’s formulaic in the earlier paintings, in the sense that, he’s relying on established compositions or arranging the compositions in a very particular way. And as I say, the later stuff is—
OLIVER: Freer.
MARCUS: It’s freer.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: I think that that’s—it’s not that I like that the best, but it’s something new in him that I think is not appreciated, because I know what that’s like. I know what it’s like to be walking and have to have your sketchbook with you at all times, because you’re going to see something, you’re going to notice something, and just need to get it down.
For me, also, I have—my sketchbooks are my diaries. I remember how I was feeling when I see a sketch of something that I did 10 years ago, because the sketch is of how I felt. It’s not of the thing that’s depicted.
And that’s certainly true of him. I think that writers really can understand this, and I think writers are like this. A writer thinks to themselves, “I have to be saying something in this essay. I have to be making a point, expressing a view.” That is how their relationship with the written word develops, is that they’re trying to make an argument.
But some writers realize over the course of doing that, that there actually is just a beauty in the language, and there is a beauty in trying to express an experience or capture an experience in the language. And Henry James is a great example of that. Right? That’s like—
OLIVER: Late Henry James.
MARCUS: Exactly.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Late Henry James. And for Soutine, Soutine thought for the first half of his career, “I have to be saying something.” And he didn’t trust that just saying was saying something. And I think that those two Soutines, very, very different Soutines.
OLIVER: Yes. Interesting.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: How many of his works are in private collections today?
MARCUS: So many.
OLIVER: The majority?
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: Yes?
MARCUS: Yes. Isn’t that terrible?
OLIVER: Well, maybe.
MARCUS: No, I guess maybe not.
OLIVER: I mean—
MARCUS: It’s bad for me. [chuckles]
OLIVER: Well, you must get to see some of them.
MARCUS: Only this one.
OLIVER: Oh, this is the only one?
MARCUS: If anyone’s listening who owns— [laughter]
MARCUS: I told this guy, he said to me, he almost didn’t write to me, because he thought that I was just going to be annoyed by him. And, I was like, “I wrote this book so that you would write to me.”
OLIVER: Yes, exactly.
MARCUS: For sure. But, yes, I would say about 70 percent, something like that.
OLIVER: OK. So, there’s a lot of good stuff out there.
MARCUS: Yes. Well, also, a lot of stuff that is not being preserved, because Soutine’s paintings, the craquelure in a Soutine painting is nuts. It’s so thick. Not all of them, but a lot of them. They need conservatorship. So, it’s dangerous. Don’t keep it at your house.
SOUTINE’S SENSITIVITY TO SETTING AND INNATE LIBERALISM
OLIVER: Now, he moved to Paris in 1913. So, he obviously experienced a very liberal and also a very illiberal Paris. How does this affect his work, or does it not affect his work?
What I like about the book is that you strip away all the like, “Oh, it’s because he’s Jewish,” or, “It’s because he’s this.” No, no, no, it’s because it’s art.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: But there must be some effect of being in this very free and also slightly dangerous place.
MARCUS: OK. Here’s what I would say about how it affects his work in a very basic, direct way. And then, I want to get to the idea of the danger and the freedom, which I think is—it’s just not possible that it didn’t affect him. But the first thing I will say is that Soutine was extremely sensitive to physical location—like heat, physical location—to location.
He needed to be in environments that stimulated him artistically. And so, when Paris was under bombardment and he left Paris along with his agent and Modigliani and a group of their friends, and they went to the south of France to flee the bombing, that experience was so generative for him. And so, if you’ve ever—
OLIVER: Just being in a new environment.
MARCUS: Being in an environment that was—we should have done this at the beginning. Born in Smilovichi outside Minsk, which is present-day Belarus, but it was Russia and then Minsk to Vilna, Lithuania, which was also Russia, [chuckles] and then Vilna to Paris. And in none of those places was he by the sea. When he finally gets to Paris, he’s in a city like a city he’s never been in before. That environment is extremely novel and exciting.
OLIVER: And just to make it clear to anyone who doesn’t quite have the context of what you’re saying, where he’s born, it’s small, there’s no art, there’s no civilization. He is drawing in the mud. He’s drawing with a stick in the mud. So, Paris is—
MARCUS: There are no museums.
OLIVER: —is an unimaginable place to him.
MARCUS: Absolute mecca.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: It wasn’t—for us, there is no way for us—
OLIVER: We don’t experience that anymore.
MARCUS: There’s nothing like it. There’s no framework for us to imagine. There’s no such thing as an artist.
OLIVER: There might be people growing up in very rural parts of China or India—
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: —or places like that. If they moved to a big—it would be that level of—
MARCUS: Except that very few people have no access to the internet, have never seen a reproduced image. I don’t know what North Korea is like—
OLIVER: Sure, sure, sure.
MARCUS: —but I think—
OLIVER: But it’s that level of—
MARCUS: Yes, it’s that level. Because it’s no civilization, and it’s also no internet, no photography—
OLIVER: No outside. No strangers.
MARCUS: No strangers. There’s no such thing as a museum. There’s no such thing as having a career in the arts. There’s no art school, except for there’s one guy who comes back from St. Petersburg and is teaching a class in some rented room in a factory. There’s no context for imagining having a career as an artist. And so the fact—that’s the earliest proof that he’s absolutely wacko, is that he had this idea, [laughter] and it bore him all the way to Paris. So, that—
OLIVER: And he keeps traveling out of Paris as well.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: So, he’s always looking for these new environments. He feels that—
MARCUS: He needs it.
OLIVER: —stimulation.
MARCUS: It’s a compulsion. If he feels stultified artistically, if he’s—so, later in his life when he’s painting—Soutine only painted when he felt absolutely seized by an idea and felt he had to paint. And that would happen very frequently when he was younger, and it started happening more and more rarely. And so, he would try to trigger it, and he would go on these trips to trigger it.
But the first time that he ever experienced that kind of stimulation—artificially created—it wasn’t like it just happened by itself—was when they left Paris in World War I and went to the south of France. And the reason I was doing the map for you guys before was that I wanted you to understand—the south of France is absolutely dazzling for people who have been to the ocean before. Those colors are crazy. That sun is insane. It’s absolutely heady. If you’ve been there, you know that there’s nothing like it.
Being a painter confronted with something like that, it’s terrifying. [laughter] He was trying to paint that brightness. You can see in those paintings, he’s never done it before. He’s using white in ways that are wrong and frustrating. White is an extremely—I have paint all over myself, and so you can—the bona fides for saying that I paint. The challenge that white poses to artists who make the mistake of thinking if you add white to something, it’ll make it brighter, it doesn’t. It dulls it. You see him learning that.
One of the facts of war, as many people around the planet are learning right now, is that you get moved around a lot. Environments change very, very quickly without warning. And suddenly, things that used to look a certain way suddenly don’t look that way anymore. And he felt that, and that kind of volatility was captured in his painting, and it was a huge part of the world at that time, and of—
The artists that he was living around were trying to contribute to the Kulturkampf that came with the war. Whereas he wasn’t participating in that particular discourse—it wasn’t what he thought the art was for—it was certainly rhythmically consistent with the way that he painted. Because he was painting like no one else was.
So, I don’t know if he would have—he certainly would tell you that he would have turned out exactly the same way, war or no war. [laughter] I think maybe there was an audience for understanding him that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. That’s undeniable, even if I don’t know—it seems wrong to say that there was no influence on his artistic choices, but it also feels wrong to say that there was.
OLIVER: So, to the extent that he is a product, then, of the liberal and illiberal forces happening at the time, to what extent is that happening inside him? Is he any kind of liberal or nonliberal, or are these just not categories that exist for him, and he’s the Artist?
MARCUS: Yes. I think that they’re not categories that exist for him, and that’s a liberal—
OLIVER: Sure.
MARCUS: Right? He didn’t think he didn’t deserve the place he held in society. In Russia, he didn’t. He would not have been welcomed in. And when Paris let them in, let all of these Jews in, and he was part of this community of Jews from Eastern Europe who were fleeing pogroms. It was the dawn—and I guess that’s an optimistic—they thought it was a dawn of an era in which Jews could enjoy rights that they could not have had in any other place. He was the beneficiary of that brief flicker and then also the victim of the blowback, which was severe and not immediate, because you get that [snaps fingers]—that snap of my fingers was his career.
So, I think that that is the true answer, and I think he would have been loath to make political speeches or grandstand. It’s not the way that he saw himself. But it’s impossible for us to look back then and to say anything other than, of course, he was a liberal; he thought he deserved to be alive.
OLIVER: Well, he exemplified a kind of liberalism without necessarily expressing it or enunciating it, or—
MARCUS: He insisted upon it, right? That’s the thing. With his actions, he insisted upon it. He thought that he deserved it. And I actually think that is one of the most convincing arguments for liberalism, in a sense—
OLIVER: Is to live it.
MARCUS: —is to live it. And to be totally blind to the argument that you don’t have a right to stand there. He went to the Louvre, this kid from Smilovichi who spoke only Yiddish and Russian, and he looked at Rembrandt and said, “Yes, me too.” What could be—what is a more prof—
OLIVER: What could be more liberal?
MARCUS: What could be more liberal? What could be a more profound argument for liberalism than that he believed that?
ARTISTIC INFLUENCES ON SOUTINE
OLIVER: And he’s obsessed with Rembrandt.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: He travels to see Rembrandt.
MARCUS: Frequently.
OLIVER: What’s the special connection?
MARCUS: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I know—
OLIVER: Color.
MARCUS: Color.
OLIVER: Composition, but there’s got to be a deeper answer.
MARCUS: I think that—
OLIVER: He loved The Jewish Bride.
MARCUS: Yes, he did.
OLIVER: And when you put that next to a Soutine painting—
MARCUS: Not obvious?
OLIVER: It’s like, you can kind of see it, but also, I don’t think I can see what he was seeing.
MARCUS: But he also loved Chardin. I think it’s wrong to think about it as, “How does this look like that?” I think it’s more that Rembrandt was operating at the highest level as Rembrandt, and Soutine was trying to operate at the highest level as Soutine. I don’t think that he was trying to paint like Rembrandt—
OLIVER: No, no, no.
MARCUS: —but people do. And it makes sense to think that way in the sense that he did organize his paintings. He saw that Rembrandt had done this insane thing, which was to dedicate an entire canvas to a flayed ox. And then he went and bought a flayed ox and strung it up, and, as you—
OLIVER: And, that’s what he was throwing the blood on.
MARCUS: That’s what he threw the blood on. I think, how could you not have felt some spiritual syncopation if you didn’t think that you were painting like him at all? But I think that there is a meatiness, if you will, [laughter] and a depth to the painting that feels analogous. But I would never have guessed that Chardin was as important to Soutine as he was. I wouldn’t have known that. And I don’t think I would have known about Rembrandt either. It makes sense I also think—
OLIVER: Shared sense of color?
MARCUS: Yes, but the color is very different. The way that Soutine is using paint is such an insane thing that he’s—
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: I don’t know where he learned that. I don’t know how he got that into his head. I don’t think it was from Rembrandt.
OLIVER: He must have invented the way he used the paint, though, right?
MARCUS: I think so. And Rembrandt also invented the way that Rembrandt used the paint but then he taught a whole workshop of people how to do it.
OLIVER: Which to Soutine is like—
MARCUS: Yes, why would you—
OLIVER: —an unacceptable, oh my goodness.
MARCUS: It’s a bizarre, freakish impulse.
OLIVER: Yes. [laughter]
MARCUS: One thing is, I think that he chose gods who were very far away from him so that they were so dead they couldn’t compete with him in real life. Having somebody real and alive be breathing over your shoulder was so—it needed to be saint-like. It couldn’t be in the world.
OLIVER: Is that why he seems to have had this conflicted relationship with Modigliani?
MARCUS: Yes, I think so. I think that he didn’t like to owe people anything. Modigliani was the reason that Soutine had any career because when he got to Paris, there was this community of Jews. A lot of them were Eastern European, but of course, Modigliani is Italian.
I love this tidbit, so I’ll just throw it in. Modigliani’s mother—they’re Sephardic Jews. Modigliani’s mother used to say that she was descended directly from Spinoza, which is hilarious because he had no children. But I think that that’s such a great lie. [laughter] I love that lie. That’s almost cooler than it being true is that you would make that up.
OLIVER: Yes. There’s a lot of front on that.
MARCUS: Yes. It’s like, “Good for you for wanting that. Good for you. Teach your children to lie that way.” And Modigliani was gorgeous and brilliant and the life of every party. Every woman was in love with him. He used to get really drunk every single night and strip while just reciting Dante for hours.
I think that Soutine loved being swept up in his aura then, as a young kid—he was 21 when they met—and then, really resented becoming completely dependent on what Modigliani left him, because his first two agents only took on Soutine because they had been Modi’s—that’s what they called him—Modi’s agent first. I think that he was not a grateful person.
ALBERT BARNES AND THE BARNES COLLECTION
OLIVER: Albert Barnes had a theory of art.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: Did that help him spot Soutine?
MARCUS: Totally.
OLIVER: What did he know?
MARCUS: Oh. He wanted people who were painting unlike anybody else, and his theory is consistent with the way that Soutine would have seen himself in the sense that if you go to the Barnes, you will see that it’s arranged in a way unlike most, if maybe any other gallery or museum. It’s not arranged chronologically or thematically. He’s placing paintings from all different eras, one right next to the other. What he wants viewers to notice is how exceptional all of them are, and that is the thing that they all have in common is that they’re all masterpieces, which is not true of most museums.
OLIVER: Sure.
MARCUS: In fact, he would say it’s not true of any museum, that museums have to have paintings. The best museums have to have everything. It matters less how individual curators view or estimate the quality of the works than it does how famous they are and how significant they are historically.
The less excellent museums have the budget they have. I think that Barnes set out to find excellence, and he wanted the excellence to be singular. Every painting is supposed to be its own contribution to art history. And he found Soutine, and he thought, “Nobody’s ever done this before,” and that was exciting.
OLIVER: Why did Barnes never let Meyer Schapiro see his collection?
MARCUS: I don’t know. I think that that’s—
OLIVER: It’s weird, isn’t it?
MARCUS: I think it’s hilarious. I think it’s funny.
OLIVER: But it’s like, what’s going on?
MARCUS: But he did that a lot.
OLIVER: But there were always reasons with other people, right?
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: They’d said something, or they’d slighted him, or—
MARCUS: Yes. I think that he had been pretty badly burned by the art establishment when he came back to Philadelphia from Paris and put on this show, which was a lot of Soutines in addition to a bunch of other artists—
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: —that he collected from Paris. The goal—he had done it with the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, PAFA, which is the art establishment in Philadelphia. They had never seen paintings like these before. They hated them, especially Soutine’s. They really were vicious in the reviews of the show.
And after that show, Barnes changed his entire relationship with the public and didn’t want it to be possible for anybody to just get in to the museum. You had to write and ask for permission to visit. And I bet Meyer Schapiro was an emissary of the Academy to him, and he didn’t want them anywhere near his stuff.
THOUGHTS ON SOUTINE’S CONTEMPORARIES
OLIVER: Yes. Can we do a quick-fire round? I say the name of an artist, and you just give us the Celeste Marcus opinion.
MARCUS: OK.
OLIVER: Yes? Vuillard.
MARCUS: I love Vuillard.
OLIVER: Why?
MARCUS: Oh. I love his relationship with color and his flatness. And I think—I find his intimacy to be gorgeous.
OLIVER: Which ones do you like especially?
MARCUS: I like the one of—I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Vuillard that I don’t like, but I like the smaller ones best. The big ones—I think because the intimacy is what delights me—the big ones don’t quite give it to me.
The one that I’m thinking of, and it’s one that I’ve spent a lot of time with, is—it’s a very strange painting. It’s of a woman who’s swinging back a curtain, and the curtain is yellow, but the thing that it’s over is a floral wallpaper. So, why would you have a curtain in front of a wallpaper? [quiet laughter] But I love the colors in it, and I love the simplicity of the forms and how—the gravity with which they’re communicated.
OLIVER: He’s great with yellow.
MARCUS: So great with yellow.
OLIVER: Yes. Yellow and brown are his colors.
MARCUS: I love his yellows, and I love his browns, but I also think he’s good with red. I like his reds, too. His reds feel gentle in a very un-Soutiney way.
OLIVER: Matisse.
MARCUS: Pretty.
OLIVER: Pretty. OK. Chagall.
MARCUS: I do think that his color is fantastic. I don’t like Chagall, but I do think that his relationship with color is really exceptional. I think it took me a long time to appreciate it because it does, a lot of it, just looks like kitsch to me. Some of it, and even the ones that are kitschy, I think are—very often, the color is original, revolutionary, gorgeous, and really intelligently applied, but it took me a long time to be able to appreciate that.
OLIVER: Cézanne.
MARCUS: Oh, my gosh. OK. This is hard. [laughter]
MARCUS: Genius.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Really complicated, staggering genius, and the geometries are precise but not cold, which I think is my big beef with Schjeldahl’s analysis. The greatest show I’ve ever been to is the watercolor Cézannes at MoMA, which just—it was just an incredible show. The staggering genius of his eye and hand, the gentleness of it, the ferocity of it, the energy and motion and stillness in it, and what he had a capacity to see and organize. His organizational capacity is just absolutely staggering. I really think that the genius part has to be—it should be absolutely crushing for the rest of us.
OLIVER: Bonnard.
MARCUS: I love Bonnard. I think that he can be trite and easy on himself, and you notice that because when he’s being exacting, it’s just life-changing. There are paintings that he’s painted that are life-changing and really works of genius.
Cézanne, I think, is also like this. There are painters who—there are certain paintings that they’ve painted that history changed after that was put onto canvas. If you’re capable of that, you really shouldn’t just be pretty ever. I do think that Bonnard is sometimes just pretty.
OLIVER: His best color is purple, I think.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: And Cézanne’s is green. Do you agree with that?
MARCUS: I really love Cézanne’s greens, but I don’t know that I would say that they’re his best. But I think that Bonnard’s purple is a kind of signature. I don’t think that I would say that Cezanne’s green is a kind of signature.
OLIVER: No, that’s fair. What other biographies of artists do you admire?
MARCUS: I don’t know if this counts, but—well, OK. The model that I used for my biography is not a biography of an artist. It’s Mind on Fire, the Emerson biography. I cannot remember who wrote it, but that was my standard and what I wanted to try and accomplish.
Biographies of artists that I loved: I really like Rosanna Warren’s biography of Max Jacob, and that was relevant for me. Obviously, the Picasso biography is just absolutely insane, and I need it, and it’s five volumes, which is crazy. The Jed Pearl’s biography of Calder, it’s encyclopedic, and it’s also its own history book. That’s important. Meryle Secrest’s biography of Modigliani was essential for my book.
OLIVER: Is that a good book?
MARCUS: It’s a good biography. Yes. I don’t think I would say it’s a good book. I think that it’s not—biography is a hard genre.
OLIVER: Yes. Yes, yes.
MARCUS: It’s not my favorite genre. I think it can be bad. A lot of these biographies are biographies I had to read to find things out, and I didn’t want to write that kind of biography, and I don’t think I did.
That’s why the Emerson example is really—that is what I was trying to do. I wanted it to be that, at the end of it, you felt like you’d been in the room with him, not the series of facts. I do think Meryle Secrest’s book is a really good example of these facts.
You didn’t ask me about Modigliani.
OLIVER: No.
MARCUS: I don’t like him.
OLIVER: You don’t like Modigliani. Why?
MARCUS: It feels shallow to me. But I also think that about Matisse, and I’m wrong.
OLIVER: What do you think of Modigliani’s portrait of Soutine?
MARCUS: I love it because it’s so sweet. He did love him. He really did. But I really don’t like it when it’s that much of a—it’s iconic; all of them look the same. I just feel like, “You’re not giving me anything, buddy. Why are you doing this?”
OLIVER: Do you not think Modigliani’s nudes, in particular—this sounds like a weird thing to say, but some people do look like that. That is a kind of physicality and a kind of shapeliness that some people have.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: Very few painters have really quite—
MARCUS: Gotten it?
OLIVER: —caught it.
MARCUS: I do think that there is a sensuality in his nudes that are the most like a real thing you are ever seeing when you’re looking at him, because they often do just look like icons. I don’t think that there’s anything necessarily wrong with looking like an icon or not looking real. I’m not using icon in the sense that it looks like an avatar. It doesn’t look photorealistic.
The insult that I’m hurling at it when I say that is that it is cold. It has no soul. I don’t think that the nudes have soul either, and I don’t—there are portraits of people that you go and stand in front of because you want to feel what it was like to stand in their weather. I don’t feel any Soutine at all when I go and visit Modi’s portrait of him. I feel Modi because Modi was so himself. And I feel like there is a tenderness that he felt for my guy that I love, and so I like that. But it is strange to me that when I’m looking at—this is a weird thing to say, but when I look at drawings that I’ve done of my wife that are so her, they feel like her. If you were to look at it, you would know something about how she feels. I think it’s super weird that you don’t feel like that with any of Modi’s portraits. I don’t know. I find that really damning.
OLIVER: Whereas with Vuillard—
MARCUS: You totally do.
OLIVER: —it’s like you’re in the room.
MARCUS: Right. Yes. Exactly.
OLIVER: No, I agree with you about that. Did you read the new Gertrude Stein biography?
MARCUS: No. [laughs]
OLIVER: Very good. I’m going to read you a quote of yours.
MARCUS: OK.
BOBBING CORKS AND A GOLDEN AGE: THE CURRENT STATE OF CRITICISM
OLIVER: You said, “The critic’s job is to ask, are we paying attention to the right thing?” Tell me what you think about the state of modern criticism in the light of that. Is that the question critics are asking at the moment?
MARCUS: I think it depends on the critic.
OLIVER: Obviously, it is in the pages of Liberties.
MARCUS: Obviously.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Our criticism is always asking that question.
OLIVER: Of course.
MARCUS: I think it depends on the critic. That is what I love about being an editor. I love—you are a great example of a writer that it is so wonderful to work with for this exact reason. I agree with myself about that. [laughter] That’s correct.
It is such a wonderful, refreshing, and life-fulfilling activity to work with a mind that is asking a question that you hadn’t thought of and that frames the world differently than you had imagined it. I think that critics have this capacity, and when they’re at their best, they’re doing it.
OLIVER: It’s an editor’s question as well, though, isn’t it?
MARCUS: Yes, I think so. I think the editor has different kinds of questions that we get to ask. You can do the other thing. You can do what you just said, which is you can pose the question to the writer and ask them to answer it. It’s wonderful when you think of the right question for the right writer. But it’s also so lovely, and my personal preference, to say to a writer that you admire to hold up this phenomenon and say, “You ask the question—”
OLIVER: What have you got?
MARCUS: “—and answer it.” I really like that. I am just constantly in this state of joy because my writers are so surprising. Their minds do weird things with the same material that I’ve got to work with, but I’m not doing that with it.
And I think that there is this salvific quality in an art critic to have a totally authentic, powerful response to a great work that is so idiosyncratic and transforms that work for the rest of us. That is such a gift for a mind to be able to perform. I love that, and I think that is what criticism can do. This morning, I was going—
OLIVER: Is it what criticism is doing at the moment, though?
MARCUS: I think it’s a little bit sophistical to act as if all of criticism is doing one thing. I think that—this morning, I was reading an essay by Gide about Dadaism, which is so cruel. [laughter] He’s talking about youth and about the fact that youth can express the rolling of a tide. It’s not really of particular interest which corks bob on the top of it so much as what the motion is.
I think that there are critics who are just bobbing on the top of a tide. They’re not asking a question that is telling you anything different. They’re not standing outside of the tide. They’re bobbing along with it. I think that’s always easier. It’s always hard not to do that. I think that criticism sells better when it’s telling the consumer what it wants to know.
OLIVER: Sure.
MARCUS: That’s always been true. But I do think that there are lots of critics writing today in the extremely impoverished, democratized state of criticism. It is possible to ask these questions [chuckles] because we’re not making any money anyway.
I do think that there are brilliant critics who are doing precisely that now. I think that there are fewer such critics writing in the pages of well-paying magazines who are doing that—
OLIVER: Yes, I think that—
MARCUS: —except for mine.
OLIVER: Obviously.
MARCUS: Obviously.
OLIVER: No, I think if you’re reading the right things—
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: —it’s kind of a golden age, I think.
MARCUS: I think so.
OLIVER: Right? There’s a lot of really good stuff.
MARCUS: I was reading—I have in my bag the TLS. Oh, my god. I had The New Yorker, but I was so angry that I threw it out. [laughter] I think Harper’s and maybe The Point. I forget what other—
OLIVER: Yes. The Point’s a great example.
MARCUS: The Point’s a great example. I love the TLS. I love it. I love how much—their writers are so knowledgeable, and they give you so much.
OLIVER: So much.
MARCUS: So, I really love the TLS. The TLS is a boon for civilization. And so are all of those publications.
OLIVER: Whenever I hear all this, like, “decline of literacy, everyone’s a philistine now,” this is what I think to myself. I’m like, “Clearly, you just need to read different magazines.”
MARCUS: You have to subscribe to publications. Subscribe to publications. I don’t understand. I love—even magazines I don’t like that I’m subscribed to that I get in the mail. I love getting magazines in the mail. It’s so exciting because—for this reason: You’re encountering a mind that is interacting with the universe in a way that’s totally different from the way you do. That’s life-affirming.
OLIVER: You just have to pay to get away from the philistines.
MARCUS: It’s not that much money.
OLIVER: It’s a small price. It’s a small price.
MARCUS: It’s nowhere near enough.
CELESTE’S INFLUENCES AND CAREER
OLIVER: A few questions about your career.
MARCUS: OK.
OLIVER: When you were an undergraduate, you worked for David Brooks.
MARCUS: Yes.
OLIVER: What was that like?
MARCUS: I worked for David at Aspen and on this thing called Weave.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: And I also was a research assistant for him on his book, The Second Mountain.
OLIVER: Yes. It’s a good book.
MARCUS: Yes. Those were two very different experiences and very different roles. Aspen was probably the more formative for me. It was also a bigger part of the job. That was a really fascinating time.
OLIVER: What did you learn?
MARCUS: What I was doing was—and actually this is funny because I’m working on a new project with Osita Nwanevu, who is a writer, and he and I are, depending a lot on my Weave capacities. [laughter] What we were doing was identifying community leaders in different small cities in different places in America. It was actually a really important skill set to develop because you were basically cold-calling people and asking them who the people were in their communities who were basically doing the work of leadership, since our political leaders are so bad at leading, bad at taking care of one another and us.
That was just a really important crash course in being comfortable talking to strangers. If you think somebody’s cool and you think somebody’s interesting and doing good work, you can just call them.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: Sometimes you can’t, but often you can.
OLIVER: Cold emailing is great.
MARCUS: Cold emailing is great. Picking up the phone and giving somebody a call, talking to them and finding out what their story is and feeling comfortable asking follow-up questions and finding a way to help and learning from people who are really different from you, you can just do that. I actually think that’s—it’s not the same thing, but going into the West Bank and being with people who are really different from me, I think that those muscles were—
OLIVER: Sure.
MARCUS: —started developing in that capacity. That was really fascinating experience.
OLIVER: What have you learned from Leon Wieseltier?
MARCUS: A lot. First of all, I’m an editor because of Leon, and he’s definitely taught me about the responsibilities of being an editor. That is a huge part of my identity, which I think is not typical for people who, even with jobs like mine. Editors usually think of themselves as writers or something, but it’s a big part of who I am, and it’s a big part of my relationship to the written language. It’s about my relationship to the world of ideas, which is alive. Probably the most important thing in terms of my career that I learned from Leon is that you get to be responsible for the creation of great work. That’s a really exciting thing.
OLIVER: You’re also a painter. What are the best art galleries in the USA?
MARCUS: I think the Phillips Collection is one of my favorite galleries in the USA. The Barnes is one of the best. Then the Neue Galerie in New York is one of the best. Just galleries?
OLIVER: Well, anything really.
MARCUS: OK. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is really an incredible museum. Whatever. You know the Met and you know the National Gallery. The Chicago Institute of Art. ICA? Institute of Art in Chicago? I forget what it’s called.
OLIVER: Yes.
MARCUS: But the big museum in Chicago is absolutely astonishing. If you ever get the chance, you have to go. I’ve never been to California, and so I can’t say anything about that, but I hear it’s great.
OLIVER: And what will you do next?
MARCUS: So, I’m writing a book about liberalism and the Jews. In my head, I’m calling it Liberalism, Zionism, Fascism. That is about how the liberal project, as championed by the advent of the American state, changed permanently the Jews’ relationship with history and changed our self-conception so dramatically that we really can’t remember what it was like before. We’re turning our back on that legacy. I want to make the case that American Jews are responsible for protecting the liberal tradition, and we are absolutely traitorous stewards.
To do that, I have to basically start from the very beginning of American Jewish history. I wrote an essay about this for Liberties called “America Giveth.” It’s not the first chapter, but it’s the beginnings of my thinkings about this. That’s one thing.
Then Osita and I are working on a project that is focusing on immigrant experiences in America. So that’s another thing. I’m still writing a novel. We’ll see if that ever actually comes into being. Those are the things right now.
OLIVER: Celeste, this was great. Thank you very much.
MARCUS: This was great. Thank you so much, Henry.
