Day 334- Soutine's "Ray"

March 19, 2022

With gallery 900, I begin exploring the Met's collection of Modern and Contemporary Art.  This gallery, which was recently rehung, holds a rather odd assemblage of works, including portraits by Picasso (Gertrude Stein has been moved here), Max Beckmann, and Modigliani. It also contains three paintings by Harlem Renaissance artists with whom I'm unfamiliar - Archibald Motley, Jr., Aaron Douglas, and Hale Woodruff; I suspect that their inclusion was a major motivation for the rehanging. All the works are representational, although most contain elements of simplification and abstraction. 

I decide that I should challenge myself by focusing on the most difficult work in each gallery, and here this is indisputably a 1924 oil by Chaim Soutine, measuring about 40 inches wide and 30 inches high. The foreground suggests a still life; it contains a dark green bottle, a white pitcher holding a paddle, and what initially looks like some unidentifiable red fruit, all laid out on a sheer white cloth. But the background is a terrifying image of what first appears to be a hooded man  staring out of half-dead eyes and spilling red vomit from his mouth. The triangularity of the hood then suggests to me that it’s not a man but a ray, and indeed, the title of the painting is “The Ray.” (Maybe I have seen the work before and vaguely remembered this.) The caption explains that Soutine’s inspiration was a Chardin painting called “The Rayfish.” But the Chardin painting (see below), now in the Louvre, is a genre scene; along with the ray, it shows a couple of other dead fish, some oysters, and a cat presumably interested in making a meal of these vittles. It's all rather harmless. 

In the Soutine painting, as in the Chardin, the ray’s “face” (eyes and gaping mouth) are at the top of the triangle. What I initially took to be the eyes may, in fact be gills, and what I thought was the mouth is a wound from which innards spew. The redness of the flesh and the entrails evoke violence and blood. The similarity of the fish to a man makes this  a nightmare-inducing image, not least because I associate hooded figures with the Ku Klux Klan. In any case, the painting is an arresting one, judging from the number of passersby who stop to look more closely at it.