Carcass of Beef

Chaim Soutine was born in a poor eastern European village and continued to struggle as a young starving artist in Paris. His years of deprivation gave him stomach ulcers, so he abstained from meat and other rich foods. Soutine expressed his ambivalent relationship to food through paintings of butchered animals, which he injected with formaldehyde to prevent from rotting. When the flesh turned gray, he smeared it with fresh cow’s blood to restore its vivid color.