Andy Warhol would have hated safe spaces. So why keep dragging dead artists into today's culture wars?

"One rainy afternoon last winter, sitting under a blanket with a cup of tea, I found myself Googling paintings by Chaim Soutine. It's a pastime I've indulged ever since visiting an exhibition of his portraits of hotel staff on the French Riviera during the 1920s — paintings that combine such a mixture of tenderness and debasement that it's as if his brush is kissing and beating his subjects at the same time."

"Yet my plans to float away on Soutine's twisted dreams came to an abrupt halt. For as I read, I realised that the tangled emotions and gnarly moral complexities that make his paintings so intoxicating had been erased from the picture. In their place was a sanitised vision of an artist with a profoundly compassionate and humane eye that sympathetically drifted to the underclass, who made paintings that celebrated the richness of these otherwise forgotten lives."

"Why on earth, I wondered, would anyone want to reframe Soutine as a saintly advocate for social justice? (While little is known of his life, existing material paints a picture of a complex and difficult man with a profound disdain for the shtetl in modern-day Belarus where he grew up.) After all, this was the very same artist whose skill as a painter-cum-butcher inspired Francis Bacon's magnificently nightmarish visions."

Chaim Soutine painted portraits of hotel staff on the French Riviera in the 1920s that fuse tenderness with degradation, producing images that feel both affectionate and brutal. A later critical framing recast him as a compassionate chronicler of the underclass, erasing the gnarlier moral ambiguities present in the work. Soutine's biography suggests a complex, difficult figure with deep disdain for his Belarusian shtetl origins. His raw painterly violence influenced Francis Bacon's nightmarish visions. Like Bosch or Paula Rego, Soutine channels ambivalent emotions to expose darker, complicated aspects of human experience rather than offering straightforward social advocacy.

Read at www.theguardian.com