"Soutine's Suit", 2008, oil on ragboard,
15"-18".

Soutine's Suit (and other stories)

In the nineteen twenties, my father Sam Salz became friends with the painter Chaim Soutine. Soutine was born in Smilovitchi near Minsk, Lithuania(now Belarus) and fled his Jewish Orthodox background after having violated the second Commandment by painting a portrait of a rabbi. He went to Paris and became friendly with the artists at "La Ruche" which was in the Montparnasse district. Among these artists were the painter Amedeo Modigliani and the dealer Zborovsky. My father knew them all and also became Soutine's dealer. He used to tell me that he and Soutine would meet the Russian filmaker Sergei Eisenstein("The Battleship Potemkin", "Ivan the Terrible"). One of the stories was that Soutine had wanted to make a painting of a carcass of beef and rented a hotel room to do it in. He hung the carcass in the room and painted it for days until he finished the artwork. After that he left with the painting and the side of beef stayed there, surrounded by flies and a bad smell. Those pictures are now some of his great works. You could almost say that the image of this hung piece of meat was like a secular painting of a crucifixion predicting the advent of the Holocaust. Usually after a sale, Soutine would buy a suit with the proceeds from one of his paintings. He would then paint, sleep and live in that suit until he sold another painting and bought a new one. Albert Barnes, the famous Philadelphia collector bought his work and was trying to convince him to come to America. "No one knows me there" Soutine replied and he died in the village of Touraine, as the Nazi army invaded France.

"Earth Tears", 2002, oil/wood, 21"-22".The tears are earth colored but act act like rain on our own earth.

"Water, Water", 2001, oil/wood. 21"-22".  This painting is part of my Talmud series. It is dedicated to the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, a survivor of the Holocaust. He died in water.

"Portrait of Moshe Soffer(Salz)" by Sam Salz. Sepia ink on paper. He was my father's father and my grandfather. He was a Torah scribe and an astronomer who died in the Holocaust(1941). He was shot by the Nazis and his two daughters, my aunts, died after being taken to the Debica ghetto and then murdered at either the Belzec or Auschwitz concentration camps. My father donated a park in Jerusalem in his memory. It is called the "Moshe Salz Garden" and is located near the Israeli government buildings and the Knesset. There is a link on this blog ("Birthplace of Sam Salz") to the Yizkor book on Radomysl. The site describes life in the town before the Nazi invasion and what happened to the victims in the camps and after the war.

“Pool"(for John Zorn), 2004, oil/baltic birch,28"-21"

part of the series Talmudic abstractions. For composer and sax player John Zorn, the creator of modern Jewish music from the ancient to the future. 

"Judgment Day", 2004, oil/baltic birch.