PAINTERS OF RAGE & STORM

EXPRESSIONISM, the theory which holds that nature must be remodeled to reflect the artist's own inner vision, has often proved more trap than triumph. But for a favored few it has provided the channel to a new freedom in 20th century art, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the two hit shows of the current Paris season: a two-month-long retrospective of the late Russian-born Chaim Soutine, and the current full-scale retrospective for doughty, 80-year-old Maurice de Vlaminck.

Carcass of an Ox. Like Van Gogh, Soutine attacked painting in a frenzy of inspiration, finished a canvas in a matter of hours, destroyed nine-tenths of what he painted by hacking it up with a knife. But oddly enough, Soutine had little sympathy with or liking for Van Gogh's work, claimed as his models such old masters as Rembrandt and Tintoretto, whom he did not remotely match in draftsmanship (though with the hot, jewellike quality of his color, he sometimes came close).

Another of Soutine's models was France's 19th century realist Gustave Courbet (TIME, Color Page April 30). who. said Soutine, "was able to express in the body of a woman the atmosphere of Paris. I want to show Paris in the carcass of an ox." This Soutine proceeded to do, hanging up a whole carcass in his studio, refreshing it periodically with a pail of blood from the butcher's shop until the stench of decay brought the police. But the resulting paintings today rank among Soutine's masterpieces. Soutine knew few moments of repose in his frenzied life; as a souvenir of one of them, spent near the cathedral town of Chartres, he left a landscape rich in color and unusually calm (opposite), which he painted in 1940, three years before he died of ulcers at 49.

Wildest Beast. By contrast to Soutine. Vlaminck leaves no doubt of his initial debt to Van Gogh. Recalling the day he saw his first Van Gogh oils. Vlaminck says: "When I left that gallery, I loved Van Gogh more than my own father.'' Vlaminck, onetime bicycle racer, nightclub fiddler and casual Sunday painter, began turning out paintings in pure, clashing colors that made him, along with Matisse, one of the leaders of the fauve (wild beast) school, and as Derain said, "the wildest of the beasts."

After a brief skirmish with cubism, Vlaminck in 1924 began striking out against the current trend, retired to Normandy and started painting the dozens of landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, windswept winter scenes (opposite) that earned him the title, "poet of stormy skies." Vlaminck today has nothing but contempt for most modern art, calls Picasso "the gravedigger of French art." Says he: "I still look at things with the eyes of my childhood; I am still moved by the same old sights: a forest path, a long country road flanked by poplars, the banks of a river and the sky, heavy with dark clouds."

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