Carcass of Beef

Chaim Soutine's Carcass of Beef was influenced and somewhat inspired by Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, which is shown below. Rembrandt's painting has been associated with the crucifixion of Christ in the way that the legs of the ox resemble Christ's arms on the cross. Though, Soutine's version of this painting looks less like the story that Rembrandt's painting has been linked to. 

To make this painting, Soutine took a decaying carcass from a butcher in his town, drug it to his apartment where it sat while he painted it. His neighbors didn't like the smell after a few hours or days of sitting in the apartment building and they asked him to remove it from his room. 

Carcass of Beef was also mentioned in the movie Mona Lisa Smile as a class of art history students are asked if it is any good. 

There is a poem written about Soutine's painting, which is also entitled "Carcass of Beef".

This poem is by Rick Mullin and it describes the painting of the Carcass of Beef by Cahim Soutine. 

 They’d broken through the old brick wall in Castaing’s 

carriage house, a renovation under way.

Soutine took full advantage of this, casting

chickens in full plumage pendent, gray

and gold and green against a jagged frame

of darkness, squawking in the ecstasy

of death. Talons, beaks and wattles flamed

and sputtered in a nightmare space of murder

on his canvas. A still life series ran to game, 

the hare against the green slats of a shutter,

the turkey on a cloth with golden apples.

Soutine conveyed their extremis in color.

Not satisfied, he bartered with his hapless

dealer to procure a side of beef 

when he returned to Paris. Butchers grappled

with a battered carcass up the stairs, a brief

comedic interlude at the apartment

he’d been renting. To the hired men’s relief

it made it through the door. The painter sent

for Paulette once the butcher’s boy had hung

the cage of ribs. His motif was the Rembrandt

at the Louvre, that bleeding carcass strung

upon the rack across a room ... the girl

appearing at the door. But Chaim would come

a little closer to his model. And he’d hurl

himself at more extensive spans of canvas.

Paulette arrived to find him in a world

of meat, his palette fat with gristle and his

model dripping on the floor. She placed

a pan to catch the blood. “But Chaim, can this

thing hang here overnight?” Paulette could taste

the painting as the smell of colors mixed 

with beef. Apparently the painter faced

another sleepless night. His helper fixed

herself a bed this time, but had to wake

each hour to baste the hulk. “Paulette, the trick’s

to keep it bleeding,” Chaim commanded. “Make

it wet.” She wet it. And when the morning sun

came shining through the window, you’d mistake

the carcass for a red Céret, a run-

ning track of bones beneath a sagging skein.

By noon, the horrid greenback flies had come

and Soutine had another canvas pinned

and propped against an oil-splattered table.

He mixed a pile of cobalt and alizarin,

a blackout violet at the center of a scumbled

wheel of colors bleeding into gray.

His oil palimpsest began to bubble

in the heat as Soutine layered splay

on splay of tortured meat between

the scratchwork ribs to end the second day. 

And sunrise found him scraping back the green

he’d laid in semidarkness. Hours passed.

The colors changed. The carcass wore a sheen

of viscous rot, its rind a venous blast

of atrophy. It cracked in hieroglyphs

of morbid skin. The painter, slouching, cast

his shadow on the sagging monolith. 

By 12 o’clock, the neighbors were amassing 

in the hall. No one ever bothered with 

Soutine from day to day, but he was asking

for it this time. The building smelled like rotting flesh.

The landlord pounded on the door. “You bastard!”

“Go away!” “Enough, Soutine. Unless

you haul that garbage from the building

I will have you hauled away.” This fresh 

affront made Chaim throw down the brush. “You’re killing

me! I told you fifty times—I paint!

This is my studio.” The landlord was unwilling

to put up with it, and a complaint 

was filed. The gendarmes were the next to knock.

“Soutine, you have to let them in.” This faint,

exhausted plea from Paulette hit him like a rock.

He stopped his painting, calmly turned around,

unlocked the door, and opened it. The shock

was registered succinctly when the gendarme found

the carcass hanging in a buzz of flies.

“Explain, monsieur.” The captain looked around

as Soutine plied him with apologies

and Paulette fumbled with the swatting broom.

He saw the three completed pictures. “These

are marvelous,” he mumbled, and the room

depressurized. The sympathetic officer 

allowed the tired painter to assume

the mantle of an artist in the aperture 

of his protected space. No law applied.

“I agree you should continue here, monsieur,

but how securely have you got this tied?”

He checked the knots and nodded in approval.

“Are you familiar with formaldehyde?”

He suggested opening a window. The removal

of the body was postponed until the weekend,

giving Soutine three more days. In all

that time, Paulette would later swear, her friend 

remained awake and working. They hardly spoke.

Soutine, his shoulders hunched, would lean against

a chair and load a brush and lunge. He broke

a dozen brushes in a day. Three times

he tried to eat—but eating made him choke.

Paulette would pull the bowl away. “Oh, Chaim,

you need to stop.” “I’ll finish when

it falls apart.” It fell. And from the slime

his hanging carcass series rose to 10,

each painting fully spread with crucified

and falling cattle, seething gristle end-

to-end. On Saturday, the thing would slide

across the floor and down the stairs and out,

a golem slab extinguished in a tide

of passion, fallen in a savage bout

of extra rounds. Soutine himself collapsed.

Zborowski paid to sanitize the rout

and crossed the landlord’s palm. Paulette, perhaps

intuiting an impact on the painter’s

ulcer, diagnosed exhaustion as a relapse—

she’d seen him through the throes of stomach pain.

Her premonition, her experience,

and her devotion would serve him well again.