Flesh and Oil: Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning at Musée de l’Orangerie

Ever ambitious, Willem de Kooning once declared to his photographer friend Rudy Burckhardt that he wanted to paint “like Ingres and Soutine—both at the same time.” Ingres, no doubt, for the rigor and refinement of his portraits of noble patrons, and Soutine for the expressionistic abandon he brought to everything from scenes of everyday working people to dense, windswept landscapes of the South of France. Even if Soutine did not return the reference—he and de Kooning neve