Walking through the exhibition “An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine,” I was put in mind of the philosopher Susanne K. Langer and her book Problems of Art, published in 1957.¹ In a chapter titled “Expressiveness,” Langer differentiates between “the expression of feeling in a work of art” and self-expression. For Langer, expressiveness is experience given shape and vitality through the artist’s realization of form. “What [the artist] expresses,” she writes, “is . . . not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling.” The jumble of life, then, is not explicated but made recognizable and whole. Langer adds that this “knowledge may actually exceed his entire personal experience.” In contrast, she brusquely likens self-expression to a crying baby. Giving precedence to the artist’s psychological disposition, self-expression surrenders the artwork’s structural logic. That such logic reinforces the aesthetic—and, yes, emotive—capabilities of a work of art is lost on those who make self-expression their métier. Cézanne, for example, may have been a cold fish, but could anyone dispute the “expressiveness” of his paintings?

The paintings of Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) exemplify the dilemma of self-expression. I don’t mean to imply that his oeuvre is equivalent to a child wailing for its mother. Soutine’s work is, after all, credible and handsome. Yet it is rarely moving—at least, in a way that we feel we shouldbe moved by it. Visitors to “An Expressionist in Paris” will, certainly, exit the show with a definite impression