Bateau Ivre 1948

Serge Charchoune made this ‘Drunken Boat’, or ‘Bateau Ivre’, probably with oil paint, and maybe with some pastel or wax crayon, too. I can really feel him there in the studio, wrestling with these blocks of color, smearing them together, probably scratching at them, too, to get that gritty, crumbly surface. It’s almost like he’s building up the image, piece by piece, like a little kid with blocks. That thick, greasy paint—it's not just color, it's matter, it's stuff, and that’s how it hits you. You can almost smell it, like a workshop. Look at those marks at the top, like pickets in a fence—they almost don't belong, but they feel so right because they are so insistent, so repeated. I bet Charchoune knew Delaunay, and maybe a bit of Kandinsky, but he’s doing something different here. He's trying to make order out of chaos; his boat might be drunk, but it's still sailing somewhere.