Maurice Tuchman: Champion of the Outsider : Art: When he was a grad student, the LACMA curator became fascinated with Chaim Soutine. Now, the definitive Soutine compendium is printed and ready for distribution.

Maurice Tuchman has been senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for more than a quarter-century. To many in the art world, he is the insider’s insider. Dapper and youthful at 56, he inspires a mental picture of a man-about-town with a weakness for trends and stylishness.

If that is one real facet of Tuchman, another is that of a whirling dervish aesthetic impresario fascinated by aptly offbeat subjects for exhibition and scholarly research. His most recent concoction is “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art,” put together in collaboration with a number of authors, and particularly his co-curator Carol Eliel. On view at LACMA through Jan. 3, the show, despite some reservations, is inarguably the town’s most important original exhibition on a modern theme this year. After closing here, it will travel to museums in Germany and Japan.

The show concerns the way outsiders--urban hermits and mentally disturbed artists--directly influenced noted modern artists like Max Ernst or Jean Dubuffet. The survey was some three years in the making, so Tuchman is understandably pleased to have it launched--and he has reason to be even more tickled about the completion of a project that’s taken him 10 times as long.

Some 30 years ago, when Tuchman was a graduate student at Columbia University, he became fascinated with the life and art of another sort of outsider artist--Chaim Soutine.

“He was a strange, phobic Lithuanian Jew who worked in Paris and died there at 49 in 1943 during the (German) occupation,” Tuchman recounts. “He suffered a severe rupture of a stomach ulcer. His panicked girlfriend drove him around for 16 or 18 hours looking for a hospital where the Gestapo wouldn’t get him. By the time they found one it was too late.

“He had no relatives, friends or a dealer to champion him. I decided to work on him, to do a catalogue raisonne as the subject of my Ph.D. thesis. Over the years, artists like Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon told me how much they had been influenced by him. I know Jackson Pollock was also a great admirer.”

Now, after decades of chipping away, the definitive three-volume Soutine compendium is printed and ready for distribution. The co-publishers are Perls Galleries and Guy Loudmer, head of a renowned Paris auction house. Tuchman, working in collaboration with fellow authors Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls, has done it at last.

Soutine, according to Tuchman, was the youngest of 11 children in the pitifully poor family of a mender whose occupation put him on the bottom rung of the social pecking order in the town of Smilovitchi. In such segregated places, life was led in constant fear of pogroms. Soutine’s early artistic efforts were rewarded with beatings from his brothers. Any visual imagery was anathema to these conservative, orthodox Jews. Needless to say, the budding artist wanted out.

When he finally struggled his way to Paris in 1913, Soutine moved into a legendary warren of studios known as La Ruche--”The Beehive.” Fellow artists in residence included Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger and Soutine’s special friend, Amedeo Modigliani.

Even in this bohemian enclave where poverty and eccentricity was the standard, Soutine was extreme. He tried working as a porter or laborer. When utterly unemployed he’d skulk in cafes hoping for a handout. He was difficult and plagued with irrational fears. He wouldn’t bathe. He burned paraffin next to his bed to ward off bugs. During the occupation, he bought 50 identical fedoras, believing if he changed them daily he’d be invisible to the Nazis.

Despite all that, he painted images of twisted servants, flayed animals, tortured landscapes and self-portraits of surpassing strangeness and beauty. He destroyed much of his own work, slashing it to bits with great glee. Even so, he attracted a dealer, lovely mistresses and powerful collectors. The latter, like the artist himself, tended to be possessive and secretive.

Crucial among them was the brilliant curmudgeon American Dr. Albert C. Barnes. In 1923, he purchased as many as 100 Soutine canvases, taking the artist out of poverty and ensuring a demand for his work, but keeping a significant block of it virtually out of public sight at the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania. A posthumous retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1950 put Soutine solidly on the American artscape. It also caused a welter of fakes to flood the market. It was at that point that Tuchman’s real salvage operation began for Soutine’s reputation.

“As much as 20% of what was passing for original was bogus stuff,” Tuchman says. “Fakes are bad business on the market, but they’re worse for an artist’s posterity. They hang in museums diluting the impression of the quality of the artist’s achievement in the historical record.”

Tuchman set about sorting it all out.

“You have to learn to recognize a painter’s style the way you recognize your own handwriting. You’re helped by the fact that fakers tend to make pastiches of other canvases, they lack a sense of space that integrates work because they just don’t care. Most fakes really aren’t very good because they are intended more as the come-on in a con game than as convincing imitations. The buyer usually knows nothing about art except that he wants some and this one is a bargain.

“It takes years to learn to discriminate with certainty and even then in some cases there is that fine gray area of doubt. It was 1968 or so before I felt I could authenticate. Since then I’ve written thousands of letters and looked at scores of works. Some sincere people, especially in Europe, have burst into tears on learning their prized possession was wrong.

“I was recently in Japan. A very powerful industrialist sent a car so I could come and view his Soutines. This man is a multibillionaire who’s treated like an American president, surrounded with security and bodyguards, the sort of man nobody says no to. Asked what I thought of his pictures, I gritted my teeth and told him, ‘Eight of them are superb examples and one is a patent fake.’

“Given the Japanese sensitivity to humiliation, it was a dicey moment. He took it very well. The next day I went on my own to the gallery that sold him the picture and told them it was fake. They gave him back the $1-million purchase price, so it came out well.”

Tuchman stands up and whacks his head rather severely on a shelf. He waves his hand over the bruise absent-mindedly, as if brushing away a fly. His mind is usually several steps ahead of real time and he’s already thinking about his next project.

“It’s scheduled for 1995 and it’s called ‘Secret Meanings in Realism,’ ” he says. “It will deal with the psychology of seeing, about philosophies of perception, particularly the illusions and deceptions found in various kinds of realistic art.”

Onward, through the fog of the modern.