Posted by Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) is considered one of the leading expressionists of the so-called School of Paris – a central figure in classical modernism, who masterfully captures his time, around and between the two world wars, with an intense, disturbing and torn imagery.
Explosions of colour. Flaming brush strokes. Dizzying perspectives. Paintings that vibrate between merciless distortion and heartfelt sensitivity. Soutine’s works reflect the many hours spent studying the paintings of the great masters at the Louvre. His love for 17th century French artists in particular directly inspired the richness of his palette, while the masters of the 18th century guided his ideas on composition.
He painted in a style similar to that of Expressionism and in series, focusing in turn on diverse themes such as landscapes, gladioli, game hunting, fowl, people in service and altar boys with spectacular distortions.
Soutine undoubtedly influenced an entire generation of painters, and even shaped a new movement in international contemporary art. Indeed, between 1923 and 1964, the exhibitions dedicated to him in the United States, primarily in the galleries and museums of New York, had a powerful impact on American painting. Works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, as well as artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, enter into a dialogue with the Expressionist works of Soutine.
Chaïm Soutine was raised in extreme poverty in a Jewish Orthodox family in what today is known as Belarus. Already from an early age on he wished to become an artist and, despite great concerns of his parents, was allowed to attend drawing lessons in Minsk.
Here, as a very young man, he painted a portrait of a man, thus going against orthodox canon, and Soutine was assaulted and badly mistreated by the man’s sons. Soutine’s parents managed to receive a compensation for the assault and this enabled Soutine is able to travel to Vilnius in Lithuania and enroll in the city’s art school.
In 1913 Soutine moved to Paris, which at the time was the capital of the European avant-garde and a meeting point for many voluntarily and involuntarily exiled artists – especially from Eastern Europe.
In the early 1920s, Soutine became fascinated by the cooks and waiting staff of French hotels and restaurants, attired in boldly coloured uniforms. Over the next decade, these humble models sat for him in Paris and the south of France. The resulting series of portraits offer powerful images of a new social class of service personnel, who moved from aristocratic households of past centuries to the luxury hotels and restaurants that arose in the late 19th and early 20th century. These often-overlooked figures from France’s most fashionable places of leisure, including the famous Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, appealed to Soutine’s idea that profound emotion and a deep sense of humanity could be found in such modest sitters. He strived to achieve the most forceful effects of colour from the bold whites, reds and blues of their different liveries.
These portraits played a key role in establishing Soutine’s reputation and turned him from a struggling painter into a wealthy one. When he started the series, Soutine, an immigrant from Russia, was living in near-poverty alongside other artists, including his closest friend, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). In 1923 the American collector Albert C. Barnes saw one of Soutine’s early paintings of a pastry chef and thought it one of the greatest modern works he had ever seen. He demanded to see more paintings by Soutine and bought some fifty works on the spot. This helped lift Soutine out of his desperate circumstances and brought him to greater prominence. His portraits of hotel and restaurant workers became especially prized by other collectors and today are considered among his greatest achievements.
Overall there is not much known about the artist as a person. He left behind but a small amount of drawings and sketches and no notes, kept no diary and only wrote a few postcards and letters. As stateless and Jewish, his reality became extremely uncertain when the German forces occupied Paris. He lived his final years more or less in hiding and on the run, sometimes having to seek shelter and sleep in the woods, and when he finally ventured back to Paris in 1943 to undergo surgery for a bleeding stomach ulcer, it was too late.
Chaim Soutine. Landscape with Figure (Paysage avec figure), c. 1918–1919. Oil on canvas, Overall: 25 7/8 x 32 in. (65.7 x 81.3 cm). Barnes Foundation BF315. In Copyright. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
In one of Soutine’s more narrative scenes, a figure in brown walks up an impossibly steep slope while others gaze down from above. A vista of hilly farmland convulses across the canvas. According to Dr. Barnes’s colleague Violette de Mazia, creative departures from physical reality—such as the figure’s sideways gait—”result from the artist’s making instrumental use of his subject…for the expression of his experience of some aspect of the world he encounters.” Taking in the amalgamated whirl of land, trees, and sky, one wonders how else someone might traverse a landscape of Soutine’s?
Chaïm Soutine
Paysage aux toits Rouges
1919
oil on canvas, 50.1 cm x 65.5 cm
Exhibition history:
New York, Perls Galleries, Modern French Paintings, 1952, no. 175
Venice, XXVI Biennale di Venezia, 1952, no. 6
Providence, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Chaïm Soutine: 1893-1943, 1953
New York, Perls Galleries, Modern French Paintings, 1953, no. 190
West Bloomfield, Michigan, Janice Charach Epstein Museum Gallery at the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit, The Art of Collecting II – Fine Art Created by Jewish Artists, 1992
Céret, Museé d’Art Moderne de Céret, Soutine in Céret, 1919-1922, 2000
Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, The Impact of Chaïm Soutine: De Kooning, Pollack, Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, 2001-02
Signature bottom right: Soutine
Source/Photographer: Sotheby’s, New York, 04 November 2015
Still Life with Flowers, 1919
Barnes Foundation, USA
Nothing is still in this still life. An undulating table holds bouquets of red flowers bursting from white and mustard-yellow vases. Objects lean into one another, as if set off kilter by the weight of the paint itself— especially in the fervently impastoed blossoms that tangle with the blackish background.
Woman with Round Eyes, 1919.
Barnes Foundation, USA
A figure sits against a blood-red background, gazing out at the viewer through large blue eyes. Soutine uses the familiar conventions of portraiture—note the folded hands and the three-quarter view pose—and then explodes tradition with fiery colors and undulating sweeps of paint. The hands are especially expressive—pinks and oranges applied in crude, broad strokes, with a few patches of bare canvas showing through.
The Pastry Chef 1919
When Albert Barnes first visited Chaim Soutine’s Paris studio in 1922, the struggling artist was known only in the city’s bohemian circles. Seeing this painting of a pastry chef sparked Dr. Barnes to buy more than 50 works by Soutine in the course of a few weeks, through the art dealer Paul Guillaume. In 1923, Guillaume recounted his discovery of Soutine’s work: “One day when I had gone to a painter’s house to see a picture by Modigliani I noticed in a corner of the studio a work which immediately got me excited. It was a Soutine; and it showed a pastry chef—an incredible, captivating, tangible, colorful pastry chef, cursed with a huge, magnificent ear, unexpected but right; a masterpiece. I bought it.”
Chaim Soutine
Butcher Boy
c 1919-1920
Photograph: © Courtauld Gallery, Simon Capstick-Dale (New York)
Chaïm Soutine – The Idiot, c. 1920. Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm.
Calvet Museum, Avignon, France
Group of Trees 1922
Barnes Foundation, USA
Soutine fled to the south of France after German troops bombed Paris in 1918. He was accompanied by his friend Amedeo Modigliani and his dealer, Leopold Zborowski, and settled for three years in the town of Céret. Here, Soutine paints a reeling townscape (perhaps Céret) blocked by a lattice of trees that lash upwards like flames. His vigorous brushwork, applied without differentiation between foreground and background, flattens the space into a whirling painterly effect that seems to merge the physical landscape with his personal experience of it.
The White Hat, 1923
Barnes Foundation, USA
Soutine presents a man with a turnip-shaped head wearing a small white hat. The figure’s black, high-collared coat emphasizes the strange contours of his face. One eyebrow is arched, giving him an air of thoughtfulness. Albert Barnes may have placed The White Hat on this wall to demonstrate how artists distort their subjects to express emotion. Compare, for example, Soutine’s white-hatted man to the icy countenance of the sitter in Redheaded Girl in Evening Dress (1918) by Modigliani.
Red-headed Girl in Evening Dress
Amedeo Modigliani
Date: 1918; Paris, France
Chaïm Soutine. The Communicant (The Bride), c. 1924. The Lewis Collection. Artwork © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image © 2015 Christie’s Images Limited
A 2021 exhibition explored the affinities between the work of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint, organized by the Barnes and the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, presented nearly 45 works by these titans of 20th-century art.
Willem de Kooning. Woman II, 1952. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, 1955. Artwork © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York
Carcass of Beef, 1925, by Chaim Soutine.
The eccentric Russian-French expressionist artist had an entire steer carcass hauled into his Paris studio, where the smell and trails of blood revolted his neighbours. He painted at least four canvases of his subject.
Chaim Soutine
The Little Pastry Cook
c 1927
Photograph: Christie’s Images, London/Scala, Florence
Chaim Soutine
The Room-service Waiter, c.1927
Oil on canvas
87.0 x 66.0cm
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
© Photo RMN – J.G. Berizzi
© Chaim Soutine, c.1927/ADAGP.
Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney 2001
Chäim Soutine
Children and Geese
1934
Photo by Efraim Lever @Milwakee Art Museum