Chaïm Soutine

gigatos | February 2, 2022

Summary

Chaim Soutin (Yiddish: חײם סוטין, Ḥaïm Soutin) was a Russian Jewish painter who emigrated to France, born in 1893 or 1894 in the village of Smilovitchi, at that time in the Russian Empire, and died on August 9, 1943 in Paris.

It seems that he had a difficult childhood in the ghettos of the former Russia but his life is not well known before his arrival in Paris, probably in 1912. Often described as very shy, even unsociable, he spent several years of misery among the bohemian Montparnasse, with recognition only coming in the 1920s, after his “discovery” by the American collector Albert Barnes. Soutine always had a complicated relationship with his patrons and with the very idea of success or fortune. Although he was affected by a stomach ulcer at an early age, he painted a great deal, with an astonishing energy. His exigency, however, led him to destroy many of his works. The five hundred or so paintings whose authenticity has been established are usually signed but never dated.

Soutine, who expressed very little about his pictorial conceptions, is one of the painters usually attached, with Chagall or Modigliani, to what is known as the School of Paris. However, he stayed away from any movement and developed his technique and his vision of the world alone. While willingly referring to the great masters, starting with Rembrandt, and confining himself to three canonical genres of figurative painting – portraits, landscapes, still lifes – he created a singular work, difficult to classify. From a vivid and contrasting palette, even violent, which may recall that of Edvard Munch or Emil Nolde, emerge convulsive forms, lines tormented to the point of distortion of the subject, creating a dramatic atmosphere. But Soutine”s canvases are even more distinctive for their thick work, which pushes the experience of painting as matter even further, in the wake of Van Gogh and paving the way for the artistic experiments of the second half of the 20th century. The flamboyant colors and the tortured aspect of his works have often brought them closer to expressionism, although they are untied from their time and do not reflect any commitment. In the 1950s, the abstract expressionists of the New York School recognized Soutine as a precursor.

In this work with its disconcerting aesthetics, some commentators wanted to see the mirror of the personality of its author, whose life – with its shadowy areas and even its legends – lent itself to reviving the myth of the cursed artist: it was a question of explaining the painter”s manner by his illness, his inhibitions, his material difficulties or his social integration, or even a form of madness. But such a link of cause and effect is not obvious. If one can detect an influence of his origins and his life experience, it would rather be on Soutine”s relationship to painting itself. In any case, he gave himself entirely to his art as if he were looking for a form of salvation.

Very shy and rather introverted, Chaïm Soutine kept no diary, left few letters and confided little, even to those closest to him. The little that his biographers know about him comes from the sometimes divergent testimonies of those who met him or were close to him – friends, other painters or artists, art dealers – and the women who shared his life. It is all the more difficult to grasp that, as a “painter of movement and instability”, always on the sidelines of others and schools, he never stopped moving around, living as a vagabond without ever settling down for good anywhere.

Also read, battles – Battle of Sekigahara

Birth of a vocation (1893-1912)

Chaïm Soutine was born in 1893 or 1894 – the first date is retained by convention – to a Lithuanian Orthodox Jewish family in Smilavitchy, a shtetl of four hundred inhabitants located about twenty kilometers southeast of Minsk. This region in the west of the Empire, on the borders of Belarus and Lithuania, was then part of the “ghetto of tsarist Russia”, the immense Residential Zone where the imperial power forced the Jews to live a quasi-autarchic life.

For some, Soutine was the son of shopkeepers who were quite proud of his talents. It seems rather that the father, Solomon, was a tailor”s mender, earning barely two rubles a week. Sarah, the mother, had eleven children: Chaïm (“lives” in Hebrew) would be the tenth of this siblings. The family lives in great poverty, like almost all the families in the shtetl, which generates violence in addition to the anguish of pogroms: Soutine”s savagery as an adult, as well as his visceral fear of authority, are very surely rooted in childhood trauma.

The family observed the religious principles of the Torah and the young boy attended Talmudic school. But, as obstinate as he was taciturn, he preferred drawing to study, ready to do anything to obtain material (according to a rumor perhaps due to Michel Kikoïne, he once stole his mother”s utensils or his father”s scissors in order to resell them). He drew everything that came into his sight: “with charcoal, on pieces of recovered paper, he never stopped drawing the portrait of his relatives”. However, the Hebrew law, following the third commandment of the decalogue, forbids any human or animal representation: so Chaïm is often beaten by his father or his brothers. When he was nine years old, he was sent as an apprentice to his brother-in-law, a tailor in Minsk. It was there that he formed a lasting bond with Kikoine, who shared the same passion as him, and with whom he took drawing lessons in 1907 – with the only teacher in the city, Mr. Kreuger – while working as a retoucher for a photographer.

Perhaps during a stay with Kikoine in his native village, Soutine painted a portrait of an old man, probably a rabbi, in an act in which Clarisse Nicoïdski sees, beyond the simple transgression, a desire for profanation. But the rabbi”s son, a butcher by trade, takes the teenager to the back of his store to give him a thorough beating. The biographer – and she is not the only one – gives a novelistic account of this brutal, not to say bloody scene; Olivier Renault at least retains that certain “elements announce the work to come: fascination for animal carcasses, death at work, colors, violence”. This episode will play the role of “founding myth” in Soutine”s career as an artist. Chaïm was unable to walk for a week, so his parents filed a complaint and won the case: part of the twenty-five rubles of compensation financed his departure for Vilnius, around 1909 – always in the company of Kikoin, one of the only witnesses of his youth.

Vilnius was nicknamed the Jerusalem of Lithuania at the time: an important center of Judaism and Yiddish culture, it enjoyed a special, more tolerant status in the Empire, which allowed Jews to live and study while mixing with goyim. The intellectual effervescence that reigned there allowed Soutine to break both “with a family environment hostile to his vocation” and “with the narrow framework of the shtetl and its prohibitions. His ambitions as an artist were confirmed, although he had failed the entrance exam to the École des Beaux-Arts for the first time – apparently because of an error in perspective.

Admitted in 1910, he will quickly prove to be “one of the most brilliant students of the school”, noticed by Ivan Rybakov, who teaches with Ivan Troutnev. But a “kind of morbid sadness” already emerges from his sketch subjects, executed from life: scenes of misery, abandonment, funerals … Telling that he has often posed for his friend lying on the ground, covered with a white sheet and surrounded by candles, Kikoine adds: “Soutine felt unconsciously tense towards the drama. In any case, he began to discover the great masters of painting through reproductions.

Sickly shy, Soutine admired the actresses in theaters only from afar, and formed a fleeting romance with Deborah Melnik, who aspired to become an opera singer and whom he later met in Paris. He also yearns for the daughter of his landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Rafelkes, but in such a discreet way that, tired of waiting for him to declare himself, she marries another. The Rafelkes, wealthy bourgeois who would nevertheless have gladly taken Soutine as a son-in-law, helped him to raise the money needed to go to Paris.

It is that at the School of Fine Arts Soutine and Kikoine met Pinchus Krémègne, and that all three, now inseparable, were already suffocating in Vilnius. They dreamed of the French capital as a “fraternal, generous city, which knew how to offer freedom”, less threatened than Russia by anti-Semitism, and in constant artistic turmoil. Krémègne, a little less poor, leaves first. He is soon followed by Soutine and Kikoïne, who thinks he remembers that they arrived in Paris on July 14, 1912 and that their first concern was to go and hear Aida at the Garnier Opera. Chaïm Soutine has definitively turned his back on his past, from which he takes nothing, not even luggage, not even his works.

Also read, biographies – Alfred Stieglitz

The Montparnasse years (1912-1922)

Since 1900, the Montparnasse district, made fashionable by Apollinaire, has supplanted Montmartre as the epicenter of an intense intellectual and artistic life. It is the result of an unparalleled meeting of writers, painters, sculptors, actors, often penniless, who exchange and create between cafés, alcohol and work, freedom and precariousness. It was there that Soutine developed and affirmed his talent over a period of ten years, living “in a poverty that bordered on distress”.

La Ruche, whose rotunda stands in the Passage de Danzig in the 15th arrondissement, not far from Montparnasse, is a sort of cosmopolitan phalanstery where painters and sculptors from all over the world, many of them from Eastern Europe, find small studios to rent cheaply where they can stay. Over the months Soutine met Archipenko, Zadkine, Brancusi, Chapiro, Kisling, Epstein, Chagall (who did not like him very much), Chana Orloff (who befriended him) and Lipchitz (who introduced him to Modigliani). As long as he did not have his own studio, he slept and worked in the homes of some or others, especially Krémègne and Kikoïne. He also sometimes spent the night in a stairwell or on a bench.

As soon as he arrived, Soutine eagerly set out to discover the capital. “In a filthy hole like Smilovitchi” where, he also claims, the existence of the piano is unknown, “one cannot suppose that there are cities like Paris, music like Bach”s.” As soon as he has three pennies in his pocket, it is to go “fill up” with music at the Colonne or Lamoureux concerts, with a predilection for the master of the Baroque. He haunts the galleries of the Louvre, shaving the walls or jumping at the slightest approach, to contemplate for hours his favorite painters: “if he loves Fouquet, Raphael, Chardin and Ingres, it is especially in the works of Goya and Courbet, and more than any other in that of Rembrandt, that Soutine recognizes himself. Chana Orloff tells us that, seized with “respectful awe” in front of a Rembrandt, he could also go into a trance and exclaim: “It”s so beautiful that I”m going crazy!

He also took French lessons, often at the back of La Rotonde, held at the time by Victor Libion: the latter, a patron of the arts in his own way, let the artists warm up and chat for hours without renewing their drinks. Soon, Soutine devoured Balzac, Baudelaire or Rimbaud, and later Montaigne.

In 1913, along with Kikoïne and Mané-Katz, he attended the very academic classes of Fernand Cormon at the Beaux-Arts, whose teaching consisted largely of copying the paintings in the Louvre: Mané-Katz remembers having heard him humming in Yiddish. When he left the course, Soutine painted on old crusts bought at the Clignancourt flea market, which he tore up at the slightest disappointment or criticism, even if it meant sewing them up again to use them if he had no other support – all his life, Soutine would not stop destroying his works in this way, mercilessly. At night, he worked with Kikoine as a stevedore at the Montparnasse station, unloading fish and seafood from Brittany. He was also hired as a worker at the Grand Palais, and even drew lettering when the Salon de l”automobile was held there, which proved at least “that Soutine did not wallow in poverty and tried to get out of it.

In the Hive, where the living conditions are the most uncomfortable, “the reality is not that of a carefree bohemian, that of poor immigrants, uncertain, not of the future, but of the tomorrow. Now, of all, Soutine is the most indigent. Perhaps carrying a tapeworm, he is always hungry (“I have the heart which draws”) or eats badly. Moreover, he invented diets based on milk and boiled potatoes to combat his first stomach pains. “To offer Soutine a meal is the most beautiful gift one can give him”: he stuffs himself without manners, like a boor, even if it means being sick the next day. Riddled with vermin, he has the reputation of being dirty, and his clothes, often soiled, are worn beyond the rope. If he no longer has a shirt, he makes a breastplate by stuffing his arms into the legs of a pair of underpants – when he doesn”t go naked, it is said, under his coat, sometimes even with his feet wrapped in rags and papers.

But although he had moments of despondency, his wild and shady temperament did not attract pity: at that time, recalls the son of Michel Kikoine, “many took Soutine for a madman. Especially since he sometimes swindled those who modestly came to his aid. The sculptor Indenbaum recounts that Soutine, on seven occasions, took back from him on some pretext a painting he had sold him, in order to resell it, at a lower price, to someone else; in the end, Indenbaum, buying three herrings at the market, demanded compensation: this would be the origin of the Still Life with Herrings, with its two forks like gaunt hands ready to clutch the fish. Soutine immediately sold the canvas to a third party at a very low price. For Olivier Renault, if the extreme poverty can explain the inelegance of the process, “this twisted game” prefigures above all “an ambiguous relationship to the production and ownership of a work of art.

As for women, Soutine pays them disconcerting compliments (“Your hands are as soft as plates”), or chooses, when he happens to go to a brothel, those who are the most damaged by life or alcohol – as they appear in some of his paintings. The relations that this unloved man, tormented by the anguish of impotence, maintains with women seem to reflect a certain disgust with himself: “I have contempt for the women who have desired and possessed me,” he confided one day to Modigliani.

The Great War came, but it did not really aggravate Soutine”s misery. Discharged for health reasons after having been hired as a digger to dig trenches, he obtained a residence permit as a Russian refugee on August 4, 1914, and then spent a few weeks in a villa rented by Kikoine and his wife northwest of Paris. There he began to paint landscapes on the spot, clutching his canvas tightly to his heart, to the great damage of his clothes, as soon as a walker pretended to glance at it – Soutine would always hide from the gaze of others when he was at work, while soliciting their judgment with feverish anxiety afterwards. It is also there that he explains to his friend why he paints relentlessly: beauty does not deliver itself by itself, it must be “violated”, in a repeated hand-to-hand combat with the material.

When the front was approaching, Soutine returned to Paris and moved in with the sculptor Oscar Mietschaninoff in the Falguière housing estate. Although it had no gas or electricity, it was less spartan than the Ruche, but just as insalubrious: Krémègne recounts the Homeric battles against bedbugs that Soutine and Modigliani fought there a little later, in their shared studio. It was in the cité Falguière – which he painted several times between 1916 and 1917 – that Soutine, one winter night, took in two young models who were homeless, and burned some of his poor furniture in his stove so that they would be warm: this act of generosity was the starting point of a long friendship between the painter and the future Kiki de Montparnasse.

“Still lifes are the dominant genre in Soutine”s early career. They often depict, not without humor on the part of a man who never eats his fill, a corner of a table with a few kitchen utensils and – not always – the elements of a meager poor man”s meal: cabbage, leek (here resembling a spatula), onions, herrings above all, the everyday food of childhood and beyond. Some time later, in Still Life with a Violin, the instrument, which may recall shtetl folklore as well as Bach”s music, is strangely wedged between the material foods, perhaps a metaphor for artistic creation and the artist”s harsh condition.

The friendship was immediate between Soutine and Modigliani, his elder, already a little known, who took him under his wing and taught him good manners – to wash, to dress, to behave at the table, to introduce himself to people. Modigliani had faith in his talent and gave him unfailing support. They became inseparable despite Soutine”s difficult character, and from 1916 onwards they rented a studio together in the Cité Falguière, where they worked side by side without any discernible influence from one on the other. The two friends oppose each other like day and night: the Italian with an expansive charm, proud of his Jewish origins, destitute but elegant and concerned about his appearance, very sociable and a great seducer of women, who draws constantly everywhere and distributes his drawings to get paid for drinks; and the shy, stooped Lithuanian, who is afraid of everything, flees from company, denies his past to the point of sometimes claiming not to know his native language, who hides to paint and for whom “sketching a portrait is a private act.

But they have in common, in addition to the same taste for reading (poetry, novels, philosophy), the same “passion” to paint, the same requirement – or dissatisfaction – which pushes them to destroy a lot, and the same desire to remain independent of the artistic movements of their time: fauvism, cubism, futurism. They are both eaten away from the inside, not so much by illness as by a deep suffering, palpable in Soutine, more hidden in his exuberant companion, who drowns it however in alcohol and drugs. But Modigliani soon dragged Soutine into his drinking bouts, where they cheated their grief as well as their hunger. The red and the absinthe leave them sometimes in such a state that they end up in the station, from where the commissioner Zamaron, collector and friend of the painters, takes them out. These excesses do not contribute little to aggravate the ulcer from which Soutine suffers, which a posteriori was very angry at Modigliani. This puts into perspective the self-destructive impulses that are often attributed to him: Soutine, despite appearances, loved life, in all its harshness, insists Olivier Renault.

If the reverse is not true, Modigliani painted his friend several times: in the 1916 portrait in which Soutine wears the poor beige velvet coat he had been wearing for a long time, the particular separation of the middle and ring fingers of the right hand could represent the blessing of the priests of Israel, a possible wink to their common Jewishness, and a sign of the Italian painter”s boundless admiration for Soutine”s talent.

Very quickly, in fact, he recommended him warmly to the poet Leopold Zborowski, who had started his activity as an art dealer with him. But the relationship was not very good and Zborowski, who was still penniless and whose wife did not appreciate Soutine”s frustrated manner, did not like his painting very much. Nevertheless, in exchange for the exclusivity of his productions, he gives him a pension of 5 francs a day, which helps him to live, and he tries, sometimes in vain, to sell some of his paintings.

Soutine lived for several years in the South of France, first between Vence and Cagnes-sur-Mer, then, in 1919, leaving the Côte d”Azur for the Pyrénées-Orientales, in Céret. Nevertheless, he went back and forth to Paris, notably in October 1919 to obtain his identity card, which was mandatory for foreigners. Nicknamed by the locals “el pintre brut” (“the dirty painter”), he still lived miserably on Zborowski”s subsidies. During a visit to the South of France, he wrote to a friend: “He gets up at three in the morning, walks twenty kilometers, loaded with canvases and colors, to find a site that pleases him, and goes back to bed forgetting to eat. But he unclutches his canvas and, having laid it on top of the one from the day before, he falls asleep next to it” – Soutine only owns one frame. The local people took pity on him or sympathy; he painted their portraits, inaugurating certain famous series such as those of men at prayer, or pastry cooks and waiters, whom he represented from the front, their working hands often disproportionate. Between 1920 and 1922, he painted some two hundred pictures.

The Céret period, although Soutine eventually took a dislike to the place as well as the works he had painted there, is generally considered a key stage in the evolution of his art. He no longer hesitated to “inject his own affectivity into the subjects and figures of his paintings. Above all, he imbued the landscapes with extreme deformations that carried them away in a “gyratory movement” already perceived by Waldemar-George in the still lifes: under the pressure of internal forces that seemed to compress them, the forms sprang up and twisted, the masses rose up “as if they were caught in a maelstrom”.

Also read, biographies – Grace Kelly

The Barnes “miracle” (1923)

Between December 1922 and January 1923, the rich American collector Albert Barnes scoured the studios and galleries of Montparnasse in order to complete the sum of works he had acquired before the war for his future foundation of contemporary art in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A great lover of Impressionists (Renoir, Cézanne), a fervent admirer of Matisse, a little less of Picasso, he wanted to know more about Fauvism, Cubism, and Negro art: he therefore began hunting for new artists under the guidance of the dealer Paul Guillaume. It is difficult to know if he discovered Soutine on his own, by seeing one of his paintings in a café, as he tells it, or if he noticed Le Petit Pâtissier at Guillaume”s, to whom this painting belonged and who described it as follows: “An unheard of pastry chef, fascinating, real, truculent, afflicted with an immense and superb ear, unexpected and right, a masterpiece.

Barnes was enthusiastic and rushed to Zborowski”s house, while some friends searched for Soutine to make him presentable. The American bought at least thirty works, landscapes and portraits, for a total of 2,000 dollars. Soutine did not seem particularly grateful to him: this was undoubtedly due to his pride as an artist – all the more so since, according to Lipchitz, it was also his own notoriety that Barnes was ensuring by “discovering” an unknown genius – and his “ambiguous relationship with success as with money”. Two weeks before their departure for the United States, Paul Guillaume organized the hanging of some fifty paintings purchased by the American collector, including sixteen paintings by Soutine. This sudden fame put an end to the “heroic phase” of the painter”s artistic training, soon to be thirty years old.

From one day to the next, even if his value did not rise immediately and a polemic arose around the School of Paris and his place at the Salon des Indépendants, Soutine became in the art world “a known painter, sought after by amateurs, the one who is no longer smiled at”. It seems that he broke with his former companions of misfortune, either to forget these years of hardship, or because they themselves were jealous of his success. Between 1924 and 1925, his paintings went from 300 or 400 francs each to 2,000 or 3,000, while Paul Guillaume, who had become an unconditional admirer, began to assemble the twenty-two or so paintings that still constitute the most important European collection of Soutine”s works.

But it took time – an article by Paul Guillaume in the magazine Les Arts à Paris in 1923, the sale of a still life to the son of a politician, the daily allowance of 25 francs paid by Zborowski, who also put his car and driver at his disposal – for Soutine to get used to his good fortune and to modify his lifestyle. If his ulcer forbids him to eat, he dresses and puts on shoes at the best manufacturers, having also recourse to a manicure to take care of his hands, which he knows to be fine and beautiful and which constitute his working tool. Some of his contemporaries reproached him for the ostentation of a parvenu. But Clarisse Nicoïdski reminds us how much he had always lacked reference points in terms of good taste, and that it was also in his temperament to do everything with excess.

Also read, biographies – Thomas Hobbes

Success and instability (1923-1937)

Sent back to Cagnes by Zborowski, Soutine went through a period of emptiness: a letter addressed to his dealer details his depressive and unproductive state, in this landscape that he said he could no longer bear. He gradually regained his inspiration, but returned to Paris in 1924, where, without leaving the 14th arrondissement, he often changed studios (boulevard Edgar Quinet, avenue d”Orléans or Parc-de-Montsouris). There he found the singer Deborah Melnik, for a short-lived affair despite a possible religious marriage: the couple was already separated and at loggerheads when Débora Melnik, on June 10, 1929, gave birth to a daughter named Aimée. Chaïm Soutine is said to be the father, but he does not recognize her or provide for her needs, even suggesting through his slander that she is not his. Clarisse Nicoïdski, however, moderates this negative image a little: Soutine would have taken care of his daughter at times.

Throughout the 1920s, the painter returned periodically to the Côte d”Azur, driven by Zborowski”s chauffeur. André Daneyrolle, a handyman but also a confidant to whom Soutine had Rimbaud or Seneca read, tells a number of anecdotes about their accommodations or the improvised nature of their car trips. He evokes Soutine”s phobia of being seen while painting: the artist would have painted the large ash tree in the Place de Vence nearly twenty times because a corner near the trunk allowed him to work hidden there. The notoriety of the painter did not chase away the anguish nor the complexes of the man. Daneyrolle also suggests, with regard to the portraits of very humble people, that “misery is not only a ”subject” for Soutine, but also his raw material”, drawn from his own sufferings.

André Daneyrolle also remembers going down with the painter to Bordeaux in September 1927 and then again the following year to the home of the art historian Élie Faure, who bought Soutine a few paintings and devoted a short but important monograph to him in 1929. Biographers point out that Élie Faure forged closer ties with Soutine than with others, such as Braque or Matisse: “he saw him very often, received him in the Dordogne, took him to Spain, and helped him materially,” paying various taxes and bills for him, as well as the rent for his new studio in the Passage d”Enfer. He “supports him especially with an admiration without reserve”. But their friendship waned in the early 1930s, perhaps because Soutine had fallen in love with Faure”s daughter, who had other ambitions for her.

The numerous still lifes with roosters, chickens, turkeys, pheasants, ducks, hares, rabbits date from this period, even if “a hallucinating skinned rabbit” with “red stumps” and as if begging for mercy had already struck a public of initiates in June 1921, during a collective exhibition at the Devambez gallery – in April of the same year, at the café Le Parnasse, the painter had produced a landscape. Soutine himself chose the animals from the stalls, then let them pamper themselves before painting them, indifferent to the stench. Between 1922 and 1924, in reference to Chardin, he had launched into variations on the rabbit or the hare, and especially the ray. In 1925, he tackled a larger series, finally confronting his master Rembrandt and his famous “Flayed Ox”.

He may have already dreamed of it at the Ruche, when the wind carried the smells and mooings from the slaughterhouses; he has been around since the 1920s-1922s with veal or mutton carcasses: he now goes to the Villette to have a whole beef delivered, which he hangs in his workshop. The meat begins to work and darken. Paulette Jourdain fetches fresh blood to sprinkle on it, or Soutine puts red on it before painting it. Soon the flies got involved, the neighbors too, horrified by the pestilence: the employees of the hygiene services arrived, who advised the painter to prick his “models” with ammonia in order to slow down the decomposition. He will not do without it.

The food that he missed so much is very recurrent in Soutine”s work, but one could wonder about his fascination for the flesh and blood of the corpse in its ultimate nudity – he who would have painted only one nude in his entire career. Poultry or game pieces are hung by the legs on some butcher”s hook, in tortured postures that the painter takes care to perfect: as if crossed by a last jolt, they seem to exhibit the suffering of agony.

In the midst of the recession that also affected the art market, the Castaings provided Soutine with a certain comfort by relieving him of all contingent worries, and a material security that calmed him more than it was really necessary – even though from that time on he had to stop painting for weeks or even months at a time because of the pain caused by his ulcer, and his production decreased markedly in the 1930s. The Castaings often invited him to stay at their property in Lèves, near Chartres, where he felt at ease despite the somewhat too worldly atmosphere for his taste. There he discovered a new interest in live animals – donkeys, horses – without abandoning still lifes, houses or landscapes, nor portraits, unique or serial: cooks, waiters, women entering the water with their shirts up, on the model of Rembrandt. But perhaps this exclusive partnership with the Castaings “locked him up even more in his fierce isolation”.

He probably acted in this way because of his demand for absolute perfection; perhaps also because he had difficulty tolerating having to attribute his fortune to a single man, Barnes, and therefore, after all, to the chance of an encounter; or again, because of a deep malaise – which Clarisse Nicoïdski attributes in part to an internalization of the biblical prohibition on the image. Perhaps at the same time, Soutine declared to a lady visiting his studio that what she could see there was not worth much, and that he would one day, unlike Chagall or Modigliani, have the courage to destroy everything: “I will murder my paintings one day.

Also read, biographies – Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark

In 1937, Soutine moved to the 18th floor of the Villa Seurat in the same neighborhood, where his neighbors included Chana Orloff, Jean Lurçat and Henry Miller. One day, at the Dome, friends introduce him to a young redheaded woman, Gerda Michaelis Groth, a German Jew who had fled from Nazism. Seduced by what she found “ironic gaiety” in the painter, she asked to visit his studio, a hodgepodge strewn with cigarette butts where she was surprised not to see any paintings: he claimed that he could only paint in the spring light. A few days later, Gerda invites him to tea at her house, but Soutine, who never has a set time, only arrives in the evening, and takes him to a wrestling match, his favorite sport. But there, he was suddenly taken ill. Having brought back Seurat villa, the young woman pampers him and stays with him to watch over him. In the morning he refuses to let her go: “Gerda, you were my guardian last night, you are a guardian, and now I am the one who guards you. Gerda Groth becomes Miss Guard for everyone.

Need for care, tenderness, or true love, it was the first time that Soutine settled down with a woman and that he led, as Henry Miller testified, a regular, “normal” life. Gerda ran the household, and her companion, who was prone to compulsive luxury purchases while remaining haunted by the spectre of precariousness, controlled the expenses. The couple entertained, went out – to the Louvre, to the cinema, to the wrestling matches, to the flea market – and often went on picnics in the vicinity of Paris, to Garches or Bougival. Soutine took his paintings and colors with him, Gerda a book. She also provided details of the painter”s habits, although she respected his taste for secrecy, which went so far as to lock his paintings in a cupboard: he attacked his subject without a preparatory sketch, used many brushes which he threw on the ground one after the other in his eagerness, and did not hesitate to work with his fingers, keeping paint embedded under his fingernails… But it was above all the intimate and humorous Soutine that she illuminated in a tender light in her book of memories.

At the side of “Garde”, the painter knows two years of sweetness and balance, which make him want to resume contact with his own family in writing. Above all, suffering permanently from his stomach, he decided to really take care of himself. He consulted specialists, got back in touch with certain foods (especially meat, which he had been doing nothing but painting for years), and took his remedies. What he doesn”t know is that, independently of his general weakening, the doctors judge his ulcer to be inoperable, already too advanced. They gave him no more than six years to live – a prognosis that the future would confirm.

The quietude of this Jewish immigrant couple was soon threatened by the international context of the late 1930s, the seriousness of which Soutine, a great reader of newspapers, measured with lucidity. Having been recommended the country air, he spent the summer of 1939 with Gerda in a village in the Yonne, Civry-sur-Serein. There he painted landscapes, increasing his palette with new shades, especially of green and blue. He counted on the support of the Minister of the Interior, Albert Sarraut, who had bought several paintings from him, to renew his residence permit, which had expired, and then to obtain, once war was declared, the pass that his care in Paris required. But this authorization was only valid for him, and even the Castaing”s mediation, during the winter when Soutine went back and forth between Paris and the Yonne, was not enough to have Gerda”s house arrest lifted. In April 1940, they both fled Civry at night and returned to the Villa Seurat.

A short respite: on May 15, Gerda Groth, like all German nationals, had to go to the Vélodrome d”Hiver. Soutine, having, as always, decided to obey the authorities, accompanied her to the gate. At the Gurs camp where she was transferred to, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, she received two money orders from him and then, in July, a last letter. She left Gurs a few months later thanks to the intervention of the writer Joë Bousquet and the painter Raoul Ubac, but Soutine and “Garde” never saw each other again.

Also read, history – Akira Kurosawa

The wandering of the last years (1940-1943)

From the beginning of 1941 Soutine began a life of clandestine wandering. From Marie-Berthe”s house, rue Littré, he takes refuge in rue des Plantes where she has friends, the painter Marcel Laloë and his wife. The latter, fearing a denunciation from their concierge, took care a few months later to make the couple flee, provided with false papers, in a village of Indre-et-Loire, Champigny-sur-Veude. Chased out of several inns where they were reproached for their uncleanliness or Marie-Berthe”s outbursts, Soutine and her eventually found a house to rent on the road to Chinon, where friends discreetly visited them.

There, despite intense heartburn that soon forced him to eat only porridge, the painter went back to work, supplied with canvases and colors by Laloë. The years 1941-1942 saw landscapes that seemed to have abandoned warm tones, such as the Champigny Landscape, or The Great Tree painted in Richelieu – which definitively put Soutine at odds with the Castaings because he had reduced the size of the canvas before having it delivered to them. But he also tackled new and lighter subjects such as The Pigs or The Return from School after the Storm; as well as portraits of children and maternities of a calmer style.

The anguish of knowing that he was being hounded and his continual arguments with his companion did not fail to aggravate his state of health: at the beginning of the summer of 1943 Soutine drank nothing but milk, and dragged himself along the paths leaning on a cane, always seeking, in spite of everything, subjects to paint.

At the beginning of August, a more violent crisis than the others led him to the hospital in Chinon, where an emergency operation was recommended, which he himself requested: but the intern on duty, taking Marie-Berthe Aurenche to be Soutine”s legitimate wife, bowed to her desire to take the patient to a renowned Parisian clinic in the 16th arrondissement. Inexplicably, between Touraine and Normandy, in order to avoid police roadblocks, but apparently also because Marie-Berthe wanted to recover paintings in various places, the transfer by ambulance dragged on for more than twenty-four hours, a real martyrdom for the painter. Operated on August 7 upon his arrival at the nursing home at 10 rue Lyautey, a perforated ulcer that had degenerated into cancer, Chaïm Soutine died the next day at 6 am, without having regained consciousness.

He is buried on August 11 in the Montparnasse cemetery in a plot belonging to the Aurenche family. A few rare friends attended the funeral, including Picasso, Cocteau, and Garde, to whom Marie-Berthe revealed that Soutine had asked for her several times during his last days. The gray tombstone is crossed with a Latin cross and remains nameless until the faulty inscription engraved after the war: “Chaïme Soutine 1894-1943”. This engraving has since been covered by a marble plaque bearing “C. Soutine 1893-1943”. Marie-Berthe Aurenche, who ended her life in 1960, rests in the same vault.

Also read, biographies – Nicholas II of Russia

The painter at work

Anecdotes abound about how Soutine, haunted by a theme, chose his motif from a fixed idea, sometimes resulting from a love at first sight, and did everything possible to find or obtain it. He runs to the markets at dawn in search of fish, a calf”s head that is, in his own words, “distinguished”, or some colored poultry, “very thin, with a long neck and flabby flesh”. One day, after a walk, he declared that he wanted to paint a horse whose eyes seemed to him to express all the pain in the world: the Castaings therefore welcomed the gypsies to whom the horse belonged for as long as it took on their property. Gerda tells us that Soutine could turn ten times in a field or around a tree to find the right angle, thereby arousing the suspicion of onlookers or gendarmes – which earned him a few hours in police custody in August 1939. He is capable of waiting seated in front of a landscape “for the wind to rise”, or of besieging for days a jealous peasant whose wife he wants to paint. “Whether his subject is living or dead flesh, Soutine shows an incredible perseverance to locate it, track it, seize it, place it in front of him.

Before setting to work, Soutine prepared his material, canvas, palette and brushes with maniacal care. He left almost no drawings, and if he happened to work on an unusual support such as a piece of linoleum, he only painted on canvases, not new and virgin but already used, and if possible from the 17th century because he found an incomparable grain in them. Once scoured, patinated by the old layers, they are meant to support the thick and dense textures he will deposit on them. He always makes sure with a ritual caress of his fingers that the surface is perfectly smooth and soft. At the end of his life, Soutine no longer stretched his canvases on a stretcher but simply pinned them to a cardboard or a board, so that he could – like Manet before him – reduce the field of his painting or recover pieces of it at will. Moreover, taking care of the texture of his pigments diluted with turpentine and wanting to have always pure colors, he cleaned his palette before starting, and lined up, according to their size, numerous brushes, between twenty and forty, “immaculate, of varying thickness: one per shade”.

All of Soutine”s work, Esti Dunow explains, follows this double process: alternately looking and painting. To “look”, that is to say to project oneself into the object in order to penetrate it, forgetting oneself; to “paint”, that is to say to internalize the object by subjecting it to the prism of one”s emotions and “spitting it out” in the form of paint. To perceive reality and to handle pigments, these two sensations must end up merging so that the painting comes about. Soutine therefore begins by scrutinizing his subject for a long time, attentive at the same time to what is happening inside him. And when nothing else stands between himself and the subject as he feels it, he starts to paint, soon carried away by his ardor but not without discipline. Thus he only ever painted on the motif or in front of the model, and not from the head – he could be seen begging an exhausted washerwoman on his knees to resume the pose she had just left.

He painted relentlessly, until he was exhausted, indifferent to external conditions – storms, driving rain. As for his concentrated gaze, oblivious to the other, who is nothing more than an object to be painted, it made Madeleine Castaing say that Soutine was “raping” his models. This intense relationship is found in his work through the series, which are less variations on a theme than a way for him to appropriate it. The need to be in front of the model made him complete the landscapes in one sitting, while the still lifes and especially the portraits often required several sessions.

Soutine usually started without any preliminary drawing: as a young man he claimed that studies would have weakened his impetus, but he still proceeded with a rough layout in charcoal; in the 1930s he always attacked directly with color, “thus avoiding impoverishing or fragmenting the force of inspiration. “The drawing took shape as he painted.” He works slowly, with a brush and occasionally with a knife, or by hand, kneading the paste, spreading it with his fingers, handling the paint like a living matter. He multiplies the touches and the layers, seeking to accentuate the contrasts. Then he takes up the details for a long time, before making rubbings on the background that will blur them and bring out the foreground. But what strikes those who see him at work the most is the state of excitement of the artist while painting, and above all his gestures, his frenzy close to trance: he rushes onto the canvas, sometimes from afar, and literally throws the paint on it with vigorous, aggressive brushstrokes – to the point where he once dislocated his thumb.

For Soutine, what matters above all, as he says, is “the way you mix color, how you capture it, how you arrange it. He exploited the expressive potential of the slightest hue, in some places leaving the white of the canvas to appear between the touches of color. In the portraits, especially those in which the model poses in uniform or work clothes (bellman, pastry chef, altar boy), his virtuosity is manifested in these large closed areas of a single color, which he practiced very early on and within which he multiplies the variations, shades, iridescence. Gerda adds that he always finished his landscapes by scattering “streaks of golden yellow that made the sun”s rays appear”: the sculptor Lipchitz praised as a very rare gift the ability he attributed to his friend to “make his colors breathe light”. As much as his flamboyant palette and tormented lines, his pigments, worked in such a way as to make the surface of the painting a “wildly shiny crust”, place Soutine “in the wake of Van Gogh, Munch, Nolde or Kirchner”.

Also read, battles – Hernán Cortés

Periods and evolution

Soutine”s career can be divided into periods according to the subjects he favored and the deformations he inflicted on them: before Céret (still lifes, tortured portraits), Céret (chaotic landscapes, sometimes to the point of confusion), the Midi (brighter landscapes where everything seems to come alive), the mid-1920s (return to still lifes with the écorchés), the 1930s and early 1940s (less jostled landscapes, portraits less swollen). The global evolution tends towards a lesser thickness of the material and a relative appeasement of the forms, without losing the movement or the expression.

Soutine”s treatment of his subjects continues to question, even to provoke rejection: bumpy, bruised faces, disheveled human or animal figures, undulating houses and staircases, landscapes shaken by some storm or earthquake – even if the forms tend to calm down in the 1930s. In 1934, Maurice Sachs spoke of his painting of the 1920s as follows: “His landscapes and portraits of that period were beyond measure. It seemed as if he was painting in a state of lyrical panic. The subject matter (as the saying goes, but literally) overflowed the frame. Such a great fever was in him that it distorted everything to excess. The houses left the ground, the trees seemed to fly.

Some of the painter”s contemporaries, Élie Faure being the first, maintained that he suffered from these deformations, signs of his split between his inner disorder and a frantic quest for balance, for stability. Maurice Sachs himself supposes his efforts to soften, in order to join classical canons, this “involuntary, terrible distortion, undergone with fright”. It is in fact essentially because of these distortions that Soutine disavowed and destroyed a large part of the canvases painted in Céret between 1919 and 1922, where they had reached a climax.

Until the end of the 1970s, critics often considered Céret”s works to be the least structured but most expressive: the painter, an impulsive and wild expressionist, would have projected his hallucinated subjectivity into them; whereas later, because of his growing admiration for the old masters, especially the French, he would have achieved greater formal success, but would have lost his expressive power, even his personality. Esti Dunow rejects this alternative, which makes the painter from Céret, in a somewhat romantic way, the only “true” Soutine, and which sees in the subsequent evolution of his art a dulling and a series of aesthetic reversals. For her, it is rather “a process of constant and deliberate work towards clarity and concentrated expression”. For even the apparent anarchy of the landscapes of Céret turns out to be constructed, thought out, just as one can detect intentions, a research, in the distortions that affect the human or inanimate subjects to the end.

The landscapes in the “Céret style” (even those painted elsewhere, from 1919 to 1922) seem the most unstable and “seismic” but obey an underlying organization. Soutine, who immerses himself in his motif, avoids any horizontal or vertical. He operates, thanks to the convolutions of the material, a fusion between each form and its neighbor, between the different planes, between the near and the far: this creates a feeling of generalized tilt, but also of enclosure in a dense, compressed space. One can say that one deals with the “expressionist treatment of scenes at first filtered by the eyes of a cubist painter”, who frees himself from the usual laws of the perspective and the representation to recompose the space according to his perception. In certain paintings where the very means of painting – thick pigments, turbulent touch, interwoven colors – ensure the entire expressive function, the motif tends to disappear and its treatment borders on abstraction.

At the end of the 1920s and until the mid-1930s, Soutine executed series centered on a motif and whose composition varied little (country houses, route des Grands-Prés near Chartres). The paintings of Burgundy or Touraine, often characterized by a cold palette, are again organized in a more complex way. They are traversed by the same tumult as those of Céret or Cagnes, the energy having been transferred from the pictorial matter to the objects represented themselves, notably the trees.

Soutine”s compositions are striking for their unstable aspect: on a plane that is itself unstable – a kitchen table, a pedestal table – some utensils and modest foodstuffs are precariously balanced, in “a sort of declension of Cézanne”s archetypes”. As in the landscapes, the elements seem in some paintings to float in the air without real support, despite the presence of a support (example of the series of rays). One does not always know if and how the pieces of game or even more so the poultry are placed or hung – even if they are only offered in three possible positions: suspended by the legs, by the neck (perhaps a borrowing from the Dutch tradition), lying on a tablecloth or on the table itself. We are dealing with a “subjective realism”, which does not bother with the traditional rules of representation. During the 1920s Soutine increasingly discarded the elements of staging favored by the Dutch masters, from whom he probably drew his inspiration: the only things that mattered were the animal and its death. As for the carcasses, they vary only in size, and in the strokes and colors within the delineated form. Some still lifes can be read as landscapes, with valleys, mountains, roads…

In parallel with the evolution of landscapes, Soutine focused more and more on the central object, sometimes very anthropomorphic, such as stingrays: he humorously conferred on inanimate beings “the expressiveness and sometimes the attitudes of living creatures. Abandoning almost entirely still lifes in the second half of the 1920s, he made a few forays into the representation of living animals (donkeys, horses, pigs) at the beginning of the following decade.

The models are always depicted facing or three-quarter-facing, very rarely standing (cooks, altar boys). They are most often seated, even when the seat is not visible, upright, with their arms crossed or their hands resting on their knees, or crossed on their lap – a legacy of old masters such as Fouquet. The servants stand with their hands on their hips or hanging down. In a very tight framing, sometimes reduced to the bust, the background (window corner, wall hanging) disappears almost completely during the 1920s and 1930s to be limited to a more or less plain naked surface. Its color even ends up merging with that of the clothes, so that only the face and the hands emerge. These, often enormous, “shapeless, knotted as if independent of the character”, translate Soutine”s fascination for the flesh, “as little tinged with eroticism as his joy in front of the flesh of dead animals”. The uniform or the plain garment allows to group the colors by zones (red, blue, white, black) to work the nuances inside as in the still lifes. They also allow an analogy between these and portraits, in that they seem to be the “social skin” of the individual, even an extension of his flesh. The end of the 1920s was marked by a tendency towards chromatic homogenization, with less tortured faces: portraits (of people) tended in the following decade to become paintings of “characters” that were otherwise more passive.

Maurice Tuchman sees in the “naive” frontality of the portraits a possible influence of Modigliani, and notes that the absence of interaction with the background – even when there is color harmony – makes “the character closed in on himself. Daniel Klébaner finds the models in a constrained posture, stiffened rather than straight, which makes them look like puppets. It is only from the middle of the 1930s that the character, even if he is pensive or resigned, is reinserted into a setting that is no longer naked, just as in the landscapes he reintegrates the bosom of nature (women reading by the water, children returning from school in the countryside).

As for the twisting of the bodies, the stretching of the faces and the humping of the features, particularly accentuated in the early years, they do not come from a gratuitous “ugliness” but from a concern for expressiveness. Perhaps Soutine externalizes “the morbidity, the ugliness of a decadent humanity”; perhaps he is more interested in breaking the model”s external mask in order to grasp or anticipate his profound truth. Modigliani would have said of his friend that he did not deform his subjects, but that they became what he had painted: in fact, in a photo taken in 1950, the farm girl is as Soutine had painted her around 1919; similarly, Marc Restellini ringing the doorbell at the home of the elderly Paulette Jourdain said he had the strange feeling of finding himself in front of the portrait Soutine had painted fifty years earlier. De Kooning also insisted on this: Soutine does not distort people, but only paint. Beyond the distortions that bring them together, the models retain their particularities.

Also read, biographies – John Metaxas

Towards a sense of the work

The motifs Soutine depicts seem to reflect nothing of his personality, but his exclusive choice of certain themes is perhaps indicative of his transgressive relationship to the act of painting.

Thus, blood is a leitmotif in all of Soutine”s work. Beyond the bare animal flesh, it appears under the skin of men, women and children, while the color red bursts out, sometimes incongruously, on many paintings, from gladiolas to the stairs of Cagnes. The recurrence of motifs forbidden by Jewish law cannot be a coincidence: representation of people or animals, desacralization of the relationship to food in still lifes and a particular fascination for blood (which according to kosher law makes the beast unconsumable and must be quickly eliminated), not to mention the “Catholic” subjects (cathedral, altar boys, communicants), in front of which the Jew from the shtetl would have quickly passed by. Soutine”s art, according to Maurice Tuchman, “rests on the need he feels to see forbidden things and to paint them”.

“Soutine”s silence, that of a man who cannot speak because what he has to say is unspeakable, drives him to express himself indirectly in and through his painting. Far from the folkloric or nostalgic reminiscences inspiring other Jewish artists such as Chagall or Mané-Katz, each canvas is a metaphor for his inner fever, and even more so the place where his emancipation from original determinations is re-enacted, while keeping traces of it. It is in this sense that we can read each painting of Soutine as “a confidence about himself”, or his work as “a perpetual self-portrait”. He manifests “his violent desire to live in spite of the weight and the fetters of the place, of the birth, of the family”, not without feeling, according to Clarisse Nicoïdski, a guilt of the transgression which obliges him to lacerate, by destroying his paintings, these images of himself.

“He was already in each of his paintings,” says Maïté Vallès-Bled: this may explain why Soutine painted himself so infrequently – or with self-mockery: around 1922-1923, he depicts himself as hunchbacked, with a large deformed nose, ears and enormous lips, in a self-portrait entitled Grotesque.

Soutine”s painting has often been described as morbid: but more than an indulgence in death, it reflects a meditation on “the vanity of all life”.

In the still lifes, the fish, placed on dishes and pricked with forks, are waiting to be devoured; the rabbits hung by their legs or the poultry by their necks are promised the same fate; the carcasses of oxen are as if stretched out on a torture rack: all seem to be still twitching under the blow of a brutal agony, a crude reminder of the common fate. However, already killed but not entirely butchered or plucked, accompanied on occasion by the vegetables that will be used to prepare them, they seem to be in an intermediate state between life and death. Thanks to the rendering of the furs or the chromatic richness of the flesh and feathers, we are “at the antipodes of morbidity”, and rather in a “joyful and cruel celebration” of the finitude of living beings. “Even dead his birds, fish, rabbits and oxen are made of living, organic, active substance.

It is thus by the curious detour of the still life – and not by the nude – that this carnal painting reaches the representation of the flesh. One would attend, through these flesh soon putrefied but “transcended by the pictorial matter which gives them a sense beyond death”, a kind of overcoming of natural laws. “Perhaps Soutine discovered, wrote Waldemar-George, the mystical principle of return to the earth, of reincarnation, of transubstantiation. For Clarisse Nicoïdski, what disturbs in Soutine”s paintings, “is that they deal not, like any work of art, with life and death, but that they are negation of the border that separates one and the other”.

As with the expressionists, the deformations aim to restore the particularities of the subject; but the excess, “bordering on tragic caricature”, ends up depersonalizing the individuals to melt them into “the same human paste”, which the painter mixes indefinitely in a dialogue between the particular and the universal. Where painters most often try to fix the moment by capturing a gesture, a look, an expression, Soutine gives his portraits a certain timelessness. With the exception of those that represent a specific person, most of them are anonymous, distinguished by the color of their clothes (for example, women in blue, red, green, pink), or by titles that are a little less vague but that only refer to social types (the machine operator, the cook, the maid, the waiter, the altar boy) or human types (the old actress, the fiancée, the madwoman). The portrait that has become a typeface is perhaps a sign of the impossibility for the painter to “fix the soul of the model”.

However – well beyond the anchoring brought in certain paintings by the trees symbolizing the renewal of nature – the flamboyance of the colors, the paroxysmal movement and the density of the material ultimately make Soutine”s painting a hymn to life, including in a burlesque, carnivalesque dimension.

Beyond the divergent labels, the views on Soutine”s work are united in the observation of his absolute commitment to his art.

Painter of the “dramatic violence” (painter of the “desperate lyricism” (carnal painter offering thanks to the “lyricism of the matter” the most beautiful expression of the visible (“visionary with the deep realism” which assigns to the painting the quasi mystical finality to express “the absolute of the life”; painter of the paradox, expressionist and baroque, which paints in spite of the prohibition, takes model on the big masters but in all freedom, looks for a fixed point in the heart of the movement and reaches the spirit through the flesh: Even the tragic readings of the work, seen as an exacerbated expression of existential anguish, suggest the singularities by which it fits into the history of painting, and a “religious” aspect independent of the subjects.

Soutine never depicts the shtetl and paints against Jewish tradition; similarly, if he seems to have fleetingly considered converting to Catholicism, when he chooses as a motif, for example, altar boys, it is in reference to Courbet”s Burial at Ornans, and to render all the finesse of the white plume over the red cassock, not any spirituality. As early as the 1920s, the Men at Prayer series suggested an analogy, conscious or not, between what this act might mean for a Jew still marked by his original religious culture, and his commitment as a painter: praying and painting both require the same passion, “a severe discipline and intense attention. When Élie Faure said of Soutine that he was “one of the few ”religious” painters that the world has known”, he did not link this to a religion, but to the carnal character of this painting, which he saw as “beating with internal impulses, a bloody organism summarizing, in its substance, the universal organism”. After Waldemar-George, he defines Soutine as “a saint of painting”, who is consumed by it and seeks its redemption – even, without his knowing, that of the human race. Daniel Klébaner speaks of “messianic” painting: more than a cry charged with pathos, it would be a “dull stridency” reminding man that representation, the present enjoyment of matter and color, reveal precisely the impossible transparency of a reconciled world that would make representation useless.

“Painter of the sacred” perhaps, rather than “religious painter”, dedicating his life to painting: such is the one whom the art historian Clement Greenberg nicknamed in 1951 “one of the most painters of painters”. The exaggerated or whimsical forms are not primarily the result of his inventiveness, but of the energy he infuses into his painting through its distortions and folds, “implicitly convinced that from his very gestures will be born the fantasy of the fable. Soutine imbues the pictorial material with such movement, such force, conclude E. Dunow and M. Tuchman, that each canvas reflects the creative impulse of the artist. He seems to rediscover the act of painting each time he begins a work, or to reinvent painting before our eyes while we look at the picture.

Also read, biographies – Charles Albert Gobat

Filiations and posterity

Even though he hung almost no reproductions on the walls of his studio, Soutine revered Jean Fouquet, Raphael, Le Greco, Rembrandt, Chardin, Goya, Ingres, Corot and Courbet. However, his “relationship to the old masters is not expressed in terms of influences but in terms of emulation”.

He has been compared to Titian for what is literally putting his hand to the paste, to Greco – but without his quest for spirituality – for the distortions of the bodies and the stretching of the faces, to Rembrandt for certain subjects (flayed oxen, for his “incomparable touch” (Clement Greenberg), of Chardin for the same reasons, in his diverted compositions (rabbits, stingrays), of Courbet who inspires him still lifes (The Trout) or rural scenes (The Siesta). A number of works “quote” specific paintings while having a completely different style: thus Oscar Mietschaninoff takes the pose of Charles VII painted by Fouquet, while the position of the Boy of Honor would evoke that of the Portrait of Mr. Bertin in the painting by Ingres… if he had a chair like him, symbol of social seating. The Large Standing Altar Boy is a good example of how Soutine exploits his various models: reminiscent of Courbet”s standing altar boy in the foreground of Burial at Ornans, this isolated figure “whose elongated silhouette is reminiscent of Greco, stands out against a dark space in which the artist”s white and scarlet palette seems to be in abeyance and bursting forth”, the treatment of the transparencies of the surcoat evoking “both Courbet”s sensibility and Chardin”s delicacy”.

According to Maurice Tuchman, Van Gogh”s legacy is felt in Soutine”s attention not only to the visible features of the model, but also to deeper aspects often neglected in painting (baseness, despair, madness) – not to mention the strong, sinuous touch taken over from the Impressionists by the painter from Auvers, which Soutine considered “knitting, that”s all. More active, even fierce in front of the canvas and the pictorial material, Soutine “would be the missing link between Van Gogh and the contemporary painters”, in particular of the abstract expressionism and the action painting.

Cézanne”s imprint is combined with that of Cubism, of which he was the precursor, and which culminated in the years when Soutine arrived in Paris. I never touched cubism myself, you know, although it attracted me for a while,” he confided to Marevna. When I painted in Céret and Cagnes, I succumbed to its influence in spite of myself and the results were not completely banal.” Soutine would have integrated in his own way the lesson of cubism, not by decomposing the object to present all its faces, but by working “on the very perception and restructuring of space.”

Soutine was unintentionally placed under the banner of the so-called École de Paris, itself a very informal grouping.

The School of Paris is not a real movement that would have been constituted around precise aesthetic conceptions or any manifesto. Before being launched in a positive sense by André Warnod, the term was coined in 1923 by the critic Roger Allard, during the long quarrel caused by the decision of the president of the Salon des Indépendants, the painter Paul Signac, to group exhibitors not in alphabetical order but by nationality – officially to cope with the influx of artists from all over. Allard used the label “School of Paris” to designate the foreign artists who had long since settled in Montparnasse (Chagall, Kisling, Lipchitz, Modigliani, Pascin, Zadkine, etc.), both to denounce their alleged ambition to represent French art and to remind them of what they owed to it. “Trained for the most part in our lessons, they try to accredit outside of France the notion of a certain school of Paris where masters and initiators, on the one hand, disciples and copyists, on the other, would be confused for the benefit of the latter,” he writes. He yields elsewhere more still to the nationalistic and xenophobic accents of the post-war period: “Certainly, one would not know how to know too much to thank the foreign artists who bring us a particular sensitivity, a turn of singular imagination, but one must push back any pretension of the barbarism, true or simulated, to direct the evolution of the contemporary art.”

However, Soutine did not exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants, nor was he ever mentioned in the course of the controversy. But the particularity of his painting seemed to crystallize misunderstandings and resentments, including on the part of some of his former comrades in misery, especially since, until then unknown to the public and ignored by critics, he had suddenly made a fortune thanks to Albert Barnes. He became, in spite of himself, if not a scapegoat, at least an emblematic figure of the foreign artist, Jewish moreover, supposed to “contaminate” French art, and whose success, necessarily overrated, would only be due to the speculative appetite of dealers-collectors, sometimes foreign too. Soutine”s career will remain tainted by this initial suspicion.

In the end, Soutine belongs to this first School of Paris, if we take the broadest meaning accepted today, of a constellation, during the first half of the twentieth century, of artists, foreign or otherwise, who contributed to making the French capital an intense center of research and creation in modern art.

Soutine, for whom his own Jewish identity seems to have been no more and no less than a fact, was caught up in the controversies surrounding the existence of a Jewish art. Montparnasse was then home to a good number of Jewish artists from Central and Eastern Europe who had left their home town or village for various reasons, economic or political as well as artistic – not all of them had to assert their vocation against a stifling or hostile environment. They swelled the ranks of the École de Paris. Some of them, founders around Epstein, Krémègne and Indenbaum of the short-lived review Machmadim, wanted to work for the revival of Yiddish culture and the defense of a specifically Jewish art. Others, such as the critic Adolphe Basler, who explained the late interest of Jews in the plastic arts by the vagaries of history and not by a fundamental religious prohibition, considered that ethnicizing their style was an anti-Semitic approach.

Soutine may have stayed away from these debates, but Maurice Raynal, a zealot of cubism among other forms of modern art, wrote in 1928: “Soutine”s art is the expression of a kind of Jewish mysticism through horribly violent detonations of color. His work is a pictorial cataclysm, a true antithesis to the French tradition. He defies all measure and control in drawing and composition. The subject is thrown on the canvas any way All these twisted, devastated, unhinged landscapes, all these horrible, inhuman characters, treated in a stew of incredible colors, must be considered as the strange boiling of the elementary Jewish mentality which, tired of the rigorous yoke of the Talmud, kicked the tables of the Law.”

In the same year, but with laudatory intentions, Waldemar-George devoted a study to Soutine in the series “Jewish Artists” published by the Triangle. However, he categorically denied Soutine the status of a French painter, or even one practicing in France, in order to make him, in his sincere admiration, one of the leaders of a supposed “Jewish school. This school, born of the decadence of Western art that it would have precipitated, would combine antiformalism and spiritualism; and Soutine, “fallen angel brings a pessimistic and apocalyptic vision” of the world by painting it “as a shapeless chaos, a field of carnage and a valley of tears”, would be, in the eyes of the Polish Jewish critic who tries to positively turn around anti-Semitic clichés, one of the most talented representatives, alongside Chagall and Lipchitz. Soutine was in his eyes “a religious painter, a synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, merging the figures of Christ and Job”. Similarly, in 1929, Élie Faure defined Soutine as an isolated genius, but properly Jewish.

The polemical context of the 1920s and 1930s meant that Soutine, who never made the slightest connection between his Jewishness and his painting, was unwillingly designated as a Jewish artist. The romantic myth of the wandering Jew reinforced his reputation as a tormented and rootless person, impulsive and unable to bend to certain formal frameworks. Clarisse Nicoïdski notes in this regard the “fascination that Soutine exercised among anti-Semitic intellectuals (even those of Jewish origin like Sachs), such as Sachs or Drieu La Rochelle”, during the interwar period.

Soutine”s marginalization as a Jewish painter was combined with his “forced” attachment to Expressionism, which he never claimed to be, and which, intimately associated with German identity, did not have good press in France before the Great War. Waldemar-George, when he interprets each of Soutine”s paintings as “the subjective expression of an individual externalizing his latent state of mind”, seems to give a definition of expressionism; however, beyond the similarities on the surface, he distinguishes the painter from the expressionists across the Rhine.

Nevertheless, Soutine was brought closer to them from the 1920s onwards and for a long time, especially to Kokoschka, although Kokoschka did not distort his models or disrupt his landscapes in the same way, and his symbolic still lifes are more like vanities than Soutine”s. The critics of the time were lost in conjecture as to whether they knew each other and whether one could have influenced the other. Nor have they agreed on the possible relationship between Soutine and some of his French contemporaries who were more or less linked to Expressionism: Georges Rouault – whom he said was his favorite – or the Fautrier of the “black” period. Sophie Krebs” analysis is that Soutine was not an expressionist when he arrived in Paris, that he became one afterwards, but that the Céret period has been wrongly emphasized: it was necessary to attach to something known (and in this case frowned upon) a work whose singularity offended, so far from a certain vision of French art that it seemed to be able to emanate only from a “foreign” or even “gothic” (Waldemar-George) spirit – when it was not qualified as “daubing”, “painting” or “dirty rag”.

Today Marc Restellini considers Soutine”s work to be the only expressionist work in France, while emphasizing that it differs radically from that of the German or Austrian expressionists, in that it is not linked to the political context or the malaise of his time, nor does it deliver any message, of revolt for example. For others, Soutine would have sought a solitary balance between French classicism and strong realism, even if the abstract treatment of detail that he sometimes achieved during the Céret period may be surprising in a painter so concerned with both tradition and the reality of the model. The fact remains that his distortions, according to J.-J. Breton, definitively transformed landscape painting, and that his work, although it may not have any real continuators, left its mark on a whole generation of American artists after the war.

It was the American artists of the 1950s who offered Soutine what Claire Bernardi calls his “second posterity”, making him an “unknowing abstract”. The first reception, during Soutine”s lifetime, was spread over twenty years, between virulent critics and exalted thurifers. American gallery owners, encouraged by Paul Guillaume and others, participated in the exhibitions, acquiring a number of his paintings from the 1930s onwards, especially those painted in Céret. It was these paintings that were discovered by post-war New York artists.

In 1950, when Abstract Expressionism was in full swing but seeking legitimacy, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMa) devoted a major retrospective to Soutine, as a precursor of this new painting in the same way as other masters of figurative modernism, such as Bonnard or Matisse. The fact that he did not theorize, nor in any case write, facilitates what turns out to be less a rereading of his work than a “recovery” in terms of contemporary issues.

Indeed, critics and artists evacuate the question of the motif – although central to his work, and affirmed in each title of his paintings – in order to focus only on Soutine”s touch and the abstraction to which the details lead. Above all, they see in Soutine”s work the tension between distant and close vision, between figuration and the collapse of forms to the benefit of matter. Moreover, based on the numerous anecdotes – apocryphal or not – peddled about Soutine”s technique, they emphasize his way of painting: the absence of a preliminary sketch, a bucket full of blood in the studio to “freshen up” the carcasses of meat, but the maniacal cleanliness of the material, the very “physical” application of the paint on the canvas. Soutine”s work then became for the abstract expressionists an essential milestone in an art history conceived as a progressive liberation from figurative “dictatorship” and moving towards abstraction and the arbitrariness of the pictorial gesture.

Willem de Kooning, who saw and meditated on Soutine”s paintings at the Barnes Foundation and then at MoMa in 1950, declared that he had “always been crazy about Soutine”: he admired him as a painter of the flesh, whose impasto on the surface of the painting seemed to him to be “transfiguring”, and as a creator whose pictorial gesture transformed the painting into organic, living matter; he said that he recognized himself in this “particular relationship to the very act of painting”. Through his “unbridled use of matter and color,” many of Soutine”s details also announce the work of a Jackson Pollock.

But he can especially be compared to Francis Bacon, who like Soutine is inspired by the old masters but “paints instinctively, in full paste, without any preparatory drawing”, like him destructures the forms, imposes distortions on the bodies, and deformations on the faces, the violence of which is particularly striking in the self-portraits. “As with Francis Bacon, whom Soutine so often reminds us of, most of the characters look like great accidents of life” because they have the misfortune to exist: “No dolorism however affects the painting. J.-J. Breton considers that by this “Bacon becomes the continuator of Soutine.

Soutine prefigured abstract expressionism and action painting – notably in the paintings of Céret – by erasing the motif behind an expressiveness entirely devoted to the material and the gesture that brings it to the canvas: he thus became a major reference for the artists belonging to these movements. But his decisive contribution to the painting of the second half of the 20th century would perhaps reside rather, since he “never thought of abandoning the limits of the figurative for the apparent freedom of abstraction”, in an overcoming of the opposition between these two tendencies.

Also read, biographies – Georgius Agricola

A cursed painter?

It is certain that “despite the many books that have been devoted to him, despite the exhibitions that have multiplied, Soutine”s work has long struggled to find its place in the history of painting, so much so that it is first of all his singularity that has struck”: this does not make him a cursed painter.

This is however the image that Maurice Sachs gave, three years after his death, of the man and his destiny as a painter:

“He settles down, moves, doesn”t like it anywhere, leaves Paris, comes back, fears poison, eats pasta, ruins himself in psychiatrists” offices, gets tired of it, saves money, runs to the dealers to buy back his bad paintings of youth. If someone refuses to sell them to him for a price that seems justified to him, his rage takes hold of him; he lacerates them, tears them off the picture rail, sends a new one as compensation. He returned home exhausted, and began to read; sometimes he could be seen in the evening in Montparnasse, sitting on the same terraces that he frequented with Modigliani and laughing. But a sad poet and descendant of that legendary race of cursed painters of which Rembrandt was the greatest, – a legion sometimes obscure, sometimes brilliant, where Van Gogh puts picturesqueness, Utrillo candor and Modigliani grace -, Soutine enters mysteriously and secretly into glory.”

– Maurice Sachs, The Sabbath. Memories of a stormy youth.

Being “one of those who have never given themselves to anything but their art”, Soutine undoubtedly suffered from being misunderstood or rejected, and from a biographical and tragic reading of his aesthetic commitment. But already during his lifetime, thanks to various connoisseurs or collectors, his work began to be praised for itself, “Soutine is no longer completely misunderstood”, and he knows it.

Nowadays he appears, after the rediscovery and reinterpretation of his work by post-war American artists, as “a silent prophet”, a painter who knew how to impose his vision without concession on the fringe of the currents of his time, and left a work that is “undeniably original” and that counts at the forefront of the pictorial landscape of the 20th century. As for the “difficulty of looking without trouble and without questioning these chaotic landscapes, these faces deformed to the point of caricature, these pieces of meat, while recognizing the know-how, the power of the colorist, the subtlety of the work on light,” Marie-Paule Vial wonders if it would not be of the same nature as the reticence towards “the works of painters like Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud, whose recognition and place in the art of the twentieth century are no longer to be demonstrated.

In 2001, the authors of the Catalogue raisonné listed 497 works by Soutine in public and, above all, private collections throughout the world, whose authenticity is not in doubt: 190 landscapes, 120 still lifes and 187 portraits.

Also read, biographies – Heinrich Hertz

Portraits

Oils, drawings and photographs are reproduced in the catalogs of the exhibitions in Chartres (1989) and Paris (2007, 2012), as well as in the catalog raisonné (2001).

Also read, history – Phoney War

Bibliography

Articles and books are presented here from the oldest to the most recent.  The following documents were used as sources for this article.

Also read, battles – Siege of Turin

External links

Sources

1. Chaïm Soutine
2. Chaïm Soutine