Have you just discovered the strange works of Soutine and would like to know more about this expressionist painter?
Understanding the paintings of Chaim Soutine is impossible unless you consider the historical period, the culture and, above all, the life of this tormented and jealous artist. His art is the mirror of his inner struggle and of the difficult times in which he lived.
Read on: I’ll tell you who he was, how he came to fame almost by chance, and where you can see his canvases today.
The difficult childhood of Chaim Soutine
Chaim Soutine was born on 13 January 1893, the tenth of eleven children, into a very poor Jewish family of the Russian Empire, in the village of Smilavichy near Minsk, in what is now Belarus.
His childhood was not easy: Jews were marginalised by the surrounding Orthodox society and often lived in great precariousness.
Although he was raised in the observance of his religion, Soutine was drawn to drawing and painting. These were activities effectively forbidden in the stricter Jewish tradition, because they went against the ban on making images: which is why his passion for art earned him more than one punishment. Despite everything he managed to study, first in Minsk and then at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, where he stayed until 1913.
Chaim Soutine in Paris
In 1913 Soutine moved to Paris with his painter friends Pinchus Krémègne and Michel Kikoïne, and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Fernand Cormon.
He went to live at La Ruche (“the beehive”), the famous cluster of cheap studios in the Montparnasse district, built around the old Vaugirard slaughterhouses. It is no small detail: the nearby abattoirs and the smell of meat stayed with Soutine from his first Paris years and return, like an obsession, throughout his painting.
At La Ruche there was a small community of penniless foreign artists: Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine and, above all, Amedeo Modigliani. It was Lipchitz who introduced him to Modigliani, around 1915, and the two became inseparable friends. Rather than a teacher, Modigliani was a companion and a supporter: he portrayed Soutine several times and, in 1916, introduced him to his own dealer, the Pole Léopold Zborowski, who began paying him a small monthly allowance and sending him to paint away from Paris, in Céret in the Pyrenees and in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera.
The turning point: the collector who bought everything
For years Soutine painted in poverty, savagely criticising his own work and often destroying his canvases in fits of depression.
Then, in 1923, something happened that changed his life. The wealthy American collector Albert C. Barnes, passing through Paris, saw one of Soutine’s pastry-cook portraits at Paul Guillaume’s and was struck by it: he bought around fifty canvases on the spot. The story goes that Soutine, money in hand, ran into the street, hailed a taxi and had himself driven all the way to Nice, hundreds of kilometres away.
From that moment the prices of his work rose and he could finally live in peace. But his character did not change: he remained suspicious, tormented and dissatisfied to the last.
Meat, Rembrandt and the flayed ox
His obsession with meat lies at the heart of his art. He admired the great masters of the past, in particular Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, and it was Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox that inspired his most famous series.
To paint his flayed oxen he brought a real carcass into his studio and kept sprinkling it with blood to keep its colour alive: the neighbours, driven mad by the stench, ended up calling the police. He also painted portraits of workers of the most varied trades, from the pastry cook to the choirboy, and still lifes of hanging fowl and fish.
The war, the persecution and death
Soutine had tried to enlist during the First World War, but was discharged because of his frail health.
It was the Second World War that closed in on him. A Jew in a Nazi-occupied Paris, he was forced to hide in the countryside, in the Touraine region, helped by his last companion Marie-Berthe Aurenche (the former wife of Max Ernst). The constant moves and the precarious living conditions worsened an ulcer that had long tormented him.
In August 1943, struck by a perforated ulcer, he had to return to Paris for emergency surgery: he was transported in secret, for twenty hours along back roads to escape the checkpoints. He arrived too late and died on 9 August 1943, during the operation. He is buried in Montparnasse cemetery; among the few mourners at his funeral were Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau.
The art of Chaim Soutine
Soutine’s art is as tormented as his soul.
His portraits are psychological portraits, his still lifes show us a universe of pain, blood and mangled flesh, and even his landscapes, with their crooked houses and twisting brushstrokes, are an echo of his inner travail.
He never joined any movement, yet he is counted among the expressionist painters for his violent use of colour and his distortion of forms. His painting of flesh, those flayed oxen that look like crucifixions, would decades later inspire the work of Francis Bacon.
Where to see the works of Chaim Soutine
Most of Soutine’s canvases are today in major museums and collections:
- in Paris, the Musée de l’Orangerie holds as many as twenty-two of his works in the Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume collection (Paul Guillaume was the very dealer who brought him to Barnes’s attention), including the famous Little Pastry Cook;
- in the United States the largest group is at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which keeps the canvases bought en masse in 1923;
- other important works are at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate in London, and the MoMA and Metropolitan in New York.
If you’re passing through Paris, the easiest way to see them in person is to book the reserved-access ticket for the Musée de l’Orangerie: you skip the queue at the Tuileries gardens and, besides the Soutines, you find yourself in front of Monet’s Water Lilies and the portraits of his friend Modigliani.
Chaim Soutine should therefore be remembered as a man of a difficult life, a perfectionist artist, jealous of his own work, but also as a Jew persecuted from birth by a rooted, senseless hatred. And you, standing before one of his flayed oxen, what do you feel: revulsion, or pity?
