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Chaïm Soutine
1893–1943Portrait, landscape and still life75 items33 collections1900–1945
Expressionist painter in Paris, from a village near Minsk, who painted landscapes, carcasses and sitters in convulsive strokes.
Chaïm Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilavichy, near Minsk, studied in Vilnius, and reached Paris in 1913. He lived at La Ruche, the studio colony that also housed Marc Chagall, and became close to Amedeo Modigliani. He looked hardest at the old masters in the Louvre, above all Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet.
His paint is thick and his drawing deliberately unstable. In the landscapes made at Céret around 1920 the houses and trees heave as if in a storm. His still lifes of plucked fowl, rayfish and sides of beef answer Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox (1655), and his portraits of pastry cooks, page boys and choirboys set one hot colour against a dark ground. A Jew in occupied France, he spent his last years in hiding and died in Paris in 1943.
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