Chaim Soutine, sad expressionist

I have come back to Chaim Soutine 1893–1943 because of two unexpected blog entries. Susan's Museum Experience analysed Little Girl with a Doll 1919. Life at Willow Manor discussed a Soutine painting called Melanie the School Teacher 1922. These lovely works, new to me, are in the Hillman Foundation NY and the Columbus Museum of Art.

Who was Soutine? Wh­ile still a young teenager from an impov­er­ished Russian village near Minsk, he attended the Acad­emy of Fine Arts of Vilna where he met another of my favourite young art students, Michel Kikoine. In order to survive financially, Soutine work­ed at odd jobs, until a doctor discovered his talent and paid for his train ticket to Paris.

What prompted Soutine and the other 100 foreign painters, largely from Eastern Europe, to travel all the way to Paris? They had no mon­ey, no French and no family support. Their arrival in Paris coin­cided with an extraord­inary artistic revolution getting under way then.

Sout­ine settled into his circle of émigré artis­ts in 1913, as had the slightly older Amadeo Mod­igliani in 1906. At first Soutine lived in dire pover­ty, kept alive by the food charity of Modigliani, Kikoine and Sonia Terk Delaunay. But som­ething in Soutine’s character made it impossible for him to man­age. He was always hungrier, dirtier and more needy than the others. Today I would read it as chronic anxiety, but I cannot find any contemporary diagnosis.

Luckily for Soutine, he was admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, probably because his ear­liest art training in Lithuania had been good. And al­though he was uncouth and unmannered, he did read poets and phil­osophers, and admired the works of Rembrandt, Courb­et and Bonnard.

Expressionism was intense, passion­ate and highly personal, based on the concept of the paint­er's canvas as a display for his emotions. Vio­lent, unreal colour and dramatic brush-work made Ex­press­ionist painting rock! Its emphasis and distortion, from the artist’s emot­ion­­al resp­onse to the sitter, was a reaction to C19th shallow­ness. In Man with Ribbons 1921, the model’s head and neck were elong­ated and an agitated flicker ran down the full length of the body. The colours were unpolished and the angles were rough.

Man with Ribbons

Soutine and other ot­her Eastern European Jews were seen to have brought with them a general sense of the hope­less­ness that comes with be­ing ex pats. Unwil­ling to adjust to the prevail­ing rules, they ex­p­ressed their feel­ings in their art by the bol­dness of their strokes and colours. Freedom allowed them to exper­ience everything for the first time. I am guessing this was because of hostile reg­imes in Eastern Eu­rope, not because of family controls.

In 1919-22 Soutine painted in Ceret, a small town in the Pyrenees. There his work reached its most express­ion­istic extreme and there he exec­u­t­ed a series of very distort­ed landscapes with agitated rhythms. I didn’t like his early landscapes at Ceret: they were messy in concept and in practice. In any case he was totally isolated in Ceret since he didn’t speak a word of Catalan. Worse still, the death of Modig­liani in 1920 left Soutine bereft. Only Modigliani, his mentor and teacher, had regarded Soutine as a genius.

Soutine spent 3 years there and painted 200 works, including Woman in Red 1922. What kind of fev­er­ish, Van Gogh-like passion drove him to pro­duce these distorted and viol­en­tly coloured works? Were the dis­t­ort­ions reflec­tions of his inner disturb­ance or of his inspir­at­ion?

Woman in Red

Soutine visited his favourite southern towns each summer: Cagnes, Montpellier, Nimes, Beziers. His friends drove him around for days, in search of the perfect image. Once he found what he wanted, he worked with such concentration that he lost all sense of time and place. This made for good paintings, but it was very tough on his friendships.
I would not have included any landscapes since I am not sure that expressionism works as well for inanimate objects as it does for human beings. However toomanyfrogsand1brit discussed chaïm soutine 's stint in Cagnes and in Céret. This blog suggested that "Soutine depicted villages all in a jumble, like hazy memories souvenired from Mediterranean towns, basked in a warm sunlight but lacking structure and foundation. It was just like German Expressionism mixed with one too many beakers of pastis!" Great description.

View of Cagnes, 1924

Soutine was only seen as bad-tempered and unsociab­le by men. To women he was cute. And he stayed in contact with his ex pat friends in Mont­par­­nasse, painted their portraits eg Kisling C1925 and treated their portraits with respect.

The American collector Dr Albert Barnes arrived in Paris in Dec 1922, to enlarge his own collection. Paul Guillaume escorted the man around the galleries and artist studios for several weeks, but nothing part­ic­ularly grabbed his attention. Finally Barnes was visiting a studio to see a Modigliani, and noticed in the corner a work that immed­iate­ly caught his eye: Soutine’s The Little Pastry Cook 1923. Barnes wanted to buy it straight away. Guillaume took Barnes to Zborowski who had a number of rec­ent landscapes that Soutine had painted, and Barnes bought them all.

Little Pastry Cook

Soutine worked intensely and managed to sell 100 of his works to Dr Barnes. The sale of his pictures in 1923 was his first big succ­ess after years of poverty and Soutine was launched. Barnes opened his Foundation and Museum, in Merion in the USA in 1924.

Having previously known poverty, Sou­tine now enjoyed a comfortable life and could stay at luxury hotels and spas: he divided his time between Paris, the Riviera and the Pyrenees. In towns where he and Zborowski went to take waters, he observed the staff and painted the well-known series of bellboys and waiters. Soutine seems to have felt a bond with these lowly workers, victims of a rejection he himself had experienced. Through typical workers, Soutine evoked the endless mass of the working class eg Room-service Waiter c1927 (below).


Sout­ine himself ac­k­n­owledged that he was at least once saved from suic­ide by a fr­iend. Obses­sed by forms and colours, and dejected and unsatisfied, Soutine destroyed many paintings during fits of des­p­air. This may explain why such a passionate artist left relatively few paintings. The Great Depression years were terrible for Zborowski who died bankrup­ted in 1932. Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing were pass­ionate ab­out art and they took it upon themselves to buy Soutine’s works AND to have him as a guest in their rural property near Chart­res every year from 1930 on. He was not well, but he was well looked after by the Castaings and even fell in love (with Gerda Groth).

Oscar Grillo has a painting of a Naked Woman by Soutine that I have never seen before. Might it have been of Gerda Groth?

In 1937 in Paris there was an Exhibition of Indep­endent Art where he was at last hailed as a great painter. Profile of a Woman 1937 was highly thought of, even though the same painting 15 years ear­lier would have been dismissed. In 1937 he rented a studio at Vil­la Seur­at. The sculptor Chana Orloff was there often and wrote about Soutine’s painting habits.

Sadly his glory was short-lived. In 1940 Groth was deported. A few months after the in­vasion of France by Germans, he fled Pa­ris in order to escape the Vichy pol­ice and Gestapo. Soutine was forced to seek shelter wher­ever he could doss down. Suffering from a bleed­ing st­omach ulcer in 1943, he had to leave his hid­ing place to undergo em­ergency surg­ery but died a few hours later.

It is ironic that Soutine largely had a miser­able life, yet he became a legend after his death. I liked Norman Kleeblatt’s and Kenneth Silver’s conclusion: that Chaim Soutine didn't quite fit into a particular era, style or movement.