Chaim Soutine

Born into a Lithuanian Jewish family, Chaim Soutine first studied at the Vilnius Academy of Art and then moved to Paris in 1913, where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts and studied El Greco, Goya and particularly Rembrandt at the Louvre. He also made friends, among others, with Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani around the artist’s studios of “La Ruche” on the Montparnasse. Soutine received material support from the art dealer Leopold Zborowski and later from the American collector Albert C. Barnes. At some stage he left Paris for a while to paint in the Pyrenees and in the south of France. Inspired at an early stage by Cézanne and van Gogh, he formed his own characteristic figurative, yet vehement style from 1917. Soutine's impetuous, impasto application of paint and his idiosyncratic deformation of landscapes and portraits created compositions full of tension and ecstatic expression, reflecting the painter's inner strife and self-doubt. His expressive colours and gestural application of paint often seemed to acquire an abstract quality of their own which was independent of the actual subject. His 1920s series of slaughtered, partly gutted animal carcasses (“Le Boeuf écoché”, 1925) is particularly worth mentioning, resulting from his study of Rembrandt and also the realistic study of nature. In the 1930s he began to take an interest in Corot and Courbet, so that his paintings acquired a calmer quality for a while. Soutine's approach was uniquely gestural and subjectivist, anticipating the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s.