Chaim Soutine

1893/4 - 1943 • Russian/French • Painter • School of Paris/Expressionist

"I still see him approaching Rembrandt's canvases with a kind of respectful fear. He stood for a long time, went into a trance, and pranced about shouting, "it's so beautiful it maddens me!"" - Raymond Cogniat, 1953

Soutine was a friend of MODIGLIANI and also Jewish, but the similarity in the two artists' backgrounds ends there. Soutine was born into an indigent family. The story is told that at the age of seven he was locked for three days and nights in a damp basement as punishment for stealing pennies to buy colored pencils. His personal torment, nightmares, bad health, and seeming instability are told by his paintings. Soutine's expressive brushstrokes often seem violent, like those of van GOGH, yet without van Gogh's directional control. Where Modigliani stylized faces, exaggerating features without distorting them, Soutine's exaggerations are true distortions: In Woman in Red (c. 1922), the strange person in a tawdry red dress and big blue hat is a parody of a woman. But it is the strangeness of the artist rather than his subjects that his pictures lead a viewer to contemplate. Side of Beef (1925) is among Soutine's best-known paintings. It is an adaptation of REMBRANDT's Slaughtered Ox (1655), which Soutine might have seen at the Louvre. He was a tireless visitor to that museum, and also made frequent trips to The Hague, where he spent hours looking at Rembrandt's paintings which the quotation above describes. Soutine's Side of Beef is accompanied by its own folklore: From day to day, blood was brought to his studio from the butcher's shop to refresh the decaying carcass he used as a model. Neighbors, offended by the smell, called the police. The same red in the dress of Woman ill Red is now slashes of blood in the hanging carcass, which is set against bright bold blues. The metaphor of human suffering and perhaps the concept of crucifixion is at its rawest here. (For slaughtered ox theme, see TENIERS.)