Chaïm Soutine

Smilovitchi, Vilna, La Ruche

Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilovitchi, in the province of Minsk in present-day Belarus — by most accounts the tenth of eleven children in a poor Orthodox Jewish family. He studied at the drawing academy in Vilna from about 1910, and reached Paris in 1912 or 1913, depending on the account.[1]

He lodged first at La Ruche, the beehive of studios in Montparnasse that held the era's poorest painters, then at the Cité Falguière. There, by the Orangerie's account, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz introduced him to Amedeo Modigliani — the friendship of his Paris life. Modigliani painted him repeatedly and reportedly pushed his own dealer, Léopold Zborowski, to take Soutine on.[1]

Céret

Around 1919 Zborowski sent him south to Céret, in the French Pyrenees, where he worked for roughly three years at a furious rate — the output is usually put at some two hundred canvases. The Céret landscapes are the most convulsed things he made: hillsides and houses folded into each other as if the ground itself were unstable. He remained brutally self-critical, and is widely reported to have destroyed many of the Céret paintings, as he destroyed and reworked canvases throughout his life.[1]

Barnes, 1922

In 1922 the Philadelphia collector Albert C. Barnes — in the Barnes Foundation's own words — 'purchased dozens of the artist's works on a single trip to Paris.' It was Paul Guillaume who steered him to Soutine, and accounts commonly put the haul near fifty canvases. For a painter who had been close to unsellable, the purchase changed everything at once: prices, standing, and the practical conditions of work.[2]

Guillaume had put his own admiration in print in his review Les Arts à Paris in 1923, describing a pastry cook 'afflicted with an immense and magnificent ear... a masterpiece' — the canvas that reportedly stopped Barnes in his tracks. The Orangerie's Little Pastry Cook is a later version of that subject, one of six known; Guillaume bought it in the early 1930s, the museum says, 'in memory of the first Pastry Cook.'[3]

Series, servants, and carcasses

The Orangerie describes his manner as not far from expressionism, organized by a fondness for working in series: melancholic figures typified to the point of caricature, with deformed bodies and vivid color. The sitters were working Paris — pastry cooks, pageboys, choirboys, valets — painted with the attention other decades reserved for bishops.[1]

The still lifes went further. Hanging turkeys, pheasants, and skinned carcasses of beef followed Rembrandt's example — the flayed ox Soutine admired at the Louvre — and the museum's Bœuf et tête de veau is the collection's blunt statement of the debt. The stories of his studio during the carcass paintings belong to Montparnasse legend; the paintings themselves are documentation enough.[1]

The Occupation and the end

The Occupation made Soutine a hunted man. A Jew with a Yiddish accent and no citizenship to shelter him, he left Paris with the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche and hid in the Touraine countryside at Champigny-sur-Veude, near Chinon, on false papers — at times, the Jewish Museum's account records, sleeping outdoors.

He had suffered from stomach ulcers for years, and in hiding the condition went untreated until it perforated. In early August 1943 Aurenche had him driven to Paris for emergency surgery — by a reportedly roundabout route to avoid checkpoints — but the operation came too late. Soutine died in Paris on 9 August 1943, at fifty. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery; accounts of the funeral place Picasso, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau among the few mourners, though no institutional record confirms the list.[1]

The Orangerie's 22

The Walter-Guillaume collection at the Musée de l'Orangerie holds 22 Soutines — the largest group in the 148-work collection after Derain's, and, by the museum's own description, the largest collection of his paintings in Europe. The Little Pastry Cook, the Best Man, the Turkey, the game still lifes, and the southern landscapes all hang a floor below Monet's Water Lilies, the direct residue of Paul Guillaume's early conviction.[1]

It is an unplanned monument. The dealer who bought Soutine when almost no one would died in 1934; his widow kept the Soutines while she sold whole schools out of the collection; and the state's purchases of 1959 and 1963 fixed the group in public hands.[1]

The carcass in the studio

Soutine's paintings of hanging beef were made from an actual carcass, which he had delivered to his studio in Montparnasse and kept there while he worked.

He wanted the colour of fresh meat, and fresh meat greys within hours. His solution was buckets of blood from the abattoir, poured over the carcass to keep the reds alive. His model Paulette Jourdain went back for more every few days.

The neighbours complained and the health inspectors came. A story attached to Soutine from his earliest Paris years, when he and Marc Chagall were both at La Ruche, has Chagall seeing blood run out from under Soutine's door and shouting into the corridor that someone had killed him. No contemporary record of it survives, and it has been told about the carcass paintings ever since.[4]

Destroying his own work

Soutine thought most of what he painted was bad, and acted on it. He slashed canvases, burned them, and painted over them.

The Céret pictures suffered worst. He had made something like two hundred of them in three furious years, disowned them afterwards, and spent years buying them back from dealers and collectors specifically in order to destroy them. An unknown number of the paintings he is now best known for came within a transaction of not existing.

Nothing about this was performance. He worked slowly, repainted obsessively, and by several accounts could not be persuaded that a finished picture was finished.

Madeleine Castaing

From about 1930 Soutine's patrons were Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing, who bought steadily and took him into their household at Lèves, near Chartres, for long stretches each summer.[1]

Madeleine Castaing was a decorator who became one of the most influential in France, and the Soutines she assembled were the core of her collection. She was still selling them decades later, and her collection was dispersed after her death in December 1992.

The arrangement gave him somewhere to work without worrying about money, for the first time since his dealer Léopold Zborowski had stopped being able to support him. The paintings from the 1930s — the trees at Chartres bent over as though in a gale, the choirboys, the schoolchildren — come out of it.

Afterwards

Soutine died in Paris on 9 August 1943, after emergency surgery on a perforated ulcer, and was buried two days later in the Montparnasse cemetery, in the family plot of his companion Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Accounts name Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau among the dozen or so mourners.[5]

His reputation moved after the war, and it moved abroad. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective in 1950. Its effect on the painters there is documented in one case above all. Willem de Kooning called Soutine his favourite painter, and talked about the sheer thickness and movement of the paint. Francis Bacon painted hanging carcasses of his own, from photographs and from butchers' shops, and praised Soutine's handling while refusing as usual to name an influence.[2]

It is a strange afterlife for someone who came out of a shtetl near Minsk, spoke poor French all his life, and destroyed as much of his own work as he could get his hands on.