Lot Essay
One of the most celebrated artists of the School of Paris, Chaim Soutine (fig. 1) was born in the village of Smilovitchi, near Minsk. The tenth child of an impoverished Jewish tailor, Soutine demonstrated his artistic talents at an early age. In 1906, accompanied by his childhood friend Michel Kikoïne, he studied painting in Minsk before attending the School of Fine Arts in Vilna, where he met another artist of the future School of Paris, Pincus Krémègne.
Soutine arrived in Paris around 1912 and took up residence in "La Ruche" ("the beehive," fig. 2), a building of artists' studios on the southern fringe of Montparnasse that had been pieced together with architectural remnants from the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Although early residents of La Ruche included Fernand Léger and the Italian poet Ardengo Soffici, the colony was primarily home to Jewish artists from Eastern Europe who had come to the French capital to work and study. During the war, Soutine moved into the Cité Falguière, where his neighbors included Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani -- who painted Soutine's portrait in 1917 (fig. 3) -- and the sculptor Oscar Miestchaninoff.
Soutine achieved a considerable degree of success in his lifetime; he was the subject of several books and monographic articles, and his paintings commanded high prices. Among his patrons were Albert C. Barnes and the influential dealer Paul Guillaume, whose personal collection boasted twenty-three of his paintings. However, as Romy Golan has noted, the growing presence of Jewish artists in Paris caused considerable unease in French cultural and intellectual circles, to the extent that influential critics (including Claude Roger-Marx, Louis Vauxcelles, Waldemar George and Florent Fels, who were themselves Jews) insisted upon a distinction between the "Ecole de Paris" and the "Ecole de France." Rooted in this division were deep anxieties about the integrity and "purity" of French art and, more broadly, the economic and social structure of the national body-politic. Internalized anti-semitism by Jewish critics and assimilationist rhetoric colored the reception of artists like Soutine. In 1925 Louis Vauxcelles flatly declared:
A barbarian has rushed like a plague, like a cloud of locusts, upon Montparnasse, descending from the cafés of the fourteenth arrondissement onto [the art galleries of] Rue de la Boëtie, uttering raucous Germano-Slavic screams of war... Their culture is so recent! Are they from our village? No. When they speak about Poussin, do they know the master? Have they ever really looked at a Corot? Have they ever read a poem by La Fontaine? These are people from "somewhere else" who know nothing of and, in the bottom of their hearts, look down on, what Renoir has called the graciousness of the French, that is, the virtue of tact, the nuanced quality of our race... (Pinturicchio, "Le Carnet des ateliers," Le Carnet de la semaine, 1925; as cited by R. Golan, Modernity & Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars, New Haven, 1995, p. 142)
Soutine's expressionistic and loose application of paint, his high-keyed palette, and his willful distortion of form seemed to challenge the aesthetic values of the French Grande Tradition: its classical sense of order in nature and its emphasis on measure and structural clarity. Indeed, Waldemar George was dismayed by the violent rhythm of Soutine's paintings: "It blends and shakes his figures... Harmonious still lifes, flowers and fruits, it reduces to rags and tears. Houses oscillate on their foundations and move ardently hither and thither in the landscape, turning it topsy-turvy as in a series of seismic shocks." (W. George, Soutine, Paris, 1928; as cited by M. Wheeler, Soutine, New York, 1950, p. 48) Insisting that "Soutine owes nothing to France, except his thirst for internal harmony, which, thank God, he will never attain," George presented the artist as a déraciné, a painter from the shtetl whose cultural roots in French soil were decidedly shallow.
Careful analysis of Soutine's oeuvre, however, reveals his considerable debts to French art and to Old Master painting in general. His still lifes recall works by Chardin, Oudry and Courbet (who he copied later in life), and his portraits bear unmistakable affinities with works by Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Goya, and even Velázquez in the way he treats surface textures. To this end, Soutine's sweeping brush stroke and his thick handling of paint are called upon to describe the palpable substance of things, whether the object in question is a slab of raw meat or human flesh. As one author has insightfully commented:
[Soutine's] concern with "flesh" has as little to do with erotic sensuality as his delight in the flesh and bones of his dead animals had to do with a morbid concern for the mold and rot of decay. Rather, it is the flesh as the material of things, the basic substance of life, that fascinates him. As the paint becomes flesh in color, texture and wetness, as inert material generates and becomes life, Soutine joins the family of artists able to effect this alchemy with their brush. (E. Dunow, Chaim Soutine: 1893-1943, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1981, pp. 219-220)
Soutine's concern with physical substance and the rendering of surface texture exists in marked contrast to the generic compositional schemes he employed. La fille en rose is a characteristic portrait of the mid-1920's, in which a seated figure occupies the frontal plane, and is set against a studio backdrop consisting only of a curtain that has been pulled slightly to one side. Yet Soutine has managed to extract a great sense of human pathos and individuality from this stock formula. The configuration of the curtain and the shape of the chair echo the posture and disposition of the little girl: both objects appear to be pulled inward precisely along the axis of the child's waist, focusing attention on her clasped hands and establishing a dynamic compositional rhythm in the form of criss-crossing diagonals or inverted triangles. The surface of the painting reads like a pool of swirling lines; summary brushstrokes establish the curve of the chin and nose, a device that is repeated in the folds of the curtain and dress, in the contours of the chair, and in the flow of Soutine's signature at the lower left. Similarly, the artist's careful orchestration of acidic pinks, yellows and greens, mediated by the strategic use of black and white, adds to the overall effect of structured dissonance -- structured in that a clear sense of geometric order prevails in La fille en rose, as the viewer's gaze is carefully directed to move from head to hands along the vertical axis of the painting. This opposition between dissolution and compositional rigor animates the painting with a tension that expresses at once the vulnerability and the resilience of the human spirit.
(fig. 1) Chaim Soutine, circa 1920
(fig. 2) "La Ruche", circa 1915
(fig. 3) Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait de Chaim Soutine, 1916
Private Collection
Soutine arrived in Paris around 1912 and took up residence in "La Ruche" ("the beehive," fig. 2), a building of artists' studios on the southern fringe of Montparnasse that had been pieced together with architectural remnants from the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Although early residents of La Ruche included Fernand Léger and the Italian poet Ardengo Soffici, the colony was primarily home to Jewish artists from Eastern Europe who had come to the French capital to work and study. During the war, Soutine moved into the Cité Falguière, where his neighbors included Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani -- who painted Soutine's portrait in 1917 (fig. 3) -- and the sculptor Oscar Miestchaninoff.
Soutine achieved a considerable degree of success in his lifetime; he was the subject of several books and monographic articles, and his paintings commanded high prices. Among his patrons were Albert C. Barnes and the influential dealer Paul Guillaume, whose personal collection boasted twenty-three of his paintings. However, as Romy Golan has noted, the growing presence of Jewish artists in Paris caused considerable unease in French cultural and intellectual circles, to the extent that influential critics (including Claude Roger-Marx, Louis Vauxcelles, Waldemar George and Florent Fels, who were themselves Jews) insisted upon a distinction between the "Ecole de Paris" and the "Ecole de France." Rooted in this division were deep anxieties about the integrity and "purity" of French art and, more broadly, the economic and social structure of the national body-politic. Internalized anti-semitism by Jewish critics and assimilationist rhetoric colored the reception of artists like Soutine. In 1925 Louis Vauxcelles flatly declared:
A barbarian has rushed like a plague, like a cloud of locusts, upon Montparnasse, descending from the cafés of the fourteenth arrondissement onto [the art galleries of] Rue de la Boëtie, uttering raucous Germano-Slavic screams of war... Their culture is so recent! Are they from our village? No. When they speak about Poussin, do they know the master? Have they ever really looked at a Corot? Have they ever read a poem by La Fontaine? These are people from "somewhere else" who know nothing of and, in the bottom of their hearts, look down on, what Renoir has called the graciousness of the French, that is, the virtue of tact, the nuanced quality of our race... (Pinturicchio, "Le Carnet des ateliers," Le Carnet de la semaine, 1925; as cited by R. Golan, Modernity & Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars, New Haven, 1995, p. 142)
Soutine's expressionistic and loose application of paint, his high-keyed palette, and his willful distortion of form seemed to challenge the aesthetic values of the French Grande Tradition: its classical sense of order in nature and its emphasis on measure and structural clarity. Indeed, Waldemar George was dismayed by the violent rhythm of Soutine's paintings: "It blends and shakes his figures... Harmonious still lifes, flowers and fruits, it reduces to rags and tears. Houses oscillate on their foundations and move ardently hither and thither in the landscape, turning it topsy-turvy as in a series of seismic shocks." (W. George, Soutine, Paris, 1928; as cited by M. Wheeler, Soutine, New York, 1950, p. 48) Insisting that "Soutine owes nothing to France, except his thirst for internal harmony, which, thank God, he will never attain," George presented the artist as a déraciné, a painter from the shtetl whose cultural roots in French soil were decidedly shallow.
Careful analysis of Soutine's oeuvre, however, reveals his considerable debts to French art and to Old Master painting in general. His still lifes recall works by Chardin, Oudry and Courbet (who he copied later in life), and his portraits bear unmistakable affinities with works by Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Goya, and even Velázquez in the way he treats surface textures. To this end, Soutine's sweeping brush stroke and his thick handling of paint are called upon to describe the palpable substance of things, whether the object in question is a slab of raw meat or human flesh. As one author has insightfully commented:
[Soutine's] concern with "flesh" has as little to do with erotic sensuality as his delight in the flesh and bones of his dead animals had to do with a morbid concern for the mold and rot of decay. Rather, it is the flesh as the material of things, the basic substance of life, that fascinates him. As the paint becomes flesh in color, texture and wetness, as inert material generates and becomes life, Soutine joins the family of artists able to effect this alchemy with their brush. (E. Dunow, Chaim Soutine: 1893-1943, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1981, pp. 219-220)
Soutine's concern with physical substance and the rendering of surface texture exists in marked contrast to the generic compositional schemes he employed. La fille en rose is a characteristic portrait of the mid-1920's, in which a seated figure occupies the frontal plane, and is set against a studio backdrop consisting only of a curtain that has been pulled slightly to one side. Yet Soutine has managed to extract a great sense of human pathos and individuality from this stock formula. The configuration of the curtain and the shape of the chair echo the posture and disposition of the little girl: both objects appear to be pulled inward precisely along the axis of the child's waist, focusing attention on her clasped hands and establishing a dynamic compositional rhythm in the form of criss-crossing diagonals or inverted triangles. The surface of the painting reads like a pool of swirling lines; summary brushstrokes establish the curve of the chin and nose, a device that is repeated in the folds of the curtain and dress, in the contours of the chair, and in the flow of Soutine's signature at the lower left. Similarly, the artist's careful orchestration of acidic pinks, yellows and greens, mediated by the strategic use of black and white, adds to the overall effect of structured dissonance -- structured in that a clear sense of geometric order prevails in La fille en rose, as the viewer's gaze is carefully directed to move from head to hands along the vertical axis of the painting. This opposition between dissolution and compositional rigor animates the painting with a tension that expresses at once the vulnerability and the resilience of the human spirit.
(fig. 1) Chaim Soutine, circa 1920
(fig. 2) "La Ruche", circa 1915
(fig. 3) Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait de Chaim Soutine, 1916
Private Collection