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Lot Essay
Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow will include this painting in the forthcoming supplement to their Soutine catalogue raisonné.
The present work, painted while Soutine was staying at nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer around the mid-1920s, captures the dramatic, plunging topography of the gorge as it cuts its way north-to-south through the Alpes Maritime and towards the Mediterranean. The convulsive energy of the brushwork, describing the gnarled upward sweep of a pathway and an equally taut building, conveys the immediacy of Soutine's painterly instinct, while at the same time establishing the fundamental elements of a relatively classical composition. This classicizing impulse in Soutine's art stands in contrast to the more hermetic, self-contained nature of his earlier Céret period landscapes. Another characteristic of Soutine's Cagnes pictures is their sense of coloristic liberation, as the piercing light of the Midi demanded from the artist a more highly-keyed palette than had hitherto been his norm.
The present work, painted while Soutine was staying at nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer around the mid-1920s, captures the dramatic, plunging topography of the gorge as it cuts its way north-to-south through the Alpes Maritime and towards the Mediterranean. The convulsive energy of the brushwork, describing the gnarled upward sweep of a pathway and an equally taut building, conveys the immediacy of Soutine's painterly instinct, while at the same time establishing the fundamental elements of a relatively classical composition. This classicizing impulse in Soutine's art stands in contrast to the more hermetic, self-contained nature of his earlier Céret period landscapes. Another characteristic of Soutine's Cagnes pictures is their sense of coloristic liberation, as the piercing light of the Midi demanded from the artist a more highly-keyed palette than had hitherto been his norm.