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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the supplement to the Chaïm Soutine catalogue raisonné being prepared by Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls.
Painted circa 1925, La folle is a portrait that appears to date from Soutine's so-called Cagnes period, just before his return to Paris. With its swirling paint, it conveys not only the energy of the artist in executing this picture, but also appears to trap some of the personal energy of the sitter herself. The red of her clothes, beacon-like on the dark canvas, fills the picture with colour, while also more subtly picking out the red of her face and lending it a meat-like quality that cuts to the heart of Soutine's paintings.
A combination of events during the early 1920s served to bring about Soutine's artistic maturity. Both in personal and artistic terms, this was a period of growth for the painter. It was during this time that he had been 'discovered' by the great American collector and benefactor of the arts, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who had purchased almost all the paintings that he could from the painter, granting him wealth, comfort and recognition. This in turn led to a greater freedom within Soutine's paintings, which had already become increasingly bold under the influence of his journeys, taken from the end of the First World War until now, in the French countryside and especially in the South. While there is a deliberate darkness to the background of La folle-- reminiscent of the paintings of Rembrandt, Velazquez and the other Old Masters whom Soutine worshipped-- this is off-set by the rich tones of the flesh of her face and by the red of her clothing.
To refer to Soutine's portraits as such is almost a misnomer. These are not portraits in the traditional sense, but are instead unique proto-existentialist documents. The faces that peer at us with their ambiguous emotions appear to have been trapped in the artist's gaze. Here, La folle looks distinctly self-conscious at the intense scrutiny under which she is being examined. In part, it was this freshness to modelling that attracted Soutine to his preferred subjects-- hotel employees, baker's boys, or here the apparently mad woman. These were humble people, normal people, but crucially they were people not used to being observed in such a way. They were not the glamorous or powerful sitters that filled so many of the portraits of Soutine's contemporaries, but instead the everyday people of the street. In a sense, this showed the artist, who had himself known the bitter taste of extreme poverty for far too long, celebrating the underdog in his pictures, granting them a relative immortality, crystallising them in oils and allowing them a claim to posterity that otherwise would almost certainly have eluded them. But Soutine was also seeking something raw, and he found that this rawness was hidden and concealed in the sophisticated people who usually featured in portraits at the time. Indeed, it is pertinent to note that Soutine painted only a handful of portraits of people of his own acquaintance, preferring strangers.
Part of this reluctance to paint his friends-- or indeed himself (only three known self-portraits remain)-- was due to the intensity of the relationship that the painter felt in the presence of his sitter. Soutine's paintings are a record not only of appearance but also of sensation. In his swirling oils, the artist has managed to capture emotions-- his pictures reveal the subjective feelings that lead to a true, personal, yet distorted view of the world. With his friends, the sensations were too great, the image too distorted, whereas with these strangers he was afforded some degree of objectivity, an emotional distance. This distance gave Soutine the upper hand; standing behind the easel, scrutinising his sitter, he was in control of the situation, and this awareness in both painter and subject creates a different relationship that itself characterises the greatest of his portraits. For here, wilting under this scrutiny, La folle appears as prey, a victim not only of the process of being painted, but indeed of life itself. It was not only Soutine's unique relationship and ability with his oils that intrigued later artists such as Frank Auerbach and, more importantly, Francis Bacon-- it was also the rawness of his vision of his sitters. For Bacon especially, the concept of seeing life as under a microscope, riddled with the implied mortality of the flesh that Soutine has captured so well in the face and hands of La folle, had a huge impact. In this picture, Soutine has captured the rawness, anxiety and fragility of life in an ineffably modern manner.
Painted circa 1925, La folle is a portrait that appears to date from Soutine's so-called Cagnes period, just before his return to Paris. With its swirling paint, it conveys not only the energy of the artist in executing this picture, but also appears to trap some of the personal energy of the sitter herself. The red of her clothes, beacon-like on the dark canvas, fills the picture with colour, while also more subtly picking out the red of her face and lending it a meat-like quality that cuts to the heart of Soutine's paintings.
A combination of events during the early 1920s served to bring about Soutine's artistic maturity. Both in personal and artistic terms, this was a period of growth for the painter. It was during this time that he had been 'discovered' by the great American collector and benefactor of the arts, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who had purchased almost all the paintings that he could from the painter, granting him wealth, comfort and recognition. This in turn led to a greater freedom within Soutine's paintings, which had already become increasingly bold under the influence of his journeys, taken from the end of the First World War until now, in the French countryside and especially in the South. While there is a deliberate darkness to the background of La folle-- reminiscent of the paintings of Rembrandt, Velazquez and the other Old Masters whom Soutine worshipped-- this is off-set by the rich tones of the flesh of her face and by the red of her clothing.
To refer to Soutine's portraits as such is almost a misnomer. These are not portraits in the traditional sense, but are instead unique proto-existentialist documents. The faces that peer at us with their ambiguous emotions appear to have been trapped in the artist's gaze. Here, La folle looks distinctly self-conscious at the intense scrutiny under which she is being examined. In part, it was this freshness to modelling that attracted Soutine to his preferred subjects-- hotel employees, baker's boys, or here the apparently mad woman. These were humble people, normal people, but crucially they were people not used to being observed in such a way. They were not the glamorous or powerful sitters that filled so many of the portraits of Soutine's contemporaries, but instead the everyday people of the street. In a sense, this showed the artist, who had himself known the bitter taste of extreme poverty for far too long, celebrating the underdog in his pictures, granting them a relative immortality, crystallising them in oils and allowing them a claim to posterity that otherwise would almost certainly have eluded them. But Soutine was also seeking something raw, and he found that this rawness was hidden and concealed in the sophisticated people who usually featured in portraits at the time. Indeed, it is pertinent to note that Soutine painted only a handful of portraits of people of his own acquaintance, preferring strangers.
Part of this reluctance to paint his friends-- or indeed himself (only three known self-portraits remain)-- was due to the intensity of the relationship that the painter felt in the presence of his sitter. Soutine's paintings are a record not only of appearance but also of sensation. In his swirling oils, the artist has managed to capture emotions-- his pictures reveal the subjective feelings that lead to a true, personal, yet distorted view of the world. With his friends, the sensations were too great, the image too distorted, whereas with these strangers he was afforded some degree of objectivity, an emotional distance. This distance gave Soutine the upper hand; standing behind the easel, scrutinising his sitter, he was in control of the situation, and this awareness in both painter and subject creates a different relationship that itself characterises the greatest of his portraits. For here, wilting under this scrutiny, La folle appears as prey, a victim not only of the process of being painted, but indeed of life itself. It was not only Soutine's unique relationship and ability with his oils that intrigued later artists such as Frank Auerbach and, more importantly, Francis Bacon-- it was also the rawness of his vision of his sitters. For Bacon especially, the concept of seeing life as under a microscope, riddled with the implied mortality of the flesh that Soutine has captured so well in the face and hands of La folle, had a huge impact. In this picture, Soutine has captured the rawness, anxiety and fragility of life in an ineffably modern manner.