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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming third volume of the Chaïm Soutine catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow.
‘It’s the lushness of the paint. He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration in his work’
Willem de Kooning
‘These are speaking likenesses of more or less humble persons whom Soutine invested with the poise of royalty. Who can tell what he thought of them? Surely, he was enthralled by their idiosyncrasy. He selects the salient features of these persons, their intensive gaze, outstanding ears, huge interworking hands, and renders them to excess with only summary indication of the body, which he then cloaks in the magnificences of the palette. They are unforgettable’
(M. Wheeler, Soutine, exh. cat., New York, 1950, p. 65).
In a shallow space against a vigorously brushed, olive-toned ground, a grown woman clutching a doll in her lap – an unexpected, viscerally expressive variant on the time-honoured image of a mother and child – locks eyes with the viewer. Her black hair is pulled back, and her brows arch inquisitively over small, deep-set eyes. Her ruddy cheeks and hands bespeak a lifetime of hard physical work, but her pointed chin lends a touch of youthful impishness to her care-worn visage. She is clad in a black top and an ill-fitting brown coat, with sleeves that end above her wrists and shoulders too broad for her small frame, imbuing the portrait with a powerful note of pathos. Depicted close-up, her head reaching to the very top edge of the canvas, she confronts us directly with her deeply individual presence – a testament to Soutine’s impassioned identification with his model and the feverish, unruly intensity that he brought to the act of portraiture.
Soutine painted Femme à la poupée between 1923 and 1924, at arguably the single greatest turning point in his storied career. His first decade in France, since he immigrated from the Lithuanian ghetto in 1913, had been one of dire penury. ‘It was the kind of gnawing, continual want that can break one’s will to work or live. It left a permanent scar on him both physically and emotionally,’ Maurice Tuchman has written (M. Tuchman, Chaïm Soutine: Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1993, p. 16). Although the Polish poet turned art dealer Léopold Zborowski took an interest in Soutine in 1917, there was no hope yet of income from sales. To eke out a meager living while he painted, Soutine took odd jobs as a railway porter and a factory hand, and he enlisted in a wartime work brigade building fortifications, but was dismissed for frail health.
Fraught with anxiety and bereft of means, Soutine remained in Paris for almost the entire duration of the war. He fled south to the Côte d’Azur with Zborowski, who shouldered the expense, and Modigliani, his closest friend, only in the spring of 1918, when the Germans began firing massive shells into the capital in a last-ditch, all-out offensive. The group initially took refuge at Cagnes-sur-Mer, but by autumn Soutine had moved on to Céret, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. He was still working there in near-solitude in December 1922, when the forward-thinking American collector Albert Barnes came upon one of his recent works during a buying trip in Paris. The painting struck Barnes with the force of a revelation – ‘No contemporary painter has achieved an individual form of more originality and power than Soutine,’ he proclaimed (A. Barnes, The Art in Painting, Merion Station, 1925, p. 375). After meeting the artist, who came grudgingly to Zborowski’s apartment for the occasion, Barnes purchased the dealer’s entire stock of Soutine’s work, more than fifty canvases, for a total of 60,000 francs.
Barnes’s chance discovery of Soutine transformed the artist’s worldly fortunes, if not his troubled soul, in an instant. Free now to go where he liked, with proceeds from the Barnes sale paying his way, Soutine left Céret in early 1923 and returned to Cagnes, remaining this time for a full two years. ‘He always thought of himself as a wanderer and an Ishmael, no matter how successful,’ Wheeler has written. ‘And in his extraordinary and implausible life, he achieved no real self-assurance, no comfort or any great illusion – except about art’ (M. Wheeler, op. cit., p. 36).
Soutine initially despaired of his decision to re-locate, struggling to adapt to the sweeping, sun-drenched vistas at Cagnes after his years at mountainous Céret. ‘I have done only seven canvases. I am sorry about this,’ he lamented to Zborowski. ‘I wanted to leave Cagnes, this landscape which I cannot stand any more. I even went for a few days to Cap Martin, where I thought I would settle. I did not like it...and I am back in Cagnes, against my will’ (Soutine, quoted in An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaïm Soutine, exh. cat., New York, 1998, p. 103). Before long, however, he found his way forward, abandoning the angular, convulsive manner of the Céret period – even destroying works from these early years – and adopting instead a burgeoning, curvilinear surface rhythm that reflects the buoyant mood of the Midi. ‘His cry of failure immediately preceded one of the finest phases of his art,’ Wheeler has declared (ibid., p. 61).
Femme à la poupée dates to the transformative two-year period that Soutine spent in Cagnes, before returning to Paris in 1925. The sitter is an unidentified local woman whom the artist persuaded to brave his famously forceful, impulsive response to the model’s physical presence – his abiding inspiration – and to pose for him. ‘Sometimes the model is all, but then something goes wrong with the work,’ he candidly explained. ‘I lose my outline of the nose, the mouth or the eyes, or something else. I begin to scream and throw everything on the floor. I admit that this is stupid and even horrible and I am always terrified at this moment, but afterwards, like a woman in childbirth, I’m exhausted but certain that the picture will be better’ (Soutine, quoted in Chaïm Soutine, exh. cat., Munich, 2009, p. 106).
The intensity of Soutine’s sensation before the model is manifest here in his unrestrained and powerfully tactile handling, reminiscent of Van Gogh in its Dionysian fervor. Swirling, voluptuous forms lead the eye down the centre of the painting, from the model’s rounded head through the hourglass lapels of her coat (perhaps a well-worn fur, to judge by the hue) to her contorted hands. Especially in the background, the pigment is applied in broad, kinetic swathes, anticipating the gestural liberation of the Abstract Expressionists, who looked to Soutine as a hero ahead of his time. ‘It’s the lushness of the paint,’ de Kooning declared. ‘He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration in his work’ (De Kooning, quoted in The Impact of Chaïm Soutine, exh. cat., Cologne, 2002, p. 53).
This sense of teeming, unfettered life contrasts with the stiffness of the inanimate doll, its arms rigid and its legs outstretched, that the sitter cradles awkwardly against her chest – a poignant and unsettling juxtaposition onto which Soutine seems to project all his own inner unrest. The doll functions as a pictorial surrogate for a live child, or perhaps even for the dead Christ in a pietà, such as Soutine might have studied at the Louvre. ‘Soutine is a painter to whom content was everything,’ Andrew Forge has concluded. ‘His art... seems to mirror a solitary experience, to have suffered to a degree that is without parallel even in the art of our century’ (A. Forge, Soutine, London, 1965, p. 21).
‘It’s the lushness of the paint. He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration in his work’
Willem de Kooning
‘These are speaking likenesses of more or less humble persons whom Soutine invested with the poise of royalty. Who can tell what he thought of them? Surely, he was enthralled by their idiosyncrasy. He selects the salient features of these persons, their intensive gaze, outstanding ears, huge interworking hands, and renders them to excess with only summary indication of the body, which he then cloaks in the magnificences of the palette. They are unforgettable’
(M. Wheeler, Soutine, exh. cat., New York, 1950, p. 65).
In a shallow space against a vigorously brushed, olive-toned ground, a grown woman clutching a doll in her lap – an unexpected, viscerally expressive variant on the time-honoured image of a mother and child – locks eyes with the viewer. Her black hair is pulled back, and her brows arch inquisitively over small, deep-set eyes. Her ruddy cheeks and hands bespeak a lifetime of hard physical work, but her pointed chin lends a touch of youthful impishness to her care-worn visage. She is clad in a black top and an ill-fitting brown coat, with sleeves that end above her wrists and shoulders too broad for her small frame, imbuing the portrait with a powerful note of pathos. Depicted close-up, her head reaching to the very top edge of the canvas, she confronts us directly with her deeply individual presence – a testament to Soutine’s impassioned identification with his model and the feverish, unruly intensity that he brought to the act of portraiture.
Soutine painted Femme à la poupée between 1923 and 1924, at arguably the single greatest turning point in his storied career. His first decade in France, since he immigrated from the Lithuanian ghetto in 1913, had been one of dire penury. ‘It was the kind of gnawing, continual want that can break one’s will to work or live. It left a permanent scar on him both physically and emotionally,’ Maurice Tuchman has written (M. Tuchman, Chaïm Soutine: Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1993, p. 16). Although the Polish poet turned art dealer Léopold Zborowski took an interest in Soutine in 1917, there was no hope yet of income from sales. To eke out a meager living while he painted, Soutine took odd jobs as a railway porter and a factory hand, and he enlisted in a wartime work brigade building fortifications, but was dismissed for frail health.
Fraught with anxiety and bereft of means, Soutine remained in Paris for almost the entire duration of the war. He fled south to the Côte d’Azur with Zborowski, who shouldered the expense, and Modigliani, his closest friend, only in the spring of 1918, when the Germans began firing massive shells into the capital in a last-ditch, all-out offensive. The group initially took refuge at Cagnes-sur-Mer, but by autumn Soutine had moved on to Céret, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. He was still working there in near-solitude in December 1922, when the forward-thinking American collector Albert Barnes came upon one of his recent works during a buying trip in Paris. The painting struck Barnes with the force of a revelation – ‘No contemporary painter has achieved an individual form of more originality and power than Soutine,’ he proclaimed (A. Barnes, The Art in Painting, Merion Station, 1925, p. 375). After meeting the artist, who came grudgingly to Zborowski’s apartment for the occasion, Barnes purchased the dealer’s entire stock of Soutine’s work, more than fifty canvases, for a total of 60,000 francs.
Barnes’s chance discovery of Soutine transformed the artist’s worldly fortunes, if not his troubled soul, in an instant. Free now to go where he liked, with proceeds from the Barnes sale paying his way, Soutine left Céret in early 1923 and returned to Cagnes, remaining this time for a full two years. ‘He always thought of himself as a wanderer and an Ishmael, no matter how successful,’ Wheeler has written. ‘And in his extraordinary and implausible life, he achieved no real self-assurance, no comfort or any great illusion – except about art’ (M. Wheeler, op. cit., p. 36).
Soutine initially despaired of his decision to re-locate, struggling to adapt to the sweeping, sun-drenched vistas at Cagnes after his years at mountainous Céret. ‘I have done only seven canvases. I am sorry about this,’ he lamented to Zborowski. ‘I wanted to leave Cagnes, this landscape which I cannot stand any more. I even went for a few days to Cap Martin, where I thought I would settle. I did not like it...and I am back in Cagnes, against my will’ (Soutine, quoted in An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaïm Soutine, exh. cat., New York, 1998, p. 103). Before long, however, he found his way forward, abandoning the angular, convulsive manner of the Céret period – even destroying works from these early years – and adopting instead a burgeoning, curvilinear surface rhythm that reflects the buoyant mood of the Midi. ‘His cry of failure immediately preceded one of the finest phases of his art,’ Wheeler has declared (ibid., p. 61).
Femme à la poupée dates to the transformative two-year period that Soutine spent in Cagnes, before returning to Paris in 1925. The sitter is an unidentified local woman whom the artist persuaded to brave his famously forceful, impulsive response to the model’s physical presence – his abiding inspiration – and to pose for him. ‘Sometimes the model is all, but then something goes wrong with the work,’ he candidly explained. ‘I lose my outline of the nose, the mouth or the eyes, or something else. I begin to scream and throw everything on the floor. I admit that this is stupid and even horrible and I am always terrified at this moment, but afterwards, like a woman in childbirth, I’m exhausted but certain that the picture will be better’ (Soutine, quoted in Chaïm Soutine, exh. cat., Munich, 2009, p. 106).
The intensity of Soutine’s sensation before the model is manifest here in his unrestrained and powerfully tactile handling, reminiscent of Van Gogh in its Dionysian fervor. Swirling, voluptuous forms lead the eye down the centre of the painting, from the model’s rounded head through the hourglass lapels of her coat (perhaps a well-worn fur, to judge by the hue) to her contorted hands. Especially in the background, the pigment is applied in broad, kinetic swathes, anticipating the gestural liberation of the Abstract Expressionists, who looked to Soutine as a hero ahead of his time. ‘It’s the lushness of the paint,’ de Kooning declared. ‘He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration in his work’ (De Kooning, quoted in The Impact of Chaïm Soutine, exh. cat., Cologne, 2002, p. 53).
This sense of teeming, unfettered life contrasts with the stiffness of the inanimate doll, its arms rigid and its legs outstretched, that the sitter cradles awkwardly against her chest – a poignant and unsettling juxtaposition onto which Soutine seems to project all his own inner unrest. The doll functions as a pictorial surrogate for a live child, or perhaps even for the dead Christ in a pietà, such as Soutine might have studied at the Louvre. ‘Soutine is a painter to whom content was everything,’ Andrew Forge has concluded. ‘His art... seems to mirror a solitary experience, to have suffered to a degree that is without parallel even in the art of our century’ (A. Forge, Soutine, London, 1965, p. 21).