Modern Age
Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943)
Belarusian-French Early Abstraction painter.
Chaïm Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilavichy, a Jewish shtetl near Minsk in present-day Belarus, the tenth of eleven children in a impoverished family. Against intense familial opposition to image-making, he pursued art with fierce determination, studying at the Vilnius Academy before emigrating to Paris in 1913. There he entered the orbit of Montparnasse, befriending Amedeo Modigliani and living in desperate poverty at La Ruche, the artists' colony where Marc Chagall and others worked. Soutine painted with ferocious intensity, often destroying canvases he deemed inadequate, and his early work went largely unnoticed until American collector Albert C. Barnes discovered him in 1923, buying dozens of paintings and transforming his fortunes overnight.
From 1919 to 1922, Soutine worked extensively in Céret, a Pyrenean town in southern France, producing some of his most radical landscapes—writhing, convulsive visions of hillsides, trees, and houses caught in states of near-dissolution. His distorted forms and acid colors anticipated aspects of Abstract Expressionism by decades. Back in Paris, he turned increasingly to portraiture and still life, painting carcasses of beef with obsessive attention (inspired by Rembrandt), as well as dignified, psychologically penetrating portraits of waiters, bellboys, and choirboys—working-class figures rendered with both empathy and formal daring. His thick impasto and visceral handling of paint created surfaces that seem to pulse with raw emotion.
Soutine lived a reclusive, anxious life, plagued by stomach ailments and a profound sense of exile. During World War II, as a Jew in occupied France, he went into hiding; a perforated ulcer led to emergency surgery in Paris in August 1943, and he died shortly afterward at age 49. Though he exhibited little during his lifetime and left no written statements about his art, his work profoundly influenced postwar painters—Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, and others recognized in Soutine's tortured, empathetic vision a bridge between European Expressionism and the gestural freedoms of mid-century abstraction.
The words the record keeps using: convulsive, tormented, empathetic, raw, uncompromising, existential, intense.
At a glance
- Lived 1893–1943
- Origin Belarusian-French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Early Abstraction
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Impasto, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- Paysage de Céret, 1919 (Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris)
One of Soutine's most convulsive Céret landscapes, where the hillside village seems caught in an earthquake or whirlwind. Houses tilt at impossible angles, trees writhe like living creatures, and the entire scene… - Le Petit Pâtissier, 1922 (Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris)
A young pastry cook in white uniform stands frontally, his figure slightly twisted and his expression solemn, almost melancholic. Soutine invests this humble working-class subject with profound dignity, while his… - Landscape with Figures—Céret, 1922 (High Museum of Art, Atlanta)
A late Céret landscape where small human figures inhabit the churning hillside environment. The addition of figures—rare in Soutine's Céret work—grounds the convulsive energy slightly, but the landscape continues to… - Carcass of Beef, 1925 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
A flayed beef carcass hangs vertically, splayed open to reveal raw flesh in searing reds and mottled pinks. Soutine transforms butchery into something monumental and tragic, recalling Rembrandt's seventeenth-century… - Portrait of Madeleine Castaing, 1929 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Madeleine Castaing, a decorator and patron, sits in a red dress against a deep, churning background. This is one of Soutine's most ambitious portraits, combining his characteristic expressionist intensity with a more…
What was said
Soutine once told acquaintances that he wanted to paint like Rembrandt, but with his own emotional truth—acknowledging his debt to the Dutch master's handling of light and flesh while insisting on the necessity of personal, unmediated expression.
Zborowski recalled that Soutine frequently destroyed his own paintings with a knife or simply abandoned them, unable to tolerate work that did not meet his exacting, internal standard. This compulsive self-criticism meant that hundreds of canvases were lost, and only those that survived Soutine's own judgment remain.
Barnes observed that Soutine seemed indifferent to commercial success and social recognition, caring only that his paintings expressed authentic, uncompromising emotion. Even after the mass purchase that made him financially secure, Soutine continued to live modestly and work in isolation.
Lineage
Passed on to Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon
What would Chaïm make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Chaïm Soutine", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Chaïm · Keep a life moment the way Chaïm would · Pictures made after Chaïm